THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 19, 1994 TAG: 9408190029
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A20 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is at it again. This time, the scandal-plagued bureaucracy has been squelching free speech by threatening to fine and serve lawsuits against those who dare object to the housing agency bringing potentially noxious projects into local neighborhoods.
In Berkeley, Calif., New York City, New Haven, Conn., Seattle and many other communities, people who have objected to HUD's effort to locate homeless shelters as well as drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers in residential neighborhoods have found themselves facing federal civil-rights charges.
In Berkeley, HUD officials are demanding all newsletters, memos and other documents that a group of residents have used to express their concerns about a proposed treatment facility for the mentally disabled and drug addicts being located in their neighborhood. If Alexandra White, Joseph Deringer and Richard Graham - who have been dubbed ``the Berkeley Three'' - don't comply, they collectively face more than $100,000 in fines, and each could spend up to a year in jail.
The reason? HUD officials say these traditional forms of protest violate the 1988 Fair Housing Act Amendments, which, as HUD has interpreted them, make it illegal to even broadly criticize proposed occupants of a housing project. Objecting to the presence of mentally disturbed or chemically dependent people, it seems, is not speech protected by the First Amendment, but discrimination.
And HUD's threats have worked. Many critics of HUD schemes in various communities, facing the prospect of fines and imprisonment or a costly legal battle, have been intimidated into silence. In Berkeley, no one showed at a hearing to protest the disputed facility once word had gotten out about the HUD crackdown.
But trashing the First Amendment has a price, and a backlash has been created. The Wall Street Journal has exposed HUD's tactics and the American Civil Liberties Union, to its credit, has spoken up against the agency's heavy-handedness. In a letter to Secretary Henry Cisneros, the ACLU said HUD had ``overstepped a critical constitutional line.''
Protesting a governmental policy in a peaceable manner is something ordinary people would think is beyond question. The idea that citizens have to hire lawyers at their own expense to defend what are so obviously their constitutional rights shows how Kafkaesque can be the effort to root out all perceived ``discrimination.'' If Secretary Cisneros does not call off the dogs, Congress should do it for him. by CNB