Selective Justice

At least one thing can be said for the Cambridge city government: it smashes constitutional rights only selectively. The freedom of peaceable assembly that bug eyed suburbanites and teeny boppers use to redress their grievances each weekend in Harvard Square has never caused much of a stir down at City Hall. Even though the weekend gapers stop traffic, dirty the sidewall, cram the Coop, and induce claustrophobia, they obviously have redeeming social--and economic--value. A small circulation magazine that socks it to the powers that be, in the very language those powers use in their back rooms, is another matter.

For the past few weeks, Cambridge police have mounted a systematic attack on Avatar. By Monday night they had arrested some 40 students and Cambridge area residents who attempted to distribute the bi-weekly magazine. Most of the sellers were charged with selling "obscene literature." Curiously, the policemen increased their harassment while a spate of court cases to decide the extent of Avatar's social disutility was still pending. Actually, given their past performances, it is unlikely that the higher courts of the Commonwealth, much less the U.S. Supreme Court, would ever bar the frank, satirical publication. Were the courts to prove so prissy, such a decision would be contemptible anyway; Avatar is every bit as meaningful for disenchanted students, as, say, Foreign Affairs is for Washington policy-makers. And there are a lot more of us than them.

The action of local officials is open to censure on other grounds. Their wise decision yesterday to stop harassing and arresting the sellers of Avatar was hardly provoked by decent motives. They did not yield their hypocritical Victorian prejudices, but merely realized that they had clogged the City Jail. The courageous, staunchly libertarian stand taken by the several dozen Harvard students who sold Avatar in the wake of Monday's bust was undoubtedly one of the main reasons the officials compromised their spurious virtue.

Just as disturbingly, the City demonstrated that it responds to libertarian pressures from young people only if they go to Harvard. The large-scale involvement of Harvard students in Avatar precipitated yesterday's compromise, not the commitment of a few local hippies earlier this winter to the ideal of a truly free press. In all probability, the officials would have taken a lot more time to wise up if hippies had dominated yesterday's sell-in. In short, it is clear that local law enforcement officials, even in their belated wisdom, adhere to a shamefully inequitable policy of legal discrimination.