PHXated was working on another project today and is just getting caught up to the coverage of the aborted Joe Arpaio appearance at the Cronkite School last night.

PHXated’s live blogging of the event is here.

Stephen Lemons, of New Times, and I argued about the disruption afterward; he makes his case in favor of it here:

I spoke briefly to Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan about the disruption, which he naturally abhorred. But, I wondered, wasn’t it to be expected? What if ASU had invited President Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to speak during the height of the Vietnam War? Wouldn’t he have anticipated civil disobedience, and far more upheaval?

“Quite frankly,” he said, “if the Defense Secretary came in to give a speech during the Vietnam War, I think it would be protested intensely. Do I think that if you had a group of journalists grilling Secretary McNamara on Vietnam policies, do I think that would be protested? Honestly, no.”

I’ll admit, as I’m sure many will point out to me, the analogy is by no means precise. The carnage of Vietnam is not parallel to the sufferings of the undocumented here in Ari-bama. But the treatment of the undocumented is a moral issue that requires a response, and civil disobedience is a response, a disobedient response.

I’m Lemons’ biggest fan, but he is off his rocker here. Callahan’s right: This wasn’t in any way a speech or a soap box for Arpaio. It was the opposite. Not only were the protesters wrong to disrupt the event, they were being dumb, which is worse.

But of course, they are students; they are allowed to be dumb. Defending them, however, is morally reckless.

In fact, I disagree with Callahan and the school’s handing of the disruption; I heard afterward that the school didn’t want to be in the position of dragging students exercising free speech rights out of a venue called the First Amendment Forum.

But that’s the point: At a First Amendment Forum, goons shouldn’t be allowed to shut down a public event. As a matter of first principles, they should have been removed and the event allowed to go on.

Indeed, absent some clearly amusing or exacerbating circumstance (like, say, if Arpaio were speaking to a bunch of ASU fat-cat donors at an exclusive luncheon, or if student money were used to pay someone as compromised as Arpaio to appear), it would have been wrong for the students to disrupt things even if it had been a regular speech.

I was in the crowd and everyone around me was yelling shut up at the people who disrupted the event. And as Callahan pointed out when he was trying to calm the students up, they had disrupted the questioning just when the professors had gotten around to asking Arpaio about his Civil Rights violations.

All in all, it wasn’t a good night for any of the parties involved.