Masked (in)justice?
Excuse me if this is something that was on every third blog yesterday; I haven't been making the rounds.
When I first read about a man being arrested for wearing a Grinch mask in public, my initial reaction was that it was an ill-considered move. (Well, no. My first thought was that they should have done this when Jim Carrey left the makeup trailer a few years ago, but that's a different sort of crime.) Yesterday was a busy day as it was, so I didn't get back to it. This morning, Grant sent me a link to the follow-up, which focused on the city's defense of the action.
It's one of those cases where it's easy to get a quick head of steam, but there are some practical considerations along with the feeling that it could be more energy than it's worth. All of that played a part in my letting it pass on Thursday.
My gut reaction is to say that it's a "presumed guilty" issue, driven by lawsuits over liability, forcing local government to presume the worst and look backwards from that theoretical tragedy with 20:20 hindsight. "Plainly there was something strange going on. Why didn't you stop this madman before he killed everyone in the daycare?!" So long as the courts might hold local law enforcement - and by extension the local government - liable for what would be seen in hindsight as "obvious" indications that something wasn't right, I cannot lay the blame fully on the lawmakers. It's fiscal self-defense.
In the end, it's one of those public safety issues one comes down on one side or the other of, either due to experience or a moral stance. It's akin to random sobriety checkpoints - something that I, regardless of being a non-drinker (it's a rare thing for me to have much of anything with alcohol in it), see as an abominable move. They all fall into a general category of laws supported by people who subscribe to the notion that it's better to inconvenience 999 people rather than let that 1 dangerous one get through. Much depends on the numbers one plugs in - the likelihood of the bad apple - of course.
I've seen some women's makeup that qualified as a disguise, even a fright mask, and that has me wondering if someone might try challenging this law in increments by going out in public with increasingly thick and feature-distorting layers of standard cosmetics. Sort of work one's way towards 1980s Tammy Faye Baker and then start to lean towards something even more theatrical. Better still, if a few people collaborate on this, men and women, to see how far it's permitted for one gender and not the other.
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