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Show The Daily Utah Chronicle. Wednesday. December 6, Page Nine vibration from a "kook capital" of the world. When a society runs up against its own internal contradictions, as our is doing, the effects are felt everywhere. People strike out. often against their best interests, and the understanding born of patience becomes a luxury. That is the true meaning of the nationwide "taxpayers' revolt", the results of which are now 1978 david armstronq. In memorian: Harvey Milk planned to interview San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk this week. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be America's only acknowledged gay public official and what his first year in office had done to him.I won't be doing that column now. Harvey Milk was gunned down November 27 by the same advocate who took San Francisco mayor George Moscone's life that day. I first tried to arrange a meeting with Milk when he was elected last year for a prestigious daily newspaper on Long Island known for its serious reporting. Milk was from Long Island and he was known as a thoughtful, provocative talker. When I told an editor there about the proposed interview, he allowed that it was an interesting idea, but wanted to know more about the spider webs that were raining from the sky over San Francisco. "The what?" I asked him. "The spider webs," he said. It was on the A.P. wire. I told him I didn't know anything about the spider webs from the sky and rang off, bemused. I didn't speak to the editor from the prestigious paper known for serious reporting after that. Milk didn't need my interview to get across. He was openly homosexual, and that made him "different"; but his lively mind embraced a broad range of concerns, and people came to respect him. In the midst of his unrelenting campaign for gay rights, Milk championed the needs of neighborhoods against the schemes of downtown developers, fought for civil liberties for women and minorities, worked for the decriminalization of marijuana and spoke out for the rights of labor not the Big Cigars atop the union hierarchies, but the voiceless ones, the That was not the fashionable thing to do in a town that, like many American cities, is exchanging its service historic blue collar base for a white-colla- r and the But it was to do, Harvey right thing economy. Milk did it. Milk, by all accounts, was a charming man. He was I law-and-ord- er rank-and-fil- e. an eTTecrive public speaker with a fitst-clas- s brain who was once a Wall Street financial analyst. When he spoke out publicly against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Milk lost his plush job. Soon afterwards, he came out of the closet, then opened a camera shop on Castro Street, in the heart of San Francisco's gay ghetto. He was elected to the citv's governing board of supervisors in 1977. The public Harvey Milk was d, but er tape-recorde- do if he was assassinated. Dan White, Milk's conservative fellow supervisor and eventual assassin, was the personification of Milk's dread. A former star athlete, paratrooper, fire fighter and cop, White did not understand the "encroachment" on his city by what he called "social deviants." And what he did not understand, he feared and despised. Dan White's is the 13Kojak mentality taken to its logical extreme. "You must realize," read one of White's campaign brochures last year, "there are thousands t'oon thousands of frustrated, angry people such as yourselves waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate the malignancies which blight our city." White wasn't too clear about specifics, but he was sure of one thing: He supported the death penalty for serious crimes, like murder. He was elected. When San Francisco's large gay community asked that a street be closed to traffic for a public celebration, White voted "no." When Milk authored a strong gay rights ordinance, White's was the only dissenting vote. And when White unleased his own fury at being denied reappointment after resigning his supervisor's seat, Milk, who opposed the reappointment, was eradicated. There is no point in ascribing the Milk and Moscone murders, or those of the 900 in Guyana, to some weird 24-ho- ur cor.i THIS ALARM WATCH WON'T LETTERS LETTERS LETTERS continued from page 8 observations can nevertheless be made. Plaintiff in the case must have believed he was damaged by the Sixty Minutes story. (Why else would he have sued?) Howrey apparently feels that plaintiff should be denied his day in court by being denied the right to ascertain whether defendant producer knew he was falsely accusing plaintiff of misbehavior or whether defendant made an innocent mistake. In a liable action, defendant's state of mind is an element which plaintiff must prove to be compensated for any injury to his reputation caused by defendant's story. Howrey would give the press free reign in trampling the reputations of figures who may unwillingly gain public attention while denying those figures the right to recover damages for statements destroying their reputation and in turn their professional and personal lives. Howrey also points to Supreme Court rulings requiring reporters to reveal to the courts in criminal prosecutions their confidential sources. Howrey feels that informants' information about crimes is better used by the press in telling the public about crimes than by the judicial system in bringing wrongdoers to justice or by law enforcement agencies in preventing crimes. Howrey ignores the fact that, absent an intermeddling journalist, informants' information is used by the court carefully and confidentially in trying the case and not blared to the public so as to make the informants reluctant to come forward with subsequently gleaned information. Howrey further ignores the splendid series of recent articles on the Jonestown massacre perfectly lustful works of journalism, conveying in full color and gory detail the grotesqueness of mass death. Admittedly, the reading public, voraciously consumes stories of violence with grusome glee. However, do these stories improve the social condition or merely afford the reader an opportunity mentally to masturbate the sordid parts of his consciousness? self-assure- privately he harbored a secret dread. He was convinced would try to kill him and that some fanatical gay-hatwould perhaps succeed. In the midst of the partying and d a garlands of electoral success, Milk for followers his friends and message detailing what to becoming obvious. Rooted in legitimate frustration, but adroitly manipulated by entrenched interests, the tax revolt has "trimmed the fat" not by cutting back career bureaucrats, but by bleeding the marginal people whosr livelihoods could not be guaranteed by the private sector in the first place. It has not returned power to the grassroots, but has further centralized it in state and federal government. This frustration was tapped further by the virulent campaigns against homosexuals spearheaded by the likes of Anita Bryant and John Briggs. Scapegoats were needed, and, in homosexuals, scapegoats were found. There is an organic, if not literal, connection between the gay witchhunts of the past two years and the death of Harvey Milk. Dan White now sits in solitary confinement, awaiting trial. He has, it is said, a steady stream of visitors and access to a telephone. If he is convicted, he will be sentenced under the new capital punishment law he promoted. Harvey Milk is gone forever. I never met him. I feel cheated somehow. LET YOU! Howrey intimates that the Supreme Court is insensitive to the First Amendment right to a free press. The Supreme Court traditionally has recognized the importance and fragility of the First Amendment. However, the Court has recognized the need to balance First Amendment rights against other important social concerns. Among these concerns is the individual's interest in protecting his reputation the gist of the common law action of libel. In the landmark case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court announced that the press is free to print information damaging to public officials except in those few cases where the press either knows the information is false or recklessly fails to discover the information is false. Sullivan is still good law and gives the press wide latitude in exposing misbehaving Alarmwatch with six digit Quartz liquid crystal display Hoursminutesmonths datesseconds REG. PRICE $3995J $99.95 public officials while, Solomonlike, protecting public officials from outrageous distortions of the truth which damage their reputation. Howrey either ignores the importance of balancing First Amendment freedoms or insists that the balance invariably be struck in favor of the press, whose investigative enthusiasm is overshadowed only by its literary bad taste and moral insensitivity. Howrey might reconsider his position if he were accused by the press of being sphyilitically insane, forced to read every article on Watergate, or made to witness a violent crime which could have been prevented had a journalist revealed his confidential sources. 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