Maybe it's because I'm a long-ago high school newspaper editor, but I was shocked and appalled (nobody is ever shocked but not appalled) by a New York Times report that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy -- "widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values" -- insisted on reviewing and tweaking an article about his appearance at a private school in New York. The student newspaper at the Dalton School published a tantalizing editor's note saying: "We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints."

Then I read the Times article again and discerned some shades of ethical gray. It's true, as Frank D. LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center said, that "in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech." But apparently Kennedy's purpose wasn't to vet the article as a whole but to reconsider the felicity of some of his phraseology.

It wasn't clear whether he made this request in advance. But if he did, and the agreement was confined to allowing him to polish his prose, I'm less shocked but still somewhat appalled. My own practice as a reporter was to refuse at the outset to show my completed story to an interviewee. As for quotes, I never would allow someone to retract or rephrase an answer because of second thoughts about its political effect.

But I made an exception when I did a series of interviews with prominent intellectuals. One law professor, in explaining his constitutional philosophy, used an analogy in reference to the Constitution. He later called me to suggest a different analogy that he said more precisely made his point. I let him change it, because the whole purpose of the piece was to let him present his thinking in his own words.

The difference here is that the Kennedy story was an account of an event at which an audience heard the justice's original words. That tips the scales of journalistic justice. Kennedy said what he said; if he wanted to correct it, he should have written a letter to the editor.

Actually, there's a precedent. Last year the court ruled that the death penalty couldn't be imposed for rape. Writing for the court, Kennedy cited as proof that the penalty was cruel and unusual the fact that, while 26 states and the federal government, had the death penalty, "only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for the rape of a child." After the decision, a blogger pointed out that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed the death sentence in the rape of a child, a fact the court had overlooked

The court added a footnote rectifying its omission -- but it didn't blot out the original language.

--Michael McGough

Columnist Jonah Goldberg foresees clouds ahead for the Democrats -- in fact, a coming storm so severe that it could end Democratic control of Congress. It's building from the Tea Party movement, which Goldberg sees as an heir to the Ross Perot third-party movement of the 1990s. "If the GOP can convincingly align with and exploit the growing Perotista discontent, it very well might ride to victory on a tsunami the Democrats can't even see."

Also on today's Op-Ed page, scholar Giles Dorronsoro explains why U.S. attempts to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan's Pashtun areas in the south and east are probably doomed to fail. And ACLU National Security Project chief Jameel Jaffer decries an attempt by Congress to circumvent the courts by giving the secretary of Defense the power to withhold photographs of combatants "engaged, captured or detained" by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

On the Editorial page, The Times weighs in on Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's policy change on medical marijuana. Though we're happy that federal prosecutors will make marijuana cases a low priority in states like California that have passed laws approving its medicinal use, we think that's the wrong approach. The administration shouldn't be picking and choosing states in which to enforce federal law -- rather, it should de-emphasize medical marijuana cases in all 50.

We also note that the best place for local health departments to conduct swine flu vaccinations is at public schools -- yet that's not where the inoculations will take place in Los Angeles, thanks to a failure by the school district and the county to properly coordinate.

And we muse on the bizarre spectacle presented by Colorado's Heene family, accused of perpetrating the "balloon boy" hoax in an attempt to drum up publicity for a reality show. "As much as some people will do just about anything for a Hollywood contract, a good number of the rest will lap up the juicy story of their wrongdoing. In reality, perhaps we all get what we wanted."

Illustration by Jonathan Twingley / For The Times

Now that covert videos have shown widespread law-breaking at gun shows, the Times calls for a couple of changes, including a federal law like California's requiring that all gun sales be channeled through licensed dealers who must perform a background check. The board also chides Cal State San Luis Obispo for caving in to pressure from the owner of the Harris Ranch beef company, who didn't like the idea of food reformer and author Michael Pollan speaking at the school. The school reduced Pollan's rule to panelist, a craven abandonment of the principle of academic freedom

On the other side of the fold, a senior fellow at the Council of Public Relations argues that there is value to opening dialogue with North Korea, even if that particular olive branch isn't going to bear fruit any time in the near future. And a board member of the Friends of the World Food Program explains why school lunches in developing countries could be our best tool against global violence. The food attracts hungry children to school, where their education contributes to a more rational society.

Finally, Times staffer Paul Whitefield worries about what he should do with the $100 bill he found on the sidewalk. It could have been money for a child's birthday gift from grandparents; it might be someone's last $100, meant to see him or her through for a week. But it's really mine, so Paul can just hand it over and feel at peace.

Photo: Dean Lewins / AFP / Getty Images

-- Karin Klein  

New FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, fresh off his speech to a wireless industry conference in San Diego, stopped by the Times this afternoon to talk to the editorial board and several members of the news staff about broadband policy, Net neutrality, media ownership and other items on the commission's plate. He was, shall we say, circumspect. At this point, almost every issue seems to boil down to a process question for Genachowski, who was far less willing than the two previous chairmen (interim and otherwise) to suggest what policies he'd like the commission to adopt. But hey, it's early yet -- he's been on the job for barely three months.

