'Give us the privacy to discriminate'

Patrick McIlheran, the Journal Sentinel's local conservative columnist, offers his assessment of the right to privacy:

Before privacy got drafted into the Abortion Liberation Army, it was an unstated premise in American life. How little markup a store is willing to earn to undercut competitors? Surely that's a private matter. Whether you rent an apartment to a couple shacking up or not: That, too, is your private business, as is whether your motives constitute a hate crime. Your house is private property, and surely any privacy right worth the name would protect you from having it turned into high-end condos by the city.

So privacy, it appears, is tied to property ownership and overrides all other rights.

If you choose not to rent to an unmarried couple (I hadn't heard the rather quaint "shacking up" for awhile), he says, that's your private business. You own the house, right?

So if you won't rent to a gay couple, is that your private business, too. [We know they aren't married, because you support laws that forbid it.]

A black family? A Hmong couple, married or not?

(Do you ask them all their relationships when they look at the apartment, to determine whether they are married, whether the two guys are gay or just friends, or do you just jump to your own conclusions?)

And don't give us any of that discrimination or hate crime stuff. You own the house, so everyone should leave you alone and give you some privacy.

Excuse me, Patrick, but this is 2005, not 1905. Women teachers are even allowed to marry now without losing their jobs. Society has become a little more tolerant, although that seems to have escaped your notice.

The privacy I want is privacy from government intruding and snooping into my life, reading my mail and e-mail, finding what library books I read, searching my bank records and generally prying into my life even though I am not suspected of anything. Government, of course, has much more latitude to snoop and spy on us since passage of the Patriot Act, which you undoubtedly support.

That's the privacy I'd like protected -- the privacy to lead my own life without the government spying on me -- not the right to privately discriminate because I happen to be a property owner.