Tags: our rights | Police State

“Protestors will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can’t be heard.”

“This is America! This used to be America!” Dissent has not been snuffed out. But over the past decade, those in power have cynically abused the legitimate need for public safety and security in order to stifle opponents.

Probably the first known “free speech area” was created by the city of Atlanta during the 1988 Democratic National Convention. One abortion rights advocate complained that the city “put us in a free speech cage.” A decade later, the raucous demonstrations at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle led to greater deployment of the tactic. The National Lawyers Guild, which monitors First Amendment abuses, said it saw “a notable change in police treatment of political protestors” following the 1999 WTO meeting. The Guild said a “pattern of behavior that stifles First Amendment rights” began to emerge in cities across the U.S.

Free Speech Area

Such “protest pens”, as activists later dubbed them, became commonplace during the presidency of George W. Bush. In September 2002, a retired steel worker named Bill Neel was holding up a sign critical of Bush when the president came to Pittsburgh. Police cordoned off anti-Bush demonstrators at a fenced-in baseball field a third of a mile from the site of Bush’s speech; those with pro-Bush signs were allowed to line the motorcade path. Neel refused to go to the pen. “As far as I’m concerned, the whole country is a free speech zone,” he later said. He was arrested and his sign was confiscated. During Neel’s trial, a local police officer testified that the Secret Service told police to segregate those making a statement “against the president and his views.”

Such incidents became common. In 2003, St. Louis police blocked members of the media from talking to protestors during a Bush visit. In another instance, antiwar demonstrator Brett Bursey was ordered to go to a “free speech zone” a half-mile from Bush’s location during a South Carolina trip. Bursey refused, and was arrested. Bursey said he asked if it “was the content of my sign, and [the officer] said, ‘Yes sir, it’s the content of your sign that’s the problem.” One journalist summed up the policy in these words: “Protestors will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can’t be heard.”

Here’s what you can still do to save freedom:

• Loudly protest this fall at town hall meetings and on the internet and call-in talk shows as well as in church and civic groups.

• Keep faxing Pres. Obama at 1-202-456-2461

• Resume calling members of Congress at 1-877-851-6437, 1-877-SOB-USOB, or 1-202-225-3121

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