Rights Lapse in Little Saigon

Elected officials in Westminster and Garden Grove are in a mad dash to please a bitter cadre of Vietnamese Americans who would prohibit representatives from Vietnam’s Communist government from entering their cities.

That doesn’t make Little Saigon into Fallouja, but it’s a dizzying silliness in a free country.

Aging Vietnamese immigrants carry understandably angry memories of the Communist brutalities that forced them to flee. They’re entitled to their opinions, but not to settle their grudge by trampling on the Constitution.

The nearly identical ordinances proposed in both cities would demand that representatives of Vietnam’s government give two weeks’ notice before entering Westminster or Garden Grove. That means two weeks to organize unruly protests and effectively bar such visits.

The ordinances, which could come to a vote next month, obviously mock the civil liberties that drew Vietnamese refugees here. Elected officials who would consider this nonsense should audit a Civics 101 course at a local high school.

Consider this tortured bit of logic advanced by Garden Grove Mayor Bruce Broadwater: “We can’t afford to have visitors from Communist Vietnam visit here at the last minute, only to stir up trouble in this overwhelmingly anti-Communist community.”

Come again? What about the fight by the American Civil Liberties Union to protect the right of the Ku Klux Klan to march through the mainly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie in 1977? What about those wholly unwelcome and often endangered Freedom Riders in the American South in the 1960s?

Westminster and Garden Grove initially considered even worse ordinances, which would have denied police protection to Vietnamese officials and trade representatives. Subsequent modifications state that the cities will not “welcome or sanction” visits by Vietnam’s government or trade groups and also add the two-week-notice provision.

Friday marks the 29th anniversary of Saigon’s fall, and hard-liners in the Vietnamese American community would be only too happy to spark a controversy that slows U.S. efforts to normalize relations with Vietnam. Time, however, is doing its work. American soldiers who fought in Vietnam are returning as tourists, and controversial former South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky recently went back to make peace with the past. A younger generation of Vietnamese Americans seeks knowledge of its roots.

Time may be standing still for pockets of the Vietnamese refugee community, but elected leaders should play no part in catering to their rejection of a basic freedom.