Here's the entire conversation, which lasted about 55 minutes. Many of the questions were asked by me, with Joe Flint chiming in on media consolidation and decency regulation, Jim Granelli on wireless Net neutrality, John Corrigan on the new chairman's view of his predecessors, David Sarno on wireless billing issues and Mark Milian on Google Voice:

The full session

And here are links to segments devoted to specific topics:

The DTV transition

Media ownership and consolidation

His predecessors at the FCC

Net neutrality

Wireless Net neutrality

Wireless broadband

Decency rules beyond broadcast TV

Wireless billing outrages

The Google Voice inquiry

Promoting broadband access, investment and adoption

-- Jon Healey

Not for use with small animals. (EPA/Peter Foley)

Alito's hypo seems a bit less far-fetched when one considers the popularity of WWE, televised hockey games and even The History Channel (which one of my peacenik relatives calls The War Channel). Violence sells, But censors, with support from the courts, usually have  focused on sex instead. What puts obscenity outside the protection of the First Amendment is that it appeals to "prurient interest" -- that is, it's sexually arousing.

Patricia Millett, the lawyer for video vendor Stevens, ratified the "violence OK, sex bad" rationale. She conceded that the law might have survived a First Amendment challenge if it  had been narrowly drawn to punish only the phenomenon that provoked the legislation -- so-called "crush videos" catering to fetishists who are turned on by seeing a woman crush dogs with her high heels. A non-erotic, aesthetic appreciation of dog-fighting, however, is protected.

The sex/violence dichotomy has inspired the familiar joke about the differences between conservatives and liberals when it comes to censorship: Conservatives want to ban depictions of sex, liberals want to ban descriptions of violence. But it's rooted in the traditional justification for laws against obscenity: society's interest in preventing debauchery. As a 19th century British judge put it: "I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." In other words, keep reading this and you'll go blind.

That rationale arguably applies to "crush videos," but it's hard to see how it justifies prosecution of the sale of dogfighting videos, which means that Stevens likely will go free. Watching violence against animals is constitutionally protected as long as you don't enjoy it too much. If a Cable TV producer greenlights Alito's idea of a Human Sacrifice Channel, he should be careful to market it to anthropologists, not sadists.

-- Michael McGough

We're all against censorship of books in this country, right? Especially by libraries. Sexual content, unpopular viewpoints, even true stories of male penguins who partner to raise a chick.

But the New York Times today reports on the decision of the Brooklyn Public Library to relegate one of the books in the cartoon-adventure Tintin series to its back room where it is kept unavailable to the public, even upon request. Some library patrons have objected to "Tintin au Congo," first published 69 years ago, feeling that it depicts Africans as mentally simple and physically like monkeys. Those who find the book offensive might have found an ally in author and Belgian cartoonist Herge, who died in 1983 but in his later years said he regretted this early work and that he had been overly influenced by an editor who wanted to depict the glories of colonialism.

So like many a public figure, Tintin, who will make a modern-day appearance in a forthcoming Steven Spielberg movie, continues to be haunted by his past. The question is how to view that earlier work now. Is it truly offensive, and if so, should it be hidden away or available as a relic of another day, another way of thinking?

Photo: A tourist takes a picture of Tintin at a 2006 exhibit in France. Credit: Jacques Demarthon / AFP / Getty Images 

-- Karin Klein

The editorial board still likes a plan that will go before the L.A. school board this month, allowing outside operators to submit proposals for running 50 new schools that will open over the next few years. What it doesn't like are signs that the district isn't acting transparently about the issue, as indicated by a town-hall meeting where opponents were locked out, and the L.A. Unified's decision to give a new school to the mayor's education partnership even though parents and teachers were not consulted:

The board has this much to say about Adolf Hitler's manifesto "Mein Kampf": It's repetitious, long-winded and evil. But it also argues that Germany should stop banning the book and go ahead with a new, annotated publication of it:

On the other side of the fold, the op-ed page ponders how President Obama's healthcare plan can prevail over doomsayers who claim the government will be taking over Americans' lives. Author Nancy J. Altman offers a possible solution: Take a cue from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's strategy for the passage of Social Security. And folklorist Patricia A. Turner tells the story behind a Ku Klux Klan quilt, and what the quilt's changed ownership says about America.

