There was much talk for a day or two of restoring “civility” to politics, to government, to American life in general – except for the American league playoffs. Thank goodness the love fest is over.

With President Obama shrieking at the “rich,” the Republican presidential candidates lobbing verbal hand grenades at each other and the Tea Party dumping bags of tea and political opponents alike into various harbors, life is as it should be.

Columnists prefer it that way. We should be ashamed of ourselves. But, we aren’t.

Imagine how dull it would be (for you and for the columnists) if the opinion pieces expressed admiration for how well mortgage processing was going these days; or what a blessing it was that all of the planes took off and landed safely at Logan; or that riding the T was akin to first class on Singapore Airlines.

No, as someone once put it, columnists sit atop the mountain, waiting for the battle to be over, so we can then come down and kill all the wounded. Sort of like auditors or bank regulators.

For instance, I was recently sitting on a mountain, watching the goings-on in New Bedford, confident that I would find a contentious, embarrassing, litigious, angry, befuddling situation that would make a perfect column.

And there it was. A barbershop was shut down by tyrannical health officials and building inspectors and animal control officers in New Bedford. It was in response to finding roosters (one of them dead), hens, pigeons, and religious paraphernalia that suggested – in addition to raising the sideburns just a bit – the barber might be engaging in ritualistic animal sacrifice.

The city claimed the shutdown was a public health issue. The barber admitted that his religion involved animal sacrifice, but not at the shop – the animals were just being stored there, along with an altar and hacksaws.

Oh, this was glorious. This was columnist material direct from God – whether or not I sacrificed a chicken to get it. The nation’s courts have been littered with the corpses of various animals over the decades (as well as naughty drugs and other odd religious supplies) as the nation muddled through the matter of whether “freedom of religion” included the right to do things that were perceived to be illegal.

A Civil Case

It was in 1987 that the City Council in Hialeah, Fla., adopted ordinances aimed at specifically prohibiting religious animal sacrifice, or, as they lovingly described it, “unnecessarily kill, torment, torture or mutilate an animal in a public or private ritual or ceremony not for the primary purpose of food consumption.”

The Church of the Lukumi strutted off to court and, in 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court made it somewhat dangerous to be a chicken in certain religious circles. In a grumpy, sort-of-unanimous, multi-opinion ruling, the decision noted that, “Religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”

Oh, these animal sacrifice cases can be glorious messes, filled with ACLU lawyers doing a First Amendment cha-cha; animal rights people marching in defense of the roosters; and exhausted appellate judges attempting to decide whether the law is “neutral” and “generally applicable” – or a direct assault on God’s children. And through it all, the columnist can sit on the mountain top, waiting for it all to be over.

And so it was in New Bedford. I waited. But then….but then… civility seemed to reign. The shame. The shame.

The barbershop was cleaned up, the various fowl and other feathered friends were removed, the barber (who continued to insist that he performed no religious rituals at the shop) was allowed to reopen, with a stern warning to leave the birds somewhere else.

The “crisis” seemed to be over. It doesn’t seem right. The barber had claimed he was a victim of religious discrimination. How many constitutional scholars can dance on the head of a chicken? That’s what I was waiting for in New Bedford.

Civility? Negotiation? They should all be ashamed of themselves.