Jack Shafer calls him a First Amendment Chicken Little. In his column, Getting the Chills, E. J. Dionne, Jr. covers recent arrests of journalists who refuse to reveal their sources.

Now, according to The Post, the Justice Department has been asked to consider opening a criminal investigation into leaks about the satellite program. Will laws designed to keep secrets from our enemies be invoked to keep secrets from the taxpayers?

I think Dionne misses the real point here. Laws designed to keep secrets from our enemies must also apply to keeping secrets from taxpayers, because the United States is a free society, and by revealing things to the citizenry at large, we must assume our enemies will see it, too.

YAnd of course there is special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s interminable investigation in the Valerie Plame case. At issue is who leaked to columnist Robert D. Novak the fact that Plame, the wife of Bush administration critic Joe Wilson, was a covert CIA agent. It’s illegal to disclose the names of undercover agents.

You might think Novak would be the journalist on the griddle. But for now it is Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine who are being threatened with spells in the slammer — up to 18 months. Their “crime” was to talk to sources about the Plame story and then refuse to tell Fitzgerald who those sources were. As Cooper dryly told CBS last week, “Putting me in jail won’t reveal who leaked to Robert Novak.”

Putting Cooper in jail probably won’t reveal who talked to Novak. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is to punish Cooper for his obstruction of an investigation that had legitimate reasons to ask who his sources were. His source(s) may or may not have been the same as Novak’s, but they did provide information about this case, and may have information that can help federal investigators track down the leak.

They participated in a story that helped in the outing of a covert CIA agent. Surely anyone whose head isn’t entirely filled with rocks can see why there would be laws to protect this kind of classified information. There’s a legitimate reason for the government to want to know where this leak is. Sure, Miller and Cooper can keep their mouths shut, but tossing them in prison for it seems a fitting punishment. If I had knowledge of a federal crime and kept my mouth shut, I’d be tossed in prison (since the 5th Amendment only provides for my right to remain silent to protect myself). Being a journalist doesn’t provide for some magical protection that allows one to flaunt the law.

What makes a journalist, anyway? Blogs are, to some, online journals. Couldn’t anyone be a journalist? Surely, Matt Drudge provides information to a larger section of the public than some reporters at, say, the Charleston Gazette. How do we determine which people are worthy of protection from laws about obstruction of justice? Simple answer: if it’s obvious that a law has been broken in providing the information, a reporter owes it to the public to reveal his or her source. If the source won’t come forward without a promise of anonymity, then it’s up to the reporter to decide whether or not to quote the source. If the source is quoted and protected, then the reporter must be prepared to face the consequences for being an accomplice in a crime.

According to MSNBC, murders of pregnant women seem to be on the rise. It’s difficult to be sure, because pregnancy isn’t a statistic that’s usually collected with regards to murder, so the collected data isn’t there to examine.

The idea that someone would commit murder because they think fatherhood would “cramp their style” shouldn’t shock me. After all, no one complained very loudly when, during one of the presidential debates, John Kerry said that he believed abortion was murder, but that he still supported its legality. That stance, essentially, says that women can commit murder if they don’t feel ready for motherhood — why should I be shocked when men choose the same path?

Please don’t take that as my expressing support for these men, or even saying that I believe that the abortion (which I don’t like, especially when it’s used as just a form of after-the-fact birth control, but I’m not entirely ready to say it should be outlawed) is the same thing as a man killing the woman carrying his child.

The MSNBC report includes quotes from Pat Brown, a Minneapolis criminal profiler:

For some men, she said, the situation boils down to one set of unadorned facts: “If the woman doesn’t want the baby, she can get an abortion. If the guy doesn’t want it, he can’t do a damn thing about it. He is stuck with a child for the rest of his life, he is stuck with child support for the rest of his life, and he’s stuck with that woman for the rest of his life. If she goes away, the problem goes away.”

Again, while I don’t support this point of view, it does bring up an inconsistency in the way men and women are treated with respect to children. Is that inconsistency problematic? It bothers me on one level, but it’s not like men can choose to carry the baby to term, so there are reasons for the differences.

Of course, maybe these are isolated incidents, not indicative of an increase in violence against pregnant women. Without a full set of data, it’s hard to determine whether there really is a problem, much less what the source of the problem is.