I'm glad I'm not an ACLU attorney.
The ACLU are the ones who defend the rights of disgusting vile people to say cowardly, revolting things.
They're pretty busy right now.
There's a great deal of discussion going on, and more to be had, about the degree of protection the First Amendment offers to the white supremacist demonstrators scuttling out of the woodwork in America, and about how conscientious officers of the Court- including law enforcement- can provide that protection and balance it against protection of the greater community from the effects of the hate they are monging and the violence they are inciting.
These are not simple issues in Constitutional law, and they are not simple for the officers of the Court charged with upholding the Constitution.
Among the people who will be having very difficult choices to make are public officials whose jobs include ensuring that all citizens have access to public spaces to assemble and express themselves, and officials of entities that are not necessarily public, but covered by various Federal rules related to ensuring Constitutionally-protected freedoms. A lot of higher education institutions have to walk that line.
There's a whole minefield's worth of questions to be asked about what officers of the Court can and can't do, Constitutionally, to restrict particular aspects of any given demonstration. They're having to consider not just the repulsiveness of the specific views being expressed, and the various displays associated with those views, but how any rule or requirement they might impose would affect others expressing other views. Including counter-demonstrators and those who might in some future time protest vigorously against government actions like the Muslim Ban, the construction of a border wall, the ongoing DAPL protests, and so on.
It looks simple to me: Assholes wearing flak vests and carrying shield and guns and gas masks, etc., are signaling that they want violence. They want to perpetrate it against others or incite it against themselves for their own purposes. Therefore, ban that shit, and say "only allow unarmed and unarmored people to attend protests."
Except that cops have been known to gas peaceful protesters of all kinds. I might want a gas mask myself, for certain expressions of free speech. If I were counter-protesting armed dickheads, I might consider wearing a flak jacket, too.
Any rule that can be used against people whose views I oppose can be used against people whose views I agree with.
And depending on who's administering the rules (remembering that right now we have a Confederate House Elf as Chief Officer of the Court) that can be a powerful problem.
If I were an ACLU attorney, I'd be thinking about all of that.
It is not, by a long chalk, the first time this sort of dilemma has arisen. But it may well be the first time it has arisen when we are walking a knife edge between having wannabe tyrants pushing the boundaries and wannabe tyrants enforcing those boundaries.
So today, I'm sending another donation to the ACLU.
They're going to need all the help they can get.
somberly,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
Very well said.
