WRITTEN BY Thomas Nephew, of Newsrack, NOT BY Gary Farber
Until recently, Peter Benjamin was the chairman of the Washington, D.C. area Metro transit system's Board of Directors. A former mayor of Garrett Park, he brought an avuncular personality and long experience with Metro affairs to the table. While in correspondence with us about the bag search issue I've written about before, he dismissed some of our assertions about the program's drawbacks — for example, he didn't believe it would cause much decline in ridership. But he seemed to take seriously the civil liberties issues involved.
Still, sometimes I think if I had a dollar for every time I've heard or read "I'm a supporter of the ACLU, but…" I could afford the richer, more refined lifestyle I truly deserve.
And sure enough, when push came to shove at a February 10 discussion of the bag search issue, Mr. Benjamin delivered what may be the new low standard in that genre. Beginning with the heart-sinking words "I am a long term member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Many of my friends consider me a civil liberties nut," Benjamin was giving the lie to those words within roughly twenty seconds. Even though asserting that the rights we have as citizens are "why we are the great country that we are" and personally believing that "bag checks are a violation of those rights, and …the beginning of a process that moves towards us having fewer and fewer and fewer of those rights," Mr. Benjamin continued: