SPEECH WINS, PRIVACY LOSES

Supreme Court

Religious evangelists canvassing door-to-door are protected by the
Constitution. But down-and-outers riding the Greyhound bus won't get much
protection if the police come on board looking for drugs and guns.

Those are the unsurprising results of two U.S. Supreme Court decisions this
week. For decades, the court has been expanding the free speech rights of
fringe groups, while sacrificing at the altar of the drug war our right to
be free from unreasonable police searches.

The Village of Stratton, Ohio, passed an ordinance making it a misdemeanor
to solicit door-to-door without first getting a license from City Hall. The
law was broad enough to cover Jehovah's Witnesses, political activists,
church fundraisers and even the scouts. The village said it was protecting
the privacy of its citizens and guarding against criminals who used
door-to-door solicitations to case homes for burglaries. The Jehovah's
Witnesses said the law violated the First Amendment. Their duty to
evangelize door-to-door comes directly from Paul's biblical command to
teach house-to-house, they say. Seeking secular approval to obey a biblical
command would violate their religion and their free speech rights.

The Supreme Court agreed that it "is offensive -- not only to the values
protected by the First Amendment, but to the very notion of a free society
- -- that ... a citizen must first inform the government of her desire to
speak to her neighbors and then obtain a permit to do so."

There was no such bold declaration of rights or freedoms in the bus search
case. The court had ruled a decade ago that police could board a bus and
seek permission to search bags and people as long as they didn't take
coercive steps that would make a passenger think he had to cooperate. On
Monday, the court went a step further and said that officers didn't have to
tell passengers that they had the right to refuse to cooperate.

This decision would be fine if everyone was versed in the fine points of
the Fourth Amendment, which few outside the Supreme Court actually
understand. It's absurd to think that the average bus rider could march
blithely past cops if he didn't feel like cooperating.

The Founding Fathers -- who were mightily upset by the searches of their
homes by the redcoats -- might be surprised that the Bill of Rights doesn't
protect the little guy on the bus as much as the little guy who goes
door-to-door without City Hall's say-so.