by Jane Palen

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts wrote an excellent piece a couple of weeks ago about vice-president Dick Cheney’s break with the Bush administration on the matter of gay marriage. Cheney has a gay daughter, and he does not support a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and woman.

Pittsí reaction to Cheneyís public disagreement with his party over the matter was, more or less, ìSo what.î

Because of Cheneyís personal situation, he now sees matters in a different light. He can now put a human face on the issue, a face he knows well. But what Pitts pointed out was that when you are involved on a personal level, you see things differently. If Cheneyís daughter wasnít gay, heíd be in perfect sync with his boss on this one. If he didnít have a gay daughter, his break from the party wouldnít be tolerated nearly as well. But then, there probably wouldnít be a disagreement.

Personal experience changes things. We see it often in the newspaper business. The number of complaints weíve received over the years for running the public record are too numerous to count. But they all have one thing in common: they came from people whose names were going to appear in that column. The number of people who have objected to the publication of the public record on principle over the years is exactly one. Itís sort of like the obituary column, you want to read it but you donít want to be there.

Some people believe that the newspaper is required to print the public record, but that is not the case. Part of the freedom of the press means that that government cannot dictate what we print. It would certainly make things a lot easier if we stayed away from anything troublesome. But it wouldnít be very responsible.

So why do it?

A recent caller (DWI) told me that his arrest is nobody elseís business.

Itís easy to see why someone wouldnít want their name to appear in the paper. But looking at it a different way, itís actually everybodyís business. Taxpayers pay for the roads. They pay for the law enforcement officers who make the traffic stops, answer the domestic calls, investigate crimes. They pay for the emergency dispatchers, the jails, the courts, the judges, the county and city attorneys. In some cases, the taxpayers pay not only the cost of prosecuting the crimes and defending the accused.

So is it really important to know who was caught without a seatbelt? Who was speeding? Who had an expired license plate? Itís probably not big news. But in the interest of fairness, we just print them all. Maybe it even does some good. If people are concerned about their names being printed, maybe theyíll avoid the behavior that would get them in.

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