STROLLERGATE

From the beginning, Sorensen claimed the whole thing was a gigantic mistake. “I didn’t think twice about it,” she said at her arraignment. “We do this in Denmark all the time.” Within days, a number of newspapers confirmed her story, running photographs of baby carriages lined up outside of stores (though not outside of bars) in Copenhagen. The point was clear: Unaware of local customs, Sorensen had committed a foolish but understandable faux pas, like German tourists wearing black socks to the beach, and bumbling New York authorities had overreacted. In the words of a New York Times op-ed, it was “a gross cultural misunderstanding.”

Based on the information provided in most news accounts, this was not an irrational interpretation. Taking a child away from his mother is, after all, a dramatic step, and it’s hard to see how the child was helped by four days in New York City foster care. On the other hand, most news accounts didn’t tell the whole story.

Consider the descriptions of the child’s father, Exavier Wardlaw. In an interview with the New York Daily News, David Kirsch, Wardlaw’s attorney, described his client as a “production assistant for Wait Disney Productions” who lived in Brooklyn and was married to Annette Sorensen. Kirsch, it turns out, was never sure that all these facts were exactly true. “It’s not like he’s full-time or whatever,” the lawyer says now, “but when Disney does movies here, supposedly, according to him, he works on them.” Kirsch of course is a lawyer, not a biographer, but his rendering of his client’s vital statistics was repeated in virtually all news stories. And Wardlaw’s resume grew more impressive in the telling. By the time the New York Times summarized the case a week later, Wardlaw had become “a movie producer from Brooklyn.”

Details like these help shape public perceptions, and in this case they were instrumental in portraying Sorerisen and Wardlaw as responsible middle- class parents caught up in a cross-cultural nightmare. Unfortunately, none of them was true. According to his new lawyer, Ron Kuby, Wardlaw is not a movie producer from Brooklyn, but instead an “unemployed homeless activist playwright on the Lower East Side,” author of such works as “The Lust of Justice” and “Disco Frankenstein.” In other plays, Wardlaw has celebrated the life and work of copkillers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Larry Davis. And his name may not even be Exavier Wardlaw. Until he was arrested last month, Wardlaw seems to have been called Exavier Muhammad.

Minor details? Maybe. But they might have given readers a better idea of why Wardlaw was arrested outside of Dallas BBQ. In an interview with CNN, Kuby explained what happened at the restaurant: “Exavier came out as soon as the police arrived and said, ‘Look, this is a normal custom in Denmark. If there’s a problem with this, we’ll be happy to take the baby inside.'” Reasonable enough. Except, this, too, is a false account. According to bystanders, Wardlaw and Sorensen (who met while both were living in an abandoned building in lower Manhattan’s Alphabet City) called the police ” pigs” the moment they showed up. The scene, Kuby now admits, got worse from there: Wardlaw “said to the officer, ‘You cops don’t know what the f — you’re doing.'” Kuby calls this “a statement so redolent of truth as to be absolutely awe-inspiring,” and it may be. But it is not the statement of a man calmly trying to explain Danish customs.

Kuby seems to recognize his own limitations as a storyteller, and he doesn’t spend a lot of time promoting Sorensen and Wardlaw as parents. ” Exavier obviously is never going to be named by Good Housekeeping magazine as Father of the Year,” he concedes. Indeed, Kuby, who as a protege of William Kunstler has made a career of defending some of society’s creepiest members (Long Island Railroad mass murderer Colin Ferguson among them), sounds ambivalent about what his client in this case has done. “I fight with my wife about it,” he says. “She thinks it’s outrageous that the child was left outside in the stroller. She’s got a point. I mean, we never did that with our kid.”

And for good reason: Sorensen and Wardlaw left their daughter unattended in a pretty sketchy neighborhood — a neighborhood, moreover, that they both had lived in long enough to know was marginal. The East Village, as Kuby himself describes it, is a place where “you can wear your hair in big purple spikes and walk down the street with your breasts hanging out in nipple rings and nobody gets too exercised about it. A lot of odd behavior is expected and tolerated here.” In other words, it’s not easy to shock an East Village waiter. Leaving your baby on the sidewalk is one way to do it.

It’s also one way to earn the praise of a certain kind of intellectual. Peggy Barlett, identified by the Atlanta Constitution as an anthropologist at Emory University, no doubt spoke for Denmark-loving liberals everywhere when she used the event to contrast the enlightened childraising attitudes of Scandinavia with the cruel deficiencies of the United States. “In other places, there is more of a sense of community responsibility for children,” she moaned. This is hardly an original idea on the left. Hillary Clinton, for one, noticed the very same thing on a trip to Denmark several years ago. “Oh,” she enthused at the time, “if we could all live in cities where we could leave our babies in baby carriages outdoors while we went in to shop without any fear.”

Mrs. Clinton was merely confirming what has been received wisdom among her friends for years. “Everywhere you go, there’s a place for children,” recounted Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund, upon returning from Denmark last year. The Danes, Edelman told the Denver Post, “find it unthinkable that in this country children are killed by guns, that people don’t have child care or health care.” If Annette Sorensen had come from Peru or China or Tanzania, it’s unlikely her arrest would have made the paper, much less drawn attention from Emory University anthropologists. But as a resident of Denmark — a heaven on Earth for kids, the home of Lego – – she obviously could not be using faulty parenting techniques.

Every day is a slow news day in Denmark, and the papers there kept Sorensen in their pages for days, invariably in the role of victim. “Dane in Grotesque Nightmare in New York: Police Stole My Baby,” screamed a headline in one Danish paper. Others called New York a “banana republic” and demanded payment for the “psychological rape” and “huge mental scars” Americans had inflicted upon Sorensen and her daughter. The Danish response was ferocious, but Newsweek, among others, seemed to understand. No wonder the Danes were so mad, since what is a crime in America, as they put it, is “a common practice in Denmark.”

And vice versa. Denmark, it is worth pointing out, is not necessarily a paradise for children. It is, for example, one of the few countries in the world in which it is legal to possess child pornography. In 1994, TV2, Denmark’s largest television station, aired footage from locally produced child pornography showing an 8-year-old girl having sexual intercourse with an adult man. The film’s 50-year-old producer provided the narration: “The children seem happy and satisfied,” he said. “The parents are present during the shootings. . . . I know that children are not harmed by it.”

Outside of Denmark, others weren’t so sure, and the European Parliament has put pressure on the Danes to tighten their kiddie-porn laws. But the sexual exploitation of children has been profitable for Denmark — by last year, pornography was the country’s third largest industry — and so far nothing has changed. Plus, there are ideological questions at stake. Outlawing child pornography, the country’s justice minister told TV2, “would be like searching in people’s pockets.”

If Denmark sounds like a depressing place, apparently a lot of the children who live there think so, too. The country records more teen suicides per capita than just about any other place in the world — 5 percent of the population under 20 years old has tried to commit suicide at least once. More than twice as many Danes now kill themselves as die in car accidents. Denmark also boasts astronomical rates of divorce and illegitimacy (as well as the highest tax rates in the world, and no private hospitals). Several years ago, it was estimated, not surprisingly, that one out of every six adults in Denmark was taking tranquilizers.

Shortly after the Danish stroller-baby story broke, the Detroit News dutifully sent a reporter out to gather reactions from Ordinary People. Opinion about Annette Sorensen was split fairly evenly, and most of it wasn’t very interesting. One woman, however, did have a thought that turned out to be illuminating, probably unintentionally. “I don’t believe that they should be punished for living out their culture,” she said, and somehow it was hard not to see what she meant.

Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.