To Kill a Mockingbird

[I]t seems that while the mainstream reporters have dutifully stuck to the government's party line ..., they missed the real story. Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic had no more chance of acquittal than did Tom Robinson, the black man accused of rape in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. This was not because of the evidence, as the government sycophants from Time and the New York Times have told their readers. No, Stewart and Bacanovic are going to prison because they fell victim to a system that is rigged to gain convictions, rather than protect people.

Social tolerance is the theme here, as events in a southern Depression town are used to show a young girl's development of a live-and-let-live attitude toward those unlike herself. ... [She] is told that 'It's a sin to kill a mockingbird,' because mockingbirds do no harm to others. By the end of the film, she has transferred tha concept to human relations: doing harm to harmless others, no matter how different they might be, is likewise wrong. This is a theme that libertarians will certainly like, and it has as well a suggestion of the nonagression principle.