Raising a Big Stick in the Name of Tolerance

By CLYDE HABERMAN

As everyone knows, no people on this and possibly any other planet are more open-minded than New Yorkers. Who can compare to us in tolerating unpopular opinions, in understanding that the best response to bad speech - nay, the only response - is better speech?

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

Unless, perhaps, the articulated thoughts disturb powerful officeholders. Then trouble can set in.

It has begun once again with an attempt by the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, to have a chicken-sandwich purveyor called Chick-fil-A kicked out of New York. Ms. Quinn is mightily displeased with the company's president, Dan T. Cathy, for putting millions of his dollars behind his belief that same-sex marriage violates “the biblical definition of the family unit” and is “inviting God's judgme nt on our nation.”

We have seen comparable situations many times, a point noted in this space just a week ago in a different context.

Over the years, people have at times rented billboards to take positions falling far from New York's political center of gravity. They've included messages challenging abortion rights, speaking skeptically about immigration and quoting biblical condemnations of homosexuality. Time after time, influential politicians showed their muscles and got the signs pulled down.

Now it's the turn of Ms. Quinn, who happens to be gay, newly married and hoping to become the next mayor. Chick-fil-A is not welcome in this city, she announced after fresh controversy erupted over Mr. Cathy's enthusiastic support of groups seeking to defeat same-sex marriage initiatives around the country.

Mayors and other officials in Boston and Chicago had similarly made clear that Chick-fil-A deserved no place in their cities. A Chicago alderman went so far as to point out that he could easily bottle up land-use legislation the company would need to open a new restaurant.

On Friday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg condemned that sort of litmus test for businesses. Ms. Quinn, joined politically at the hip with the mayor most days, parted company with him this time. She made clear that she wanted Chick-fil-A banished.

Not that the company has exactly taken New York by storm. It has only one outlet here, in a food court at New York University, and it's not open in the summer. Still, on Saturday the Council speaker sent a letter to the college's president, John Sexton, calling on him to send the chicken sellers packing altogether.

A university spokesman, John H. Beckman, said in response that it would be left to the University Senate - a body made up of students, faculty members and administrators - to recommend in the fall what action, if any, to take. One component of the sen ate, the Student Senators Council, has already weighed in. Nothing less than free speech is at stake, it said last spring. If people wish to boycott Chick-fil-A, that's their right, said the council's chairman, Albert Cotugno, but “to ban any entity from campus for ideological reasons is, in most every case, to limit freedom of expression.”

A reasonable position, many would say.

Ms. Quinn herself says there is no evidence that Chick-fil-A violates city laws by refusing to serve or to hire gays. Nor, she acknowledges, would she be on solid ground if she followed the Chicago alderman's lead and used her office to deny a permit just because someone's politics offended her.

(Nor, by the way, is it likely that Chick-fil-A stands alone on same-sex marriage. No doubt, plenty of New York businesses are run by socially conservative Christians, Jews and Muslims whose religious beliefs match Mr. Cathy's on this score, yet they escaped the speaker's opprobrium.)

“I fully understand that Mr. Cathy has the right to say and donate to anything he wants,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview on Sunday. But, she said, “I have the right to use my voice just as much as he does.”

That she does, agreed Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It's important to differentiate between government action and the views of policy makers,” Ms. Lieberman said. But at the same time, she added, care must be taken that an official's opinions do not “translate into actions that go over the line.”

Does trying to shut down a business perhaps go over that line?

Back to Ms. Quinn. “When people speak who hold a significant stature in society - which for better or worse corporate C.E.O.'s do - when they speak out in a homophobic or discriminatory way, it has an effect,” she said. She added, “It affirms that being discriminatory is O.K., and I think we ought to speak out against it .”

A Council speaker has significant stature, too. What she or he says also has an effect.

One chilling effect, felt repeatedly in this city, is on the expression of unpopular opinions and, equally important, on the ability to make oneself heard. Sure, major public officials have as much right as anyone else to mix it up in the marketplace of ideas. But all too often in New York, they're not content just to enter the market. They have a history of taking control of it and putting their thumbs heavily on the scales to tip the balance their way.