Throw the Imams From the Plane

DIGG THIS

The six suspicious Imams that had boarded and then were thrown off a U.S. Airways flight last November are now engaging in a great American pastime: they've filed a lawsuit. As Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports, "The imams are demanding unspecified damages from US Airways and the Metropolitan Airports Commission," as well as from other, unnamed defendants, presumably those who witnessed and reported their behavior before and after boarding the plane.

There is outrage all around. The Imams claim that they have suffered mentally as a result of being tossed off the flight. According to the Star Tribune, their complaint "rehearses a catalogue of harms allegedly suffered by the imams, including fear, depression, mental pain and financial injury. They have not only endured exhaustion, humiliation and ridicule, but also have lost sleep and developed anxiety about flying." On the other side of the coin, there are plenty of people outraged that the Imams would file a suit like this; after all, they were behaving like Muslims – possibly evil, suicidal, terrorist Muslims – and in the wake of 9/11 they should have known better.

The controversy over the Imams, though, should rightly be viewed as a tempest in a teapot, a matter – if society in general these days had any real understanding of freedom – of little lasting consequence. The first bit to consider is the outrage over the Imams' action in filing their lawsuit. The suit, which alleges racial and religious discrimination, targets, in addition to the airline and the airports commission, the passengers who reported the suspicious behavior. That, according to the Star Tribune, is a dangerous precedent: "The imams’ attempt to bully ordinary passengers marks an alarming new front in the war on airline security," said the paper.

No it doesn't. The Imams are free to sue whomever they wish, including other passengers, the airlines, or whoever. Deciding whether the case has any merit is the job of the courts. In this case, the decision should be easy. Properly understood, the suit is frivolous and entirely without merit and should be dismissed as quickly as it was filed. As will be seen, though, the issue is not as easy as it should be.

At question is whether or not a private organization (and by extension, a private citizen) is within its rights to regulate access to privately owned property. The issue, at its root, is deceptively simple, as an example will show. Let's say the six Imams show up at your house one day and begin to pray in your driveway. Then they enter your house and sit down. One of them, uncomfortable in your easy chair, wants the couch instead, so they switch seats. You, hearing the commotion, enter the living room from your kitchen, looking to see what is going on. To your surprise and consternation, you find the six Imams. "Get out," you tell them. "This is private property and I don't want the likes of you on it."

As a private property owner you'd be completely within your rights in ejecting the Imams, on the grounds that they were trespassing. The right to remove a trespasser stems from the basic natural right of each person to choose with whom they wish to associate and to determine when and where that association will occur.

By extension, since it is an agglomeration of individual stakeholders, a corporation has the same rights as the people holding title to the company. Thus, just like private citizens, private companies have the right to regulate the people they let onto their property and to remove those who they deem to be trespassing. This gets to the heart of the matter between the Imams and U.S. Airways. The airline is part of US Airways Group, a corporation headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. As a private entity it has the right to choose with whom it will associate and when – in other words, the corporation has the right to be discriminating in its associations. There was, in essence, nothing wrong with the airline's decision to throw the Imams off the plane, hence the Imams' suit is frivolous and should be dismissed.

The problem is that, since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the fundamental right of freedom of association has been markedly curtailed. The new law decreed: "All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin." Inasmuch as the Civil Rights Act dismantled public laws that unjustly discriminated against blacks, the law was a good piece of legislation. But in its zeal, the law went too far, as Roger Pilon noted in his essay, "The Right to Do Wrong." As Pilon put it, the Civil Rights Act "created a u2018right' against private discrimination on certain grounds and in certain contexts," but it is a false right, one found nowhere in the Constitution or anywhere else. In fact, Pilon observed, "if we do have a right to be free, to plan and live our lives as we choose, limited only by the equal right of others, then we have a right to associate, or to refuse to associate, for whatever reasons we choose, or for no reason at all." Some may choose to associate or not to associate with others for reasons some others might find unethical and repugnant. But, as Pilon observes, "if freedom and personal sovereignty mean anything, they mean the right to make those kinds of decisions for ourselves, even when they offend others."

Unfortunately, since 1964 the right to freely associate only exists in the potential of natural law and in libertarian theory. In practice, the right of association, one of the first natural rights to be undermined in the U.S., has been so far circumscribed that the Imams may just win their lawsuit.

March 29, 2007