Highway justice

In a move that King Solomon would have been proud of, Missouri officials have neatly side-stepped a hornet's nest of conflict between the free speech rights of Nazis and outraged Jewish leaders.

When the neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Movement, adopted a half-mile stretch of Missouri highway, state officials realized they were powerless to stop them. They knew they could not legally deny the application, and that they would have to provide a sign celebrating their act of good citizenship.

But it was the the Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee in Kansas City that offered a remedy: rename the road after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled Nazi Germany and became a prominent Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States.

They were following an earlier example set when the Klan won the right to clean up a highway, that was then renamed for Rosa Parks.

This is a celebration of the free marketplace of ideas that makes America work at its best. Yes, give the hate mongers the freedom to say what they will, but let the side of reason and justice have their say too. Don't let the hate go unchallenged.

This is poetic justice, and a brilliant solution to the problem.

The name change for the highway the neo-Nazis are cleaning is expected to go into effect later this year. I wonder how well they will do their job of picking up trash then.