In the minutes of the last meeting: guts

My idea of a patriot is someone willing to question authority, not a closed-minded true believer marching in lockstep behind a bad idea. It’s a person or a group of people who can rise amid a crowd of shouting flag-wavers and, motivated by conscience, quietly disagree with the majority opinion.

That’s what I think the L.A. City Council did the other day when it took on the Patriot Act. It declared almost unanimously that portions of the so-called antiterrorist law were un-American and encouraged racial profiling.

The council’s opposition came one day after President Bush, in his State of the Next Election speech, justified the freedom-threatening Patriot Act as a valuable tool in protecting America from its enemies and called upon Congress to extend it.

A few days later, a federal judge ruled unconstitutional a section of the act that makes it illegal to give “expert advice or assistance” to foreign terrorist organizations. The language of the law was so vague, wrote U.S. Dist. Judge Audrey Collins, that it could be construed to include “pure speech and advocacy protected by the 1st Amendment.”

Hallelujah.

The federal court and the City Council did what Congress should have done in 2001, instead of giving Bush and his crowd the power to pry into our private conversations, monitor what we read and throw us in jail for unspecified periods if, for a variety of reasons, we are suspected of being terrorists. Even someone buying an almanac was viewed with suspicion.

The act is, in a way, the Cold War all over again, when Joe McCarthy and his Commie-hunters were destroying the lives and reputations of innocent Americans, preying upon our fears to chew away at our civil liberties. Those who stood in opposition risked losing everything. Refusing to sign a loyalty oath was tantamount to declaring lifelong membership in the Communist Party. Many suffered greatly for their courage.

Fear has always been a scoundrel’s weapon to subdue a nervous crowd. Tell a group of kids that a bad guy is about to steal their cookies and they’ll scream and cry and raise all kinds of ruckus until the meanie goes away. Tell an edgy nation that the Jews or the Communists or the Arabs or the Japanese are about to do us in and we start throwing them in jail or, worse, regard each other with deep suspicion.

L.A. wasn’t the first city to challenge the Patriot Act, but it was the largest. More than 200 other cities, counties and states have passed resolutions similar to the one approved by our council, which ought to send a strong message to Congress that we’re beginning to wake up to the fact that the erosion of our Constitution is a far greater threat than what terrorists might be able to accomplish with bombs.

It was a disappointment when in the U.S. Senate, for instance, only one man voted against the Patriot Act while the others, unable to grasp a threat to freedom more significant than any momentary solution to terrorism, did as they were told by a president who obscured their vision by waving a flag, and then went to war to eliminate a danger that didn’t exist.

The destruction of the twin towers and the continued violence in the Middle East reveal in stark and bloody terms the degree of horror that terrorists are capable of inflicting on other human beings. They are equal opportunity killers, murdering without hesitation any man, woman or child in the parameter of their explosives, killing themselves too for a heaven which, if it exists, would never take them in.

But even knowing that and suffering the pain of madmen, to allow our document of freedom and individual liberty to erode would be to give in to the very fear that is one of terrorism’s most lethal weapons. This is why I cheer anyone who stands to oppose, at the risk of humiliation or worse, any government or government agency that misuses patriotism to forge chains.

City councils are not necessarily known for courage in the face of fire. In 50 years of journalism, I can only recall one city, Berkeley, facing down the U.S. government by voting against the war in Vietnam and even, perhaps foolishly, attempting to establish diplomatic relations between it and North Vietnam while the war was going on.

I applaud the L.A. council as perhaps an anomaly in the otherwise barren landscape of civic courage and hope that other large cities will come to understand what most of our council members already realize: that no law of convenience ought to infringe upon the Bill of Rights. It was created to outlast human conflict, and to be there, a document for the ages, when any war on terror is a distant memory.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez @latimes.com.