Free for All by Wendy Kaminer

...Alan Wolfe In this collection of columns and occasional essays, most of them originally published in The American Prospect, Wendy Kaminer offers a passionate defense of civil liberty...

...They want balance, not an approach that privileges one side over everything else in a complicated legal and social equation...

...Civil libertarians cannot think that way...

...And on the left, we have been through a period of political correctness dominated by speech codes and other efforts to regulate what some people can properly say about others...

...Irrational in our fear of criminals, we cede unchecked power to prosecutors...

...However, Kaminer has little sympathy for such concerns, even when they take the form of protecting children against pornographers or sexual predators...

...When terrorists attacked us on September 11, our instinctual response was to turn to government...

...Those who favor it consider that a relatively minor harm compared to the damage our current system has imposed on democracy...

...People do not seek security because they are cowards who turn irrationally to government...

...It is not illiberal to make that calculation...

...The present era, in her view, is especially rough on freedom, for not only do we have Ashcroft, we recently survived Bill Clinton, whom Kaminer describes as "uncharacteristically constant in his hostility toward civil liberty...

...Kaminer is a witty and thoughtful writer, but, like many civil libertarians, she often fails to appreciate moral dilemmas, so sure is she that respect for civil liberty is always the clear path...

...On the right, we have an attorney general, John Ashcroft, who has never been known to rank due process high on the list of the virtues of a democratic state...

...Internet pornography, they tell me, is bestial...

...Relying persistently on principle, even on good principle, is not enough...

...Money facilitates the exercise of rights, as Kaminer correctly suggests...

...In this atmosphere, Kaminer's book is both refreshing and welcome...

...Guns actually do kill people...

...Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College...

...Unlike many on the left, Kaminer argues that, once committed to civil liberty, one cannot welcome efforts at campaign finance reform, since they will inevitably, in regulating money, also regulate speech...

...Nor does she take the easy way out on gun control, for she recognizes that the Second Amendment, like the First, was meant to protect individual freedom against government intrusion...

...If I seek security for my children and myself, it is because I have made a careful calculation between the benefits I would receive from a civil libertarian approach and the ones I would receive from an approach that takes other things into consideration...

...Kaminer observes that the Bush administration takes strong stands against terrorism because its programs are "buttressed by public hunger for a strongman...

...In both cases, ideas, no matter how obnoxious others may find them, ought to trump fears...

...they very much are...

...The language, I believe, is too extreme, as Kaminer's language can be...

...all those who turn off politics because they feel it has been too long dominated by the rich and powerful effectively lose their rights of voting and participation...

...Meanwhile drug czars in Washington deny them their rights...

...She does not come out and defend the right of members of The Body, a Christian fundamentalist sect that has seen a number of its babies die from starvation, but she does wonder why we go after them and not after more respectable believers such as Christian Scientists...

...Civil libertarians think of themselves as watchdogs who protect everyone, even those who flee to the false security of government, against their own failures of nerve...

...Knowing this full well, the public has become extremely cynical, barely bothering to vote or read newspapers...

...To know when to champion the state and when to resist it, we need to make moral and political judgments...

...On the contrary, after reading her book, I am more puzzled than ever about why some people do...

...Terrorists really hate us...

...The House of Representatives has right-wing Republicans who are as fierce in their condemnation of government measures aimed at protecting security as anyone on the left...

...Despite her best efforts, Kaminer has not convinced me to join the American Civil Liberties Union...

...They seek security because there is much to fear...

...It does not permit identity cards and allows large numbers of immigrants to cross its borders, many of them illegally, without routinely checking on their status...

...It may well be true that campaign finance reform will restrict the speech of some advocacy groups...

...George W. Bush's unwillingness to regulate industry unless compelled to by Congress is only the most obvious example of this conflict of interest...

...Even in the wake of September 11, we have taken few concrete steps in the direction of Israeli-like airport security and flag protection-and chances are we never will...

...Some people, especially those with terminal cancer, really benefit from use of the drug, she argues, and in using it, they harm no one...

...Because of the way we financed elections prior to the passage of McCain-Feingold, politicians literally sold themselves to the highest bidder and rarely voted in ways contrary to what those bidders demanded...

...Still context is crucial...

...She follows the logic of her arguments wherever they lead politically, a rare quality in these ideological and partisan times...

...In so doing, she claims, they fall into "the logic of terrorists, demagogues, and other absolutists who perceive no moral dilemmas: For them, the right path is always clear...

...This is, after all, a culture that, in contrast to Europe, is dominated by laissez-faire individualism...

...At one point she uses the term "rampage" to describe, not only the teenagers who shot up Columbine High, but the reaction of public school officials to their act...

...no great fan of evangelical Protestantism, she would defend the right to evangelize for the same reason she would object to restricting access to pornography on the Internet...

...Her timing is good...

...The passage of McCain-Feingold will not correct all these abuses, but it is a giant step in the direction of restoring democracy's credibility...

...Sometimes the state is our friend and sometimes it is our enemy...

...a new law protecting the American flag against those who would desecrate it, in her view, is all but inevitable...

...The main argument advanced for protecting civil liberty is that we are always in danger of losing it...

...Writing about airport security, she suggests that "the trouble is that many people are becoming accustomed to submitting to authority, in the hope of remaining safe...

...Never once, while reading this book, did I feel that Kaminer was writing to please one constituency or another...

...I regard the state as an occasional ally, never a friend," she writes...

...Kaminer certainly thinks so...

...Courage and honesty are one thing, however, but persuasiveness is another...

...We don't yet inhabit a police state," Kaminer writes, "but it is not paranoia that imagines one taking shape...

...It also prevents their exercise...

...Its government is so dominated by lobbyists and divided by partisanship that it can rarely take effective action against even widely acknowledged abuses...

...To be fair to her, she is consistent in her view...

...We are wrong, she argues, to censor groups like the North American Man Boy Love Association, whose Web site Kaminer finds "a lot less incendiary than the Bible...

...In their view, liberty is so fragile that it must always, or at least nearly always, be protected...

...It is a valid and important point, but Kaminer does not apply it to the views of those who would put child safety, or national security, ahead of civil liberty...

...The essence of the civil libertarian perspective, Kaminer writes (citing the Boston attorney Harvey Silvergate), is to put oneself in another's shoes: How would I feel about restrictions on religious speech if I were religious...

...I cite this passage for a different reason...

...Free for All is also honest...

...This is not to suggest that Americans are unconcerned about safety or lack an interest in protecting themselves against terrorists and criminals...

...Kaminer describes an America I can barely recognize...

...Context, for them, is anathema, for once we start asking questions about whether specific circumstances ought to trump principles of liberty, we have already begun to sacrifice the liberty we ought to be protecting...

...In one of her essays, Kaminer takes up the question of the medical uses of marijuana...

...I'm often suspicious of child-savers," Kaminer writes...

...None of these worries about safety or national defense reflects Kaminer's own take on the world...

...Americans, Kaminer's views to the contrary, do love freedom, but they love other things as well...

...From a civil libertarian perspective, our liberties are in danger because we instinctively trust the state more than we do our own freedoms...

...And though many of Kaminer's essays were written before September 11, some, written afterwards, reflect the view that, in our zeal to protect ourselves against terrorism, we are likely to curtail individual rights...