Shut up, they explained.

• Author: Olson, Walter

The speech police discover "zero tolerance."

"I know one thing," said Maureen Dowd when she joined the Washington bureau of The New York Times. "I'm not going to be covering any of those dreary regulatory agencies." Too bad. We already have more than we need of political coverage that chronicles the doings of high officialdom while glossing over the details of how government actually works its day-to-day will on the citizenry. It's as if pundits were forever recording every change in restaurants' ownership and management without ever sampling the food.

The very dreary Equal Employment Opportunity Commission typifies the sort of agency that would come under constant press scrutiny in a more sensible world. How much power does the EEOC wield? Well, as Washington's chief interpreter of harassment law, it gets to put out guidelines on when tasteless or insensitive banter, e-mail, or photocopier humor at everyone's workplace reaches the unlawful point of imposing a "hostile environment" on co-workers. Put differently, it gets to strut about as a sort of Flirtation Monitor and Joke Cop.

Hostile-environment law has posed a running affront to free speech principles ever since Professor Catharine MacKinnon, the Savonarola of Ann Arbor, helped dream it up. Now we seem to be entering a new phase, summed up by a catchy slogan: "zero tolerance" of harassment and of discrimination more generally. It's all the rage: The Department of Veterans' Affairs and the Department of Agriculture have recently proclaimed zero tolerance policies; so have big businesses galore, such as New England's Fleet Bank, along with the Boston "T" transit system and various bureaus of the Los Angeles city government. Legal pressure inevitably plays a key role: Giant printer R.R. Donnelley pledged zero tolerance after it got sued for allegedly allowing racist expressions in internal e-mail, while former Labor Secretary Lynn Martin recommended a zero tolerance policy in a report for lawsuit-besieged Mitsubishi Corp. An official with the federal Civil Rights Commission complained that while St. Petersburg, Florida, had adopted a zero tolerance policy for its police department, it had not enforced that policy as avidly as had neighboring Tampa.

When it comes to harassment and discrimination, in short, everyone's in favor of zero tolerance - whatever that turns out to mean. But what does it mean?

To get a better idea, consider the case of zero tolerance policies on other subjects...