WOULDN'T YOU KNOW that during the very week that I became a tour guide for hire in the City of Philadelphia, all heck would break loose in the Philadelphia tour guide industry around Independence Hall. At issue is a bill passed by City Council and signed into law in April by Mayor Nutter requiring tour guides to pass a test (and buy a license) before they are allowed to tell tourists that the Benjamin Franklin statue atop City Hall Tower is the largest statue, made entirely of cheese, on top of any inhabited manmade structure east of Wisconsin. Most Philadelphia tour guides would tell a different story, but at issue here is not historical accuracy, but the right to be cheesy.

Three veteran tour guides filed a lawsuit last Wednesday in federal court to overturn the new ordinance scheduled to go into effect in October. Their arguement: "What are you, nuts? You want to stifle free speech in the shadow of the building that gave us Freedom of Speech? And Religion? And Peaceable Assembly? And of the Press?" Let's face it, their arguement is richer in meaning and consequence than the goal of the tour guide testing law. If there is anything I have learned in my recent tour-related excursions around Independence Mall, it is that the First Amendment grants any and every American the right to be both obvious and wrong, about God, about politics, about who killed Officer Daniel Faulkner.If being wrong in America was a criminal activity, Rush Limbaugh would be Al Capone. If lying to your face were a crime in America, George Bush would be serving eight years somewhere other than the White House. How bout we pass a law to license presidents instead of tour guides? Oh, that's right. That would be unconstitutional.

In Friday's Inquirer editorial cartoonist Tony Auth showed a horse drawn carriage driver telling a bewildered tourist family, "On the right, Ben Franklin's house where he lived with his wife Betsy Ross. . ." which of course was a marriage featured on the front page of that day's newspaper, a real marriage of real people (Ralph Archbold and Linda Wilde) pretending to be make believe people and officiated the night before by Mayor Nutter in front of Independence Hall. As Tony's caption ends, "Is this a great country or what? Hey, you can't make this stuff up." Not like I made up that cheese statue of Ben Franklin atop City Hall. Every tour guide knows that's Frank Rizzo on a bad hat day.