Sometimes you wonder why the people who proclaim loudest and longest their love for freedom are so anxious to deny freedom to anyone who might be different. It’s a right-wing plague today, but all human beings have been subject at times to a similar infection.

Indeed, the Bill of Rights protects us not only from bad government but from bad neighbors. Sean Hannity, this history lesson is for you.

Hannity said this week on Fox News (Motto: Freedom is mainly for white Christians!) that if he had the chance he would personally water board suspected terrorist bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Ann Coulter, his guest at the time, agreed so readily you almost figured she hoped to have a chance to hold the towel. Hannity and Coulter are moral cowards, of course, and Exhibit A if you ever wonder why we extend protection under the Bill of Rights to people whom we fear or might have been involved in the commission of heinous crimes.





Or, to put it another way: Once you’ve hanged a witch it’s too late for any apology.

Leaving witches aside for now, consider the unrelated terror case this past week, involving ricin-laden letters mailed to President Obama and other politician figures. A suspect, Paul Kevin Curtis, known until now mainly as an eccentric Elvis-impersonator, was soon apprehended.

What we had here, in other words, was another dangerous terrorist suspect. That suspect had produced a biological weapon, potentially one of mass destruction. And where was Hannity, that asshole, when we needed him?

Wait? Does it matter that Curtis wasn’t Muslim? For Fox and Friends and fans it almost certainly did. Or, did it matter that the case quickly crumbled? If we followed the Hannity Rule (I hate and fear you so I may inflict serious abuse upon your person.), we’d already have water boarded Curtis to produce information. He’d have had to start inventing because he was innocent.

Well, hell! Now we have a new suspect who might need to swallow a little water, James Everett Dutschke. Good god, this suspect is an accused child molester.

Fear the terrorist. Fear the molester. Fear the witch. Don’t you see? The visceral reaction is always the same.

Here’s what stood out about the Curtis case if you read about it this morning. It’s the description of Mr. Curtis. According to the New York Times, he’s a damaged individual. He “has battled mental illness and been in and out of jail on various misdemeanor charges.” Thirteen years ago he was employed doing janitorial work at the North Mississippi Medical Center. One day, he claimed, “he opened an industrial refrigerator to find frozen body parts.” He was fired soon after, in part because he insisted the hospital was engaged in “an organ-harvesting scheme.”

Mr. Curtis ended up on medication for a bipolar disorder. His marriage fell apart and his employment prospects grew dim. When ricin-filled letters turned up, including the sentence, “This is KC and I approve this message,” he became a prime suspect. News reports noted that this was the same wording Curtis used in ending a Facebook post on April 11. It appeared in a link to a YouTube video by Jason Shelton, the Democratic candidate for mayor of Tupelo, Mississippi.

The figurative noose began to tighten. Shelton distanced himself, telling a reporter for the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, “The guy is definitely not a friend of mine. I think he’s insane and out to hurt people.”

The picture of Curtis was now one of a man who had gone off the deep end and turned into a threat to his neighbors. He was a man “obsessed with conspiracies, an obsession that apparently alienated him from his family.” On his fan site, Kevin Curtis Live (KC), Curtis himself had written, “My brothers fear me. My sister hates me…I have lost most of my friends.” The poor fellow rambled on, claiming that unknown enemies had burned down his house, killed his dogs, his cat and his rabbit.

For some reason they had also blown up his 1966 Plymouth Valiant.

So: It looked like it might be time to start building the gallows. Further investigation by the FBI and local authorities, however, soon showed that Curtis played no role in sending the letters and suspicion turned instead to Dutschke.

It was a textbook example of why we guarantee “due process” rights to all under the U. S. Constitution. We don’t just grant protection to people we like but to all suspects. Curtis had those rights. Dutschke has them now.

So does Tsarnaev.

At Fox News, they might believe Muslim-Americans aren’t covered by the Bill of Rights. But the dangers of this sort of thinking are so clear you wonder how Hannity and Coulter and others on the twisted fringes of the right miss them.

Look up the case of the Scottsboro Boys, for example. In 1931, nine “black monsters” allegedly raped two white women in Alabama. A mob formed to lynch them. Only good fortune, skilled ACLU lawyers, and two trips to the U. S. Supreme Court to overturn their unjust convictions kept them from a seat in the electric chair. Turns out later the boys, ages 13-19, were innocent. The State of Alabama recently admitted as much, pardoning them posthumously.

Remember the case of Richard Jewel and the Atlanta Olympic bombing?

How about Michael Morton, recently released from a Texas penitentiary, after DNA evidence cleared him in the 1986 slaying of his wife? Morton spent a quarter century in jail despite his innocence and might easily have been sentenced to death in such a case. (Down in Texas they like their justice swift and sure and execute more prisoners than all the other states combined, never stopping long enough to wonder how many might have been innocent.) In Morton’s case the district attorney has been charged with withholding exculpatory evidence.

That’s the key, really. Sometimes we ourselves are the biggest threat to the freedom of others, “We the people.”

The proof is on display today in the ravings of Hannity and Coulter. It was equally clear in 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U. S. Supreme Court caved in to a wave of hysteria and allowed tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans to be sent to prison because at the time too many Americans hated and feared all “Japs.”

It’s a lesson that goes all the way back to the first pages of recorded history, to medieval times, when you might have smelled the results in the air while tens of thousands of Jews burned at the stake as heretics. It’s the same picture you had when nineteen witches were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts by our own ancestors.

The author Evan S. Connell probably said it best: “If you make men sufficiently angry or fearful the hot red eyes of cavemen will glare out at you.”

History reminds us that those we hate and fear are most in need of the protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and shows that despised individuals and groups are often innocent of all wrong-doing.

Viall usually writes about education matters at http://ateacheronteaching.blogspot.com/