Michael Newdow was asked on Tuesday about prayer at public
school graduations. He said he opposed having a school sponsor
or set aside time for a prayer at any school-organized event.
(I understood that to include cases where students led the prayer,
as in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe,
presumably because the school was still endorsing or encouraging
prayer by inviting the students to do that, or by putting it on the
schedule.)
Newdow then mentioned a case where a student who was valedictorian of his
class had sought to talk about and praise Jesus in a valedictory
address. The school prohibited and prevented this.
Newdow said the student had been wronged, because it was inappropriate
for the school to decide that a religious message on the part of a
student was less valuable or less deserving of expression than some
other message on the part of a student. If, he argued, the school
had decided that whoever was the best or highest-achieving student
had thereby earned the right to give a message of his or her choice
to the whole graduating class, the school was not entitled to say
that a particular viewpoint should not be expressed. If the school
would not say that a valedictorian's speech shouldn't advocate for or
against the war in Afghanistan, the school should also not be allowed
to say that the valedictorian's speech shouldn't advocate for or against
religion. To do otherwise would imply that religious speech is less
permissible or less protected than other speech, or that religious views
are less permissible or less protected or favored than other views.
So in a case where a school permits someone to express a personal view,
the school shouldn't say that this can't be a religious or anti-religious
view.
So Newdow said that religious valedictorians ought to be able to
express their religious beliefs in a graduation ceremony if it was
the policy of a school that valedictorians ought to be able to
express their own views. This was important in order to ensure
that the school didn't discriminate against anyone's views.
In discussing this with people, he kept pointing out that valedictorian
are routinely permitted to say extremely controversial things which
offend many audience members. His favorite example seemed to be the
fact that schools permitted valedictorians to oppose the U.S. war in
Afghanistan (and past or prospective war with Iraq). They would not
usually say that this kind of view couldn't be expressed simply because
it might offend people. Critics would argue that the audience at a
graduation was "captive" and was being forced by the school to listen
to a particular message. And Newdow would reply along the lines of
"So, are they any less captive when the speaker has an antiwar
message, and the school is forcing them to listen to that message?"
He considered it essential that, under the first amendment, religious
expression is not in any way inferior to non-religious expression, and
that people ought to freely and openly express their religious beliefs.
I thought that point of view made sense and provided evidence that
Newdow's campaign is a campaign for the first amendment and not
against religion. Do Newdow's critics know that he is defending
the rights of religious students to speak against the objections of
non-religious students who might be offended by religious speech?
Do they know that?
(The student whose cause Newdow supported was
Jason
Niemeyer.)
Sometimes institutions make it hard for people to do good things,
even when they have good intentions.
This observation seems commonplace, but it still seems puzzling
when institutions made up of basically good and decent people end
up doing a lot of harm. I keep wondering why that should be.
On the other hand, there is still room for people to use their
abilities, powers, and access for good. There are movies made
about particular acts of heroism (my mom used to be particularly
fond of exciting movies about environmental whistleblowers, of
which there are several, some of them based on true stories),
but most good deeds conceived in secret go unreported and unrewarded.
One of the most poignant lines in the Dar Williams song which
celebrates Daniel Berrigan (after "we burned them [draft records]
in the parking lot: / better the files than the bodies of children")
is "God of the just, I'll never win a peace prize". This is a
poetic way of expressing, in one breath, on one foot, the terribly
long-winded conclusion that public honors most often come to people
who did good deeds in conventional and popular ways. It's true,
though. Michelle has often pointed out to me that only certain
kinds of activism and only certain kinds of achievement are likely
to win awards. That doesn't mean that those activities are
ultimately the best or most effective. There's so much politics
in who gets an award and who's passed over; in the same way, there's
so much politics in who becomes a celebrity.
But it's important that people continue to do good things where
they have no hope of reward or recognition.
Shene'amar:
In the place where there are no men, strive to be a man.
(Pirke Avot 2:6)
I've been very sociable this weekend.
On Friday, I had lunch at the
Internet Archive and then
dinner with Kragen, Beatrice, and Ping, and on Saturday, dinner
with Danny, Quinn, and Fred. Saturday was also the day of the EFF
Share-in concert in Golden Gate Park, which I think was very successful.
I'm still trying to remember a particular joke Danny told me.
For those of you who are following software-defined radio, FCC
rules, communications security, or
the tinkering issue,
take a look at
this
SDR Forum report on software-defined radio and security. It's wide-ranging, but a
lot of it has to do with mitigating security threats involving end-user modifications
to radios. The FCC, in its Report and Order on SDR, made some allusions to the
importance of preventing SDR transmitters from transmitting on the wrong frequencies
or with greater-than-licensed power, and I think there were suggestions in there that
this meant that the transmitters should be built in such a way that the software
driving them couldn't be modified by end-users.
The SDR Forum has picked up on that suggestion and expanded upon it with a long
discussion of the importance of, well, preventing end-users from modifying the
software in radios, mainly with a view to avoiding interference and spoofing,
but also apparently in order to prevent certain other behaviors.
There seems to be very little discussion in this report (just as there was practically
no discussion in the FCC's Report and Order) of whether it is important to prevent
users from modifying the software in software-based receivers. I've talked
in the past about the idea that it may be appropriate to specify only "wire protocols"
(even for wireless systems) instead of specifying the design of a device which implements
those protocols. That is the approach taken by virtually all Internet RFCs, and by
most communications standards, but not always by FCC regulations.
It seems that the SDR Forum is responding directly to the FCC's suggestion that
industry should consider security issues related to SDR. And they've considered
precisely those security issues which the FCC asked them to consider. That means
that it's still totally unclear whether the FCC or the industry has thought from
the point of view of security about SDRs which are only receivers and not
transmitters. (See, I know of
one of those.
They've considered the possibility of implementing transmitter functions in the
future, but none of them have been implemented to date. The commercial members
of the SDR Forum all seem to be working
exclusively with systems which are capable of transmitting.)
Now I'm wondering to what extent it's been required by law in the U.S. that
systems which are designed to radiate RF energy must not only comply with
certain frequency and power limitations but must also be designed to resist
modification by a user. Anybody?
There used to be a War Department, which is now more euphemistically called
the Defense Department; what if there
were a
Peace
Department?
I've been writing some pretty wild sed rules; I hope to be able to share
them with you soon.
