E-Mail This Article to a Friend Playing with fire Chuck Turner plays the race card. New top cop’s convention challenge. And the real hypocrite in the presidential-campaign marriage debate.

TO PARAPHRASE 1988 vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen: "Chuck Turner, we all remember Louise Day Hicks, and Michael Flaherty is no Louise Day Hicks."

District Seven city councilor Chuck Turner went too far last week when he likened Council president Michael Flaherty to Hicks, the city’s most controversial politician of the last four decades. Hicks earned a national reputation for her politics of racial divisiveness during the school-desegregation battles of the 1960s and ’70s. She served three terms on the School Committee in the 1960s, topping the ticket each time, before running unsuccessfully for mayor in 1967 against Kevin White. As a School Committee member, she routinely approved budgets that shortchanged schools in minority districts, directly contributing to the inequities that existed between schools attended by black students and those attended by whites. Her slogan — "You know where I stand!" — was a repugnant promise to the city’s closeted and not-so-closeted bigots that they could count on her.

So what prompted Turner’s outrageous comparison? Flaherty’s decision to remove Turner as chair of the council’s Education Committee. Turner has held that position for three years, and it gave him some influence in the ongoing debate over whether to revamp the current system of assigning students to Boston’s public elementary and middle schools (see "Another School-Busing Battle Looming?", page 1).

Flaherty favors a system that would, at minimum, allow children to attend school closer to home by increasing from three to nine the number of geographic zones from which parents pick their children’s schools. He would eventually like to see enough elementary schools either purchased or built by the city so that the Boston Public Schools could return to neighborhood-based school assignment. Flaherty’s is not a radical position. Indeed, a majority of parents of Boston’s public-school pupils — 85 percent of whom are students of color — probably feel the same way.

But Turner and others, including the council’s two other members of color, District Four councilor Charles Yancey and at-large councilor Felix Arroyo, are wary of any changes in the school-assignment policy that would limit parental choice before more schools are built.

It’s a sensitive issue made even more so by the scars the city still bears from the riots that consumed Boston after 1975’s federal-court order desegregating the schools. Turner was way out of line when he compared Flaherty to Hicks. That said, Flaherty’s handling of the Education Committee chairmanship could not have been more clumsy. There was no reason to strip Turner of the post, particularly when the politicians leading the charge for changing the current assignment policy, namely Flaherty and Mayor Tom Menino, are white, and those urging caution are African-American or Latino. But just because Flaherty did so doesn’t make him a racist. Not by a long shot.

The race riots of the 1970s are long behind us, but the politics of race and prejudice are not (as the current debates over the school-assignment policy and gay marriage have shown). Everyone involved needs to proceed with extreme caution and good sense.

THIS WEEK, Mayor Tom Menino appointed Kathleen O’Toole as commissioner of the Boston Police Department. That it was the right choice was immediately made clear when O’Toole, within hours of being made commissioner, called the family of the 21-year-old student who was killed during post–Super Bowl riots in Boston. She was apparently — and shamefully — the first city official to phone the family and offer condolences.

O’Toole has pledged to find out exactly what went wrong with police coverage that night. She’ll need that information to apply it during what’s sure to be her first big challenge as police commissioner: maintaining order and security without violating constitutional rights during July’s Democratic National Convention.

In 2000, police response to the protests at both political conventions left stains on both host cities’ departments. Rubber bullets were fired into a crowd of protesters during the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. During the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, then–police commissioner John Timoney achieved notoriety for implementing a policy of pre-emptive arrests. At the beginning of the week, Timoney’s department arrested hundreds of protesters — along with dozens of others who made the mistake of walking by the protests or living nearby or covering them for media outlets, thereby getting caught up in the Philly-police dragnet. With the cooperation of the local district attorney, he then kept them locked up for the entire convention (see "Rough Justice," News and Features, January 18, 2001).

This summer’s Democratic Convention will surely attract a number of protests. In addition to ensuring the safety and security of all participants, O’Toole must ensure that those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly are allowed to do so. We have the lessons of the previous conventions, recent anti-war protests, and even the Super Bowl–riot tragedy to draw from. O’Toole would be wise to utilize them.

DOES DEMOCRATIC presidential front-runner John Kerry really deserve to be charged with election-year pandering, given his response to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriages? Some say he does. Consider Kerry’s actions in 1996, when he was the only one of 14 US senators up for re-election to vote against the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which he angrily condemned as "legislative gay-bashing." Today, of course, Kerry, who unequivocally supports civil unions, says he could support an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution banning gay marriage, depending on the language of the amendment.

But that pales in comparison with Vice-President Dick Cheney’s flip-flops on this issue. Here’s what Cheney said about legalizing same-sex relationships when he was asked about it during his 2000 debate with Senator Joe Lieberman: "People should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It’s really no one else’s business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard.... I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area. I try to be open-minded about it as much as I can and tolerant of those relationships.... I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into." But last month, Cheney said he would support an amendment to the US Constitution banning legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

Going forward, let’s keep in mind that the real hypocrites, the real enemies, in this election-year marriage-rights debate — as well as in so many other important national issues — are Bush, Cheney, and the GOP, not Kerry and the Democratic Party.

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