Eightmaps and the strange knock at your door

Someone got my address from publicly available sources, made a malicious flyer with that information on it, went to the city's homeless shelters and passed it around (the police told me that someone on staff at a shelter told them he saw a stranger distributing the flyers). The flyer told the homeless that if they came to my house, we'd give them money. This person did not care that it was summer, and he was tricking the poorest of the poor to a four-mile walk from the downtown shelters to my house. All he cared about was striking out at me.

We knew something was up after the second rough-looking person showed up demanding money, and got angry when he was told we had no idea what he was talking about. (All this happened when I was at work; imagine your wife opening the door to confront a homeless man who has just learned from her that he'd walked all that way in the heat for no reason). But we could tell they had some sort of flyer with our address on it. We called the police, who advised us to stall the next person who showed up, then call them on 911. That we did. Julie phoned me at work one day to say a scary-looking guy was at the front door with one of the flyers, and that she'd just called 911.

By the time I got home, the police were there questioning this guy, who looked like he'd wondered what the heck he'd gotten into. The cops said that this guy meant no harm, that he'd been the victim of this prankster just as we had. They also said he was a registered sex offender.

The police advised us to post a notice on our property warning solicitors away, which apparently gives us certain rights to press charges if anybody else came to our door. The cops started an investigation, but as far as I know, they never found out who was behind the prank; if they ever do, I will press charges. No other homeless person came to our door.

Here's the thing: how would you feel if your wife or your kids were at home alone when some outraged creep from the Queer Avengers or somesuch organization showed up pounding on the door demanding to talk to somebody about your Prop 8 donation? Eightmaps makes that a lot more likely. In Texas, thank goodness, we have a castle law, which gives homeowners the right to shoot anybody who invades their property. It's a good law, and though I certainly hope never to have to invoke it, after last summer's experience I wouldn't hesitate to make use of the liberty it grants me to protect my family and my property. Activists who wish to use Eightmaps or any of its successors to harrass Texans, gay or straight, conservative or liberal, in their houses risk getting their asses shot off.

Too bad that California doesn't have a castle law. If some anti-Prop 8 hothead vandalizes a house or worse, Californians may want to create one. By making people feel vulnerable to attack in their own homes for exercising their democratic rights in a way that certain radicals find intolerable, this is the world that Eightmaps is bringing into existence.

On a more high-minded (or perhaps not) note, I should say also that it's rather odd for Andrew Sullivan, who once suffered a spectacular humiliation when his enemies chose to violate his privacy, would be so quick to advocate the trampling of others' privacy for the sake of politics. As Cliff Rothman, one of Sullivan's defenders, wrote at the time:

Well, I also have ideological differences with Sullivan. I am a gay, left-liberal, vegetarian Californian, and I often disagree with the Tory Catholic Sullivan. But however conservative Sullivan is, or how much he may moralize in ways that are different than me, he is entitled to sexual privacy. He acted confidentially, as most of us do, in good faith, online. He chose not to use his name or post a picture. Yet his adversaries decided to drag his most private sexual behavior through the town square for derision, to punish him for his political views.

As I read Signorile's story about Sullivan's alleged double life, and the excruciatingly detailed description of his online ad, I was pained at the violation of his privacy, and the obvious attempt to shame him. "It's almost enough to make you cry," a senior editor at the New York Times told me. Whatever discrepancies may exist between Sullivan's public words and private actions don't justify his abuse -- and I do see it as abuse, vendetta masquerading as advocacy journalism. Sullivan calls it "sexual McCarthyism," and many agree.

More Rothman:

Ehrenstein doesn't see the issue as "outing" because Sullivan was operating, even if anonymously, on the Internet, which he sees as public. "When you are going to put something out there in public space, is it private?" asks the author. "He is asking the world to come to his door. You go and find out who he is. People followed up the ads and found out it was him." That Sullivan is a public figure who has spoken out on the issues involved also makes him "fair game. He has opened the door. What are you going to do? Are you just going to ignore this?"

But if Sullivan is fair game, so are we all. Sullivan is now being tortured, but we are all at risk.

I agree. The gay critics who outed Sullivan's secret online life claimed they were doing it because he was a hypocrite, denouncing loose gay sexual morals while living a double life. You can read them saying things not far removed from what Sullivan said today about the Prop 8 funders: "If Prop 8 supporters truly feel that barring equality for gay couples is vital for saving civilization, shouldn't they be proud of their financial support?" If Andrew Sullivan truly feels that cruising online for risky anonymous sex is vital to his freedom, shouldn't he be proud of people knowing it? I mean, should a man who suffered unjust humiliation when his enemies got hold of information that he put into the public realm with an expectation that it would not be used against him really be saying today, as a justification for Eightmaps, "Information wants to be free"?

Andrew also says today, of the "outed" Prop 8 supporters:

Cry me a river. You can only shame people if they feel ashamed. And, frankly, if you have chosen to strip civil rights from some of your employees, why should you be able to protect yourself from the consequences?

How is this rationale different from what Michelangelo Signorile and other gay journalists said when they exposed Andrew's secret online life? They argued that he was a high-profile gay journalist who had made a point of sternly criticizing gay libertinism. If he harshly judges other people by standards he won't live by himself, why should he be able to protect himself from the consequences of his private behavior made public (the argument went)?

They had a point, admittedly. But in a world in which the expectation of privacy (as distinct from the right to privacy) is fast disappearing, thanks to technology and the evaporation of the bounds between the public and the private realms, it seems to me that we should all resist any new development in the culture that makes privacy harder to maintain. It's very hard to be consistent about this, I know, but as Milan Kundera's character Sabina said in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the only way we can live a tolerably human life is to maintain an inviolable realm of privacy. We are always negotiating the borders of that realm, and it's impossible to satisfy the public's need to know with the individual's right to, or expectation of, privacy. But violating another's privacy, even if it is legal, is not something we ought to do cavalierly. Remember this exchange between William Roper and Sir Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons":

Roper: Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil? Yes. I'd cut down every law in England to do that.

More: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- Man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then? Yes. I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.

Substitute the phrase "custom" for "law," with respect to the expectation of privacy, and you have captured exactly the danger of what Andrew and the Eightmaps people advocate -- and how it will ultimately imperil their own safety.

While there are obvious distinctions to be made between the Eightmaps situation, which Sullivan defends, and what happened to him, it seems to me that Sullivan supports the idea that because the Prop 8 contributors took a public stand, and their donation records are public matters, they have no right to expect that their privacy should be respected. This strikes me as gay McCarthyism posing as a noble exercise in public accountability.