Boise as Caesar

Note: The following was submitted to be run as a Reader’s View at the Statesman. I was informed it would run and was asked for a headshot and bio. I sent them, but it’s always possible, there was a miscommunication (as can happen any time you try and give an e-mail address over the phone.) Perhaps, someone at Statesman didn’t realize the article was time sensitive. I’ve been looking for it to appear every day. As today is the deadline for the Keep the Commandments folks to pay, tomorrow the piece would be dated and irrelevant. So, in order to avoid that situation, I’ll go ahead and run this piece here:

“It’s time to render, Caesar demands it.”

That’s how the Statesman ended their editorial urging Bryan Fischer and Brandi Swindell to pay more than $10,000 in legal fees that they were ordered to pay by a federal judge in 2004, but which the city didn’t attempt to collect until sending out an ominous letter earlier last month. The statement distorts the issue. The issue is not whether Fischer and Swindell will pay the money the city demands if they have it, but whether the City should require the money of them.

Yes, a federal court gave the city the right to collect the money. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. Adam Parks of the City of Boise insisted that to waive fees was to put Fischer and Swindell above the law. Yet, a quick Google search of the City’s website reveals more than 900 hits for the word “waiver” and more than 80 for “waive fees.” In March 2006, the City waived a combined $14,000 in fees for a Soccer Tournament and a Lewis and Clark Expo. No one suggested that violated the rule of law.

Fischer and Swindell are asking for the city to waive the fee, and just because they are Christians, that doesn’t mean they have less rights than a soccer tournament. Even St. Paul appealed to Caesar.

I’d argue there are three reasons the City should waive the fees:

First, they created the situation that necessitated the lawsuit. The entire situation could have easily been avoided had the city held a public hearing. Instead, those of us who wanted to talk about the issue and were told by city employees that we would read when the hearing would be in the paper found ourselves out in the cold. The city created the situation, not Fischer and Swindell.

Second, the city, in their efforts to avoid public debate, filed a lawsuit to stop a public vote on the Keep the Commandments Coalition’s initiative, though precedent was against them. It was a frivolous lawsuit that stopped KCC’s momentum coming off the petition drive and created voter fatigue on the issue. Given that KCC didn’t demand legal fees from the city for this suit, turnabout is fair play.

Finally, the Statesman is concerned about people frivolously suing the city. I’m far more concerned about the right to freedom of speech and redress of grievance being squashed. Those screaming so loudly for these citizens to pay up are, almost without exception, their political opponents. Using the state to bludgeon people you disagree with may feel good in the short term, but it sets a bad long term precedent.

I have to remark on the irony of the Statesman telling citizen activists to shut up and pay the king two days before Independence Day. For thousands of years, we lived under the rule of men like Caesar, who punished dissent and made a public example of those who rose to oppose them. America has been the exception: a shining city on the Hill, full of free citizens who can involve themselves in politics without fear of retribution. The City of Boise violates this tradition with a vindictive attempt to collect its pound of flesh.

Do we really want to live under Caesar? As Shakespeare wrote: “he bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep around to find ourselves lowly graves”

That may be the type of city the Mayor and the Statesman want, but it is the nightmare of free people everywhere.