Oceanside, Island Park Letters to the Editor

Manufacturing outrage betrays all

To the Editor:

Election campaigns are routinely and increasingly hyperbolic affairs, full of bluster, platitudes and baseless attacks. Let’s face it — we Long Islanders have every reason to be particularly jaded by this point of an election campaign. Negative campaign ads are pretty much everywhere and inescapable, and we can usually tune them out if we want to.

But there are still lines that should not be crossed, and on March 31, we saw a perfect example. Self-righteous activists descended upon State Senate 9th District candidate Christopher McGrath’s campaign headquarters and held a protest right outside, loudly proclaiming that he should drop out of the race, ostensibly because of a case his firm handled.

It’s not the protest itself — obnoxious as such a deliberately disruptive event may be — that crossed the line into absurdity. Protester Frederick Brewington, an attorney, reportedly stated that the reason for the outrage lay in the fact that McGrath’s law firm represented a pair of firefighters who were fired after donning blackface and engaging in an unquestionably appalling public performance. McGrath had nothing to do with the case, yet Brewington felt justified in somehow criticizing his “decision making.”

The attempt to incite outrage by linking an attorney to an odious incident that led to a court action is where Brewington crossed several lines. Like both District 9 candidates and Brewington, I am a practicing attorney. While my own clients have not been involved in reprehensible acts, I hope that I can fairly state that I would have done my duty as an attorney in such an instance. Considering that the First Amendment was designed to prevent our government from restricting the rights of individuals to express their views, however odious or racist they may be, Brewington’s arguments ring particularly hollow.

The point is that attorneys, and their firms, often find themselves duty-bound to represent odious clients.

Even if McGrath had taken a role in the lawsuit, and even if he and his firm had chosen to represent those men in retention of their First Amendment rights rather than being bound to do so by a larger contract, he still would have been acting in keeping with both professional ethics and fundamental principles of American jurisprudence.

Brewington’s attempt to manufacture outrage is frankly inexcusable, and reflects an appalling lack of understanding of the First Amendment. One can only hope that such specious grandstanding is not going to fool any of us when we go to vote on April 19.

There are surely reasons for people to support any candidate. But we owe it to ourselves to vote for valid reasons, and not because of any antics designed to trick us into voting out of misplaced emotion. We are better than that.

Aaron Eitan Meyer

Oceanside