John Nichols: Activist Ben Masel never shied from exercising his rights

JOHN NICHOLS | The Capital Times | jnichols@madison.com madison.com | (4) Comments | Posted: Monday, May 2, 2011

Ben Masel loved liberty. No, not talking about liberty, in the way that self-serving politicians and pontificating pundits do. Liberty was his passion, his avocation, his life's work. Even as he was battling the lung cancer that would end his remarkable life, Masel kept struggling to make real the promise of freedom that has been so often made and so frequently denied to Americans.

A few weeks ago, on a break between radiation and chemotherapy treatments, Masel was outside the Willy Street Co-op promoting the latest of his political projects when a manager informed him that the activity was not allowed. Masel stood his ground. The police were called and they informed the veteran of 40 years of speaking truth to power that he had to cease his campaigning. Actually, Masel informed the officers, he had every right to exercise his rights in so public a place. He directed them to review a specific section on a specific page of a specific set of rules and regulations. The manual was retrieved and reviewed and, when all was said and done, Masel's assessment of his rights — and those of all who dare dissent — was accepted.

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No one pushed harder against the limits on dissent in what was supposed to be a free society. That pushing earned him dozens of court dates. But Bennett Masel, the New Jersey native who came to Madison as a UW undergrad and remained to become a local icon, was never merely a provocateur. He was, for all the theatrics, a serious believer in a left-libertarian analysis of the individual liberty that lawyers and judges came to understand as a credible extension of the thinking of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the longest-serving justice on the high court and a hero to 1970s radicals such as Masel.

Douglas was once referred to by Time magazine as "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court." And it is fair to say that Masel was the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian to appear before the municipal, state and federal courts that had to pass judgement on whether his arrests for protesting outside political party conventions, capitols and grocery stores were legal or not. Ultimately, the judges came to accept the arguments Masel honed over time — to such an extent that attorney Jeff Scott Olson, who represented the activist across the better part of two decades, said his client rarely lost a freedom of speech or right to assemble case.

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/john_nichols/article_8fbe344a-74d7-11e0-aad4-001cc4c03286.html

Ben Masel died of lung cancer saturday morning. RIP Ben, you will be missed.