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What have you said in private?

A private recording of racist remarks by the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling, in a telephone conversation was released last week.

That his comments are racist and therefore contemptible goes without saying. But the incident raises other issues that are not so clear as the racism in Sterling’s comments, yet they are at least as important.

One is the increasing release — and the acceptability thereof — of private recordings and videos.

Take the video released last month of a married congressman engaged in a passionate kiss with a married member of his staff. This was a security surveillance video. Isn’t the only reason for the very existence of surveillance cameras to catch criminals?

Why didn’t the release of such a video shock the media and the country?

I have consistently defended these ubiquitous video cameras against those who argue that they violate our privacy. I am convinced that they are indispensable to apprehending violent criminals, as they were in the case of the Boston Marathon terrorists. But, I have repeatedly added, if these cameras are ever used for personal or political reasons to ruin people’s lives or careers, the perpetrators of the release must be punished severely, including prison terms. And if this abuse becomes widespread, the cameras must be taken down.

The fact that whoever released the surveillance video of the congressman has not been apprehended is a threat to us all. Yet this aspect of the incident has not even been discussed. All we heard was gloating over catching a conservative congressman in an act of infidelity.

Similarly, recordings of private speech must also remain private unless they pose a danger to others. That, far more than the NSA trolling of billions of phone calls in order to identify terrorists, poses a real threat to privacy.

Where are the civil liberties groups and libertarians on this issue?

Now, the second issue: How important to the public are the private remarks of public individuals? On July 18, 2000, I wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Hillary Isn’t an Anti-Semite.”

It was a response to a book, State of a Union, by Jerry Oppenheimer, in which the author claimed that Clinton had called the Jewish manager of husband Bill’s failed 1974 Congressional campaign a “Jew bastard.”

“I wish to defend Hillary Clinton,” I wrote, “against the charge of anti-Semitism. I do so as a practicing Jew and a Republican. . . . We must cease this moral idiocy of judging and labeling people by stray private comments.

“As David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman revealed, one of the most courageous friends American Jews and blacks ever had in the White House frequently used [epithet for Jew] and [epithet for black person] in private.

“Was this unfortunate? Yes. Important? No. Defining of the man? Absolutely not.

“I am repulsed by the loose talk about Mrs. Clinton’s long-ago utterance. If that renders her an anti-Semite, then virtually every Gentile is anti-Semitic and almost every Jew is an anti-Gentile bigot.

“It is highly misleading to probe private comments for evidence of anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry and sexism. The present trend emanates largely from a lethal combination — the totalitarian temptation inherent in contemporary liberalism and the media’s sensationalism.”

It may well matter to G-d what people say in private. But what should matter to us is what people say in public and how people act — whether in private or public.

Now, as it happens, Sterling does seem to have behaved in a racist manner in the past. And these actions do matter in assessing Donald Sterling.

Yes, the private remarks attributed to Sterling are racist and awful. But the growing acceptance of leaks of people’s private non-criminal behaviors and comments — and the consequent judgment of these people — will ultimately injure society far more than who owns the Los Angeles Clippers.



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Columnist | Conservative Lens


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