Photo: Ku Klux Klan quilt. Credit: Cheng Saechow / UC Davis

-- Karin Klein

In what seems to be part of a crackdown on civil rights lawyers in China, the Chinese government has arrested prominent civil rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong on tax fraud charges. Zhiyong, who has not been heard from since his arrest two weeks ago, started the nonprofit Open Constitution Initiative legal clinic six years ago, which has recently represented victims of the poisoned milk powder that left three children dead and 6,000 sick in China. Zhiyong's clinic was shut down for "tax evasion." Experts say this arrest does not bode well for the already precarious rule of law in China, and human rights activists across the political spectrum are calling for President Obama to speak up on the issue.

Iran's government announced Tuesday that it would release 140 prisoners detained during the political unrest that wracked the country last month, but one now-notable name was not on the list: Maziar Bahari remains in Tehran's Evin prison. Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist for Newsweek, filmmaker, playwright, author and artist, has been getting a lot of attention since his June 21 arrest.

A full-page ad in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal shows a picture of the captured reporter with the words, "Free Maziar Bahari." Below is a list of more than 300 writers, reporters, filmmakers and even some Nobel Prize winners from 60 countries who are pressuring the Iranian government to free Bahari.

The ad has also appeared in Newsweek, and he's received vocal support on the Huffington Post from actor and director Robert Redford. Human and journalistic rights organizations such as the PEN American Center and the Committee to Protect Journalists, which circulated petitions for Bahari's release, seem to be narrowing their focus on Bahari, whom the Iranian government said was arrested for "biased" reporting.

But let's not forget that there are 200 other journalists, artists, political activists, protesters and Iranian citizens still detained in Evin Prison (click here for a list of all journalists detained in Iran since June). Other organizations, such as the International Women's Media Foundation, started petitions on behalf of the more than 35 international journalists imprisoned by the Iranian government.

While there is no doubt that Bahari's story is a sad one, advocacy groups should not lose sight of the roughly 200 others jailed in Iran for merely annoying Iran's theocratic leadership after the election. Using Bahari's notoriety to draw attention to these arrests and human rights violations makes sense; ignoring the others by focusing too much on Bahari does not. Every person in Evin is a victim of human-rights violations, and the 300 people who signed a petition on behalf of Bahari should have made a broader appeal for all of those who were doing their jobs reporting on the sham election and subsequent protest.

--Catherine Lyons

Photo: AP Photo / Newsweek

Comments continue to cascade in response to  Catherine Lyons' thoughtful post on the president of France's broadside against burqas. I thought I'd add my 2 cents' worth, even they're pennies I spent in 2004 when I was writing for another newspaper. In a column headlined "Scarves and Smugness," I suggested that Americans ought to refrain from judging the French too harshly for their ban on the wearing of headscarves -- and other religious garments and adornments -- in state schools.

That policy had drawn criticism from the Bush administration, criticism  echoed by President Obama in his June 4 speech in Cairo. Freedom in America, he said, " is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state of our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That is why the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it."

In my column (full text here) I wrote:

"Official tolerance for religious diversity in this country is a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn't until 1987, in response to an adverse Supreme Court decision, that Congress allowed Jewish military officers to wear yarmulkes with their uniforms. Only recently have Christmas pageants in public schools been repackaged as ecumenical 'holiday celebrations' that also make note of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. . . .

"It is tempting to recommend to the French that they copy the U.S. First Amendment, which the Bush administrations seems to think offers simple answers to the question of religious expression in state schools. But that amendment itself pulls in two directions: prohibiting governmental 'establishment of religion' but guaranteeing the 'free exercise' of religion. Into which category should we place an exception in a school dress code for religious apparel?
 
"The sort of 'multicultural' pluralism the Bush administration recommends to France took time to develop in this country and in England, where until the 19th century Roman Catholics and other 'Nonconformists' were second-class citizens. Earlier than that, in Elizabethan times, Catholics were presumed to be traitors because they answered to a pope who had excommunicated England's Protestant queen. The line between religion and politics in those days was a blurred and bloody one. So it is, some would argue, in contemporary France with its large Muslim minority."

"Some would argue" was a hedge on my part, and I'm still torn about whether France should bolster its wall of separation between church and state. I do think that the burqa controversy raises the question of whether Americans should equate the particulars of our democracy or civil society with universal imperatives like representative government, separation of church and state and fair trials. Take the question of an independent judiciary, which appears on the checklists of most definers of democracy. In this country, an independent judiciary includes the right of the Supreme Court to nullify unconstitutional statutes. Britain historically has not gone that far, not surprisingly given its lack of a written Constitution. But British justice, though sometimes flawed (as is American justice), has a deserved reputation for political independence. And while the British have an encouragingly expansive understanding of freedom of religion, they also have an Established Church.

Banning women from wearing the burqa anywhere strikes me as a violation of the basic principle of religious freedom. Banning headscarves and crucifixes from state schools, not so much.  France is more of a stickler for secularism than the is United States, because of its history and culture and not just out of concern about unassimilated Muslims. I'm not quite willing to say  "Vive la différence," but neither will I excommunicate France from the free world.