Trade-offs necessary in open society

We ought to repeal religious freedom because someone could begin a church whose teachings harm people.

We ought to repeal press freedoms because some reporters, editors and bloggers are biased, incompetent or deliberately deceitful.

And free speech? Heavens, what if someone spreads subversive ideas?

While we're at it, those search-and-seizure guarantees in the Bill of Rights need to go because some criminals have used them to walk out the door, even though they obviously were guilty.

I could go on, attacking virtually every freedom this nation holds dear. But you get the point. Freedom and openness are messy things. Sometimes, they protect the guilty. But the opposite kind of world would be one in which officials promise no guilty person will go unpunished, and they make that happen by punishing everyone, especially the innocent.

And they do it in such a way that no one will find out.

Some state lawmakers need a lesson in this tug-of-war between liberty and ignorant bliss. One bill working its way through the state Senate, SB260, would allow a government to shut off access to records involving charges and disciplinary actions against peace officers. Mind you, the arrest records of the people those officers take into custody still would be open for all to see.

Sponsored by Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, the bill came about because someone may have been gathering public records from several agencies and compiling them into a database he could sell to defense attorneys. No one has been able to actually locate this man, but that's beside the point. Crafty entrepreneurs have been trying to make money off of public records for years.

I remember one scam from the mid-1980s, when I was a reporter in Las Vegas. Someone went to Clark County and gathered the records of all marriages performed each month. Las Vegas is a marriage Mecca. Many of these, of course, are performed on people from out of state.

Each of these out-of-state couples would receive a notice in the mail from this person, in an envelope that looked similar to an official government document. Inside was a letter explaining how it was recommended that the couple obtain a copy of their marriage license, which they could do by sending a modest sum of money to the enclosed address. My guess is the person behind this plan made a tidy profit.

It was deceitful, despicable and wrong. It also was one of the hazards of living in an open society.