Obviously people showed up in the thread to say, “This is not a first amendment issue,” and “The bill is being misinterpreted” and “These actions are illegal and we shouldn’t be defending them.” Just like they did for a woman laughing at Jeff Sessions.
This is a first amendment issue
Every law is a first amendment issue. If a law has the effect of preventing free speech, freedom of religion, or freedom to protest against government, it becomes a first amendment issue, even if it wasn’t intended to deal with that. That’s how constitutional rights work. I’m sure on these forums there are people with more knowledge of the American constitution than I have, but I feel absolutely no risk say this: If you can’t site a specific legal test for what it and isn’t protected expression and show how it applies, I’ve got no reason to believe you have any idea what you are talking about.
The situation is rarely being misinterpreted
Most of the time the person who shows up to say this has a theory of how we ought to read the bill that conforms to the Fox News/Breitbart theory and that runs against international news and fact checking sites. Usually in a thread about a terrible racist and their right to spout racist nonsense you’ll see people sticking up for the first amendment in the same way “gun nuts” stick up for the second amendment - interpreting every action as an attempt to chip away at it, thinking about all of the bad ways that anti-freedom-of-speech arguments might be used. But when it comes to the most specific provision of the first amendment - the right to political protest - the burden of proof seems to reverse itself. Instead of worrying about chipping away or insidious restrictions, the only thing that would qualify seems to be if a prohibition against protest were written in plain language right in a law.
We should defend these actions even if they are illegal
The entire point of freedom to protest is that it should extend to people who are doing things that are otherwise illegal. Imagine the government had a law against holding placards. We’d have people in here saying, “Look, if those protesters didn’t want to be arrested they shouldn’t have broken the law against holding placards - everyone knows that’s already illegal.” Constitutional rights are all about judging the law itself. Any idea that they are tested against what’s legal is a complete misunderstanding of the law. Constitution beats legislation. How that isn’t obvious is beyond me.
