Peter Y. Sussman

(Originally posted on Huffington Post on July 25, 2009)

The police officer who arrested eminent Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is said to be an excellent and sensitive cop. He teaches a class in racial profiling. Here are a few discussion points he might want to add to the syllabus. They come from a white layperson who has written often about criminal justice issues and given a good deal of thought to the sort of ambiguous confrontation that led to Gates’ arrest.

These suggestions for the lesson plan are occasioned by the incident in which Gates became embroiled, but none is specifically intended as a comment on that case since there is no way for outsiders to accurately determine what occurred during the confrontation inside that house in Cambridge. They are advanced as points worthy of consideration in similar situations.

First lesson: If an officer arrests a citizen for an offense that is not the one he or she was investigating at the outset and arises solely from the officer’s interaction with the arrestee, then there is an extra burden of proof on the officer. When the arrest results from such a personal interaction, in the absence of imminently dangerous and overt threatening activity such as the brandishing of a weapon, it likely represents a subjective and suspect assessment on the officer’s part

There was no crime until the police presence itself created one.

and not a clear-cut violation of the law.

Second lesson: Officers who enter a home or a tense encounter suddenly, as most do at some point, must realize that their presence will heighten animosities that have no necessary relationship to illegal activity.

Third lesson (an elaboration of the second): People get angry. When angry enough, they are likely to swear or shout or verbally abuse the officers whose very presence sets off such outbursts. This anger and acting-out are understandable (albeit not commendable) emotional responses and are not an indication of illegal activity. It is not illegal to be angry or to shout. The First Amendment protects speech, and there is no law mandating citizen politeness to authorities. It is the officer’s duty to defuse tense situations with calming talk or such other means as would be helpful (see next lesson).

Fourth lesson: After the original cause for an encounter has been resolved — as it apparently was when Professor Gates proved he was the resident, not a burglar, in his own home — then the officer must urgently consider the
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(Originally posted on S.F. Gate on July 18, 2009)

Meg Whitman has a problem with our right to marry, but it’s not at all clear what that problem is.

The billionaire former eBay boss, now running as a Republican for governor, spoke to a gathering of “high-profile high-tech Silicon Valley women,” reported Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik. According to Garchik’s source, Whitman said she’d voted for Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, based on her religious convictions and her emotions.

Whitman added, as if to stake out an “above-the-fray” compromise position: “You know, I just wish there were one term for everything: civil unions.”

Here’s where I started getting lost, because there is currently

I won’t interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don’t interfere in our civil affairs.

 “one term for everything.” It’s called “marriage.”

For some reason, Whitman apparently prefers her own “term for everything,” as a substitute for the one that has been universally recognized for ages, in this country and elsewhere.

Under Whitman’s system, Garchik reports, “government would grant civil licenses only. It would be up to individual churches to decide who they would marry.”

Again, that’s the current system exactly: Government grants civil licenses, called marriage licenses. They are civil documents only, with no religious significance whatsoever. If churches wish to perform their own rituals using the civil marriage license, they are welcome to, and most have chosen to do so. They are free to perform that ritual for any gender combinations they wish. Civil authorities have no right under the Constitution to control how churches use the civil license in their rituals.

Similarly, couples who wish to be married outside a church, using the same civil marriage license, are entitled to do so, receiving the same civil benefits and responsibilities as those who “consecrate” their marriages in a religious institution.

Whitman’s essential point seems to be that, although she wants to retain the nationally recognized civil license, she objects to it being called what it’s always been called: a marriage license. She apparently wants all of us who were married years ago, as well as those who will be married in the future, to change the name of the license that was or will be issued for us. Why? Is she trying to disrupt traditional marriages like mine by changing the name of the license that first bound us 
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