Marge Schott Has A Right To Her Bigoted Thoughts

WASHINGTON, D.C. - I don't know whether acting baseball commissioner Bud Selig is more thoughtful than the rest of us or a leading candidate for Mr. Chickenheart of 1996. All I know is I'm glad he didn't try to punish Marge Schott for believing that Hitler wasn't always a bad guy.

Now let's be very clear. Schott, the owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, is, by all accounts, an awful person: bigoted, ignorant and unrepentant. Her Hitler comment - that that architect of the Holocaust "was good at the beginning, but he just went too far" - is a replay of words she used in 1993, when she was fined and suspended for a year for slurs that included calling two of her players "my million-dollar niggers."

In the earlier remarks, she also made reference to "Japs" and "money-grubbing Jews."

So why am I glad Bud Selig didn't throw the book at her last week - perhaps even leading a movement to throw her out of baseball?

It's because I have a problem with punishing people for what they believe. I know that the pretext for the punishment would not have been her beliefs but for bringing "disrepute" to Major League Baseball. The ethnic slurs of three years ago - particularly those that referred to baseball players - might well have brought disrepute to the game, if they had gone unpunished. It's not that much of a stretch to say those things have something to do with baseball. But in what way is baseball, as opposed to Schott herself, brought into disrepute because of her idiotic judgment and ill-informed history regarding Adolf Hitler?

Teach her, re-educate her. Hold her views up to scorn. Let a thousand stand-up comics savage her name, and you'll get no peep from me. But the demand over the past few days has been to punish her economically - not by boycotting her product but by taking it away from her. And that makes me very nervous.

But it wasn't just bad history, protesters will say. She has kept swastikas - or, depending on the account, at least one swastika arm band - in her home. Isn't that evidence of bigotry, along with her videotaped words, sufficient ground to force her out of baseball?

Well I don't think so. It would have been quite enough, in my view, to have kept her out of baseball in the first place. I'd have kept her out upon proof of the story my colleague Thomas Boswell told the other day. It seems Schott was hosting a party for some of the Reds front office staff when her Saint Bernard started licking a bowl of mayonnaise. When the slobbering offense was called to her attention by the wife of one of her employees, Boswell reported, Schott responded: "That's terrible. That's expensive mayonnaise." She then "got a knife, stirred the mayo until the evidence - three big doggie tongue prints--disappeared, then said loudly, `Come on, everybody. Eat up.' "

I told you she was awful.

But keeping her out of baseball is one thing. Throwing her out - in effect confiscating her property - is quite another thing, and far more serious.

I mean, not everything that might be a basis for breaking off an engagement is automatically a ground for ending a marriage.

Am I saying that once she's in she's in forever? Of course not. I'm simply saying the rules for ouster must be clear and consistently applied. Is baseball prepared to rid itself of bigoted owners? And if so, on what evidence of bigotry? Can the bigots remain if they manage to avoid being tape-recorded uttering the word "nigger" or are careful never to say "money-grubbing" and "Jew" in the same sentence?

As with any other business owner, there are lots of things Marge Schott could do - and even a fair number of things she might say - that might justify the lifting of her license to do business. But what beliefs - however ignorant or ill-informed - can justify the taking of a business?

I don't like Marge Schott. But I'm not ready to punish her - even force her to publicly apologize - for what she believes. I'm not ready for the thought police.

(Copyright, 1996, Washington Post Writers Group)

William Raspberry's column appears Tuesday on editorial pages of The Times.