Quickies

Who would expect to find Anita Bryant on the libertarian side of any issue? In January, Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance that forbids discrimination in housing and employment "on the grounds of sexual preference." Translated from the liberalese, this gives gays the "right" to housing whether the owner wants to provide it or not (adieu private property), and the "right" to a job whether the employer wants to hire them or not (adieu private enterprise). That includes the "right" to a teaching job—not just in the public schools, mind, but in the private schools as well. This was too much for Ms. Bryant, who says, "Having worked with homosexuals in music all my life, I've always had a policy of live and let live. I'm not here to take away their civil rights as human beings. But I have civil rights too. And it seems that in their pressure they are taking away my rights and, if this ordinance stands, the civil rights of my children." Indeed. So she up and organized Save Our Children, Inc., which got some 60,000 signatures on a petition to force the Dade County commissioners to either repeal the law or put it to a referendum. The election is now scheduled for June 7. But it's pretty embarrassing that the "gay rights" groups all favor the ordinance. Considering how noisy they were at the 1975 Libertarian Party convention, one might well ask: where are the gay libertarians?

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Jerry who? According to the Washington Star, Rep. Paul Simon (D-IL) sent a letter to "The Hon. Gerald Ford" at his transition office but used the wrong zip code. It came back marked, "ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN."

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"Kissinger, on the other hand, is being wooed by the BBC, which is offering him up to $1 million for doing an Alistair Cooke-type venture around the globe. ('I am standing in Angkor Wat, one of the great miracles of the world and a place I personally helped to destroy.')" That's Alexander Cockburn, writing in the Village Voice.

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Surely you heard the uproar when the 14 Congresscritters gave themselves that raise. Well Congresscritter Thomas Steed (D-OK) figures that it costs each of his subjects—beg pardon: constituents—only a nickel a year. So if anyone from his district complains, Steed will return the nickel—if the churl promises not to complain in the future. And why should he complain? Five cents will still buy a bullet.

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When Leonard Woodcock and company went to Hanoi early in March to discuss American MIAs, the North Vietnamese gave them the remains of twelve Americans—or so they thought. Upon examination, one turned out to be Vietnamese, and Hanoi had given the wrong name for another. The reason for the mixup might be due to the fact that Hanoi's Van Diem cemetery, where the Americans had been buried, was bombed during the war. Incidentally Mr. Louis P. Kubicka of the American Friends Service Committee estimated in the Los Angeles Times that the North Vietnamese Army suffered 25,000 men missing in action.

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It was good to see how many journalists supported Larry Flynt when he got sentenced to from seven to 25 years in prison for exercising his freedom of the press. But hark! It is that bulkward of liberty the Wall Street Journal intoning: "Americans for a Free Press [a pro-Flynt group] and the like argue the domino theory—if Hustler goes the Wall Street Journal may be next.…Anything of the sort seems terribly remote, to say the least, and for our part it is hard to avoid our sympathy with the citizens of Cincinnati in their desire for a cleaner environment." To which one member of AFFP, the veteran journalist and libertarian fellow-traveler Nicholas von Hoffman retorted: "No one is suggesting a domino theory that leads from the closing of Hustler to the closing of the Wall Street Journal for the simple reason that the Journal never has and never will publish anything displeasing to those who might have the power to shut it down." Von Hoffman, by the way, is now a columnist for Penthouse. Journal readers who desire a cleaner environment might follow him there.

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The Rhodesian Assembly barely passed a bill to repeal the laws barring blacks from white hotels, bars, and restaurants, and to reduce the size of the areas where blacks cannot own land. One source says those areas will now total only one-half of one percent of all Rhodesia. This is to Rhodesia's credit, to be sure; but why didn't our right-wingers think to mention those restrictions when they were blathering about Rhodesian "free enterprise"?

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Tass, the Soviet news agency, claims that in the last five years "98.4 percent" of those who sought to emigrate have been allowed to do so. One of the 1.6 percent is Amner Zavnrov, who had his internal passport confiscated when he applied for permission to emigrate, and then was sentenced to three years in prison for not having one. He was also charged with "hooliganism" because he didn't have a job—which he couldn't get without an internal passport.

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Great Moments in Political Philosophy, No. 4: In a letter to Business Week, one E.I. Strom reveals that the Invisible Hand is attached to the long arm of the Kremlin: "It is more than a hundred years since Karl Marx said: 'The protective system is conservative and the free trade system is destructive. Therefore, I am for free trade, because it will hasten the day of the social revolution.' I believe that anybody who promotes free trade must be considered a fellow traveler of Karl Marx." (March 28, 1977.)