Columnist Susan Snyder: Can liberty and security coexist?

Monday, Jan. 19, 2004 | 8:13 a.m.

We're traveling vicariously today.

This is because we have traveled somewhere five of the past six weeks. And if I had been forced to toss my toothbrush into a suitcase one more time, I'd be writing this from a cell.

It's not that traveling in and of itself is stressful. Truthfully, I'd rather be on the road than at home where unfolded laundry, plants in need of re-potting and a desk that needs organizing beckon.

But there's nothing like enduring too much of a good thing. For example, U.S. travelers this year will experience more security than they can -- or should -- stand.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day seems a fitting time to remember that in our zeal to allow the federal government to decide for us which liberties are to be civil and which are to be luxuries, we might lose the liberty to be ourselves.

The government plans to plod forward (backward?) with a computerized background security check system that will rate all U.S. airline passengers based on their names, addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates and itinerary.

The information will be compared to the government's Super Secret Spy List of Bad People and Other Undesirables, then passengers will be assigned a color code.

Green means go. Yellow means this may take awhile. Red means rent a car, because your airline tickets ain't going to fly.

Might be easier to celebrate the King holiday and your civil rights at home.

Debates over sexual freedoms are hitting some odd twists out West.

The Boston Globe last week reported that a man and two women have asked a Utah federal court to abolish that state's ban on polygamy, because such a ban violates their constitutional rights to practice their religious beliefs.

The trio may have some odd legal bedfellows -- last summer's decision overturning a constitutional ban on sodomy in Texas and one that overturned the ban on same-sex civil unions in Massachusetts.

And in Northern Nevada, developers of an industrial park east of Reno are fighting another developer's plan to move the old Mustang Ranch brothel buildings to a spot a mile from the park, where he plans to open a brothel museum.

The buildings of one of Nevada's most famous brothels would be added to the grounds of one of its newest -- the Wild Horse Canyon Ranch 20 miles east of Reno.

A Washoe District Court judge is set to hear the case Friday.

And in Carson City, J.C. Penney Co. officials say they don't want hillbillies in their neighborhood -- at least not the kind actor Max Baer Jr. is proposing to bring with a Beverly Hillbillies Mansion & Casino.

The $54 million hotel-casino that the man who portrayed Jethro Bodine wants to build conflicts with a zoning restriction that bars such a business in the shopping center that Penney's shares.

Maybe it's the 200-foot, flaming oil derrick.

Fun, isn't it, to think about residents of our capital city experiencing skyline accoutrements typical of the ones we enjoy daily?

The promise of a Mustang Ranch museum and Jed Clampett blackjack are almost enough to make me wish my bag was packed and ready to go.

Almost.