The right to be rude

When Massachusetts woman Louise Barron, 71, stood up and, not for the first time, called her local town board members "Hitlers" who were "spending like drunken sailors", she got zero points for originality or proportionality.

- JANE CLIFTON

But she found illustrious allies - constitutional founding fathers John and Samuel Adams - in her lawsuit against the board's attempt to silence her under its civility code.

They'd enshrined in the state's constitution the right to be rude, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled last month. The court invalidated the civility code, leaving Barron free to heckle on - with cacophonous implications for public meeting barrackers everywhere.

Key to the decision was that the Adams believed it important Bostonians remained free to call King George III and other authorities insulting and even profane names. They rated verbal abuse of the powerful a bulwark against physical abuse of power.

The founding fathers said nothing about dousing people in tomato juice or throwing sex toys at Waitangi, and being high-minded, the pair could never have envisaged a time when the entire American population might need protection from a former president's constant abusive heckling.