If I were less charitable, I’d say that his values are “the opposite of whatever the socjus folk here support”.
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I very much like the sound of Americans United for Kittens and Puppies, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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So it seems. . . which would be a shame, since again, a lot of what they’re fighting for is apparently a lot of what he believes in.
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Who was probably planted to allow the police the reason to shut down the organization.
Does any one actually live in Oklahoma anymore?
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Misty Lackey and her husband do.
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If I ever go there, I will let you know.
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Look up the term “kettling”
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The basic goals are similar, but I do differ with them on the means to attain those goals.
Good luck waiting forever for institutional authority figures to ever break away from the plutocrats’ puppet strings.
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this, very much this.
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http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/category/fossil-fuel-extraction/
Earth First! is not primarily focused on fossil fuel opposition. I guess I should have mentioned “Climate Direct Action” instead. But there is a fair amount of overlap in the many such groups. It is easy to get the agenda of the People’s Front of Judea mixed up with that of the Judean People’s Front.
I don’t hate protesters. I have protested, and still take the right to do so very seriously. The practices I oppose are not protest as such. I have to park my equipment out of sight of the public road. Not because someone would steal it, but because of “monkeywrenchers”, who would vandalize or burn it out of misguided good intentions.
If you are going to take action to protect or improve the environment, you should take actions that will actually result in environmental improvement. Sometimes, those effective actions are counterintuitive. But any action taken will likely have unforeseen consequences. I am not going to support any group that advocates actions that I believe are reasonably likely to result in environmental disaster. Even if those people are very sincere and have good intentions.
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As not-a-lawyer you shouldn’t be guaranteeing anyone anything. After a women’s topless protest against anti-toplessness laws, women were successful in their first amendment defense - their toplessness was an expression of their protest against the law. Something that would be illegal if it were not a protest can be legal because it is a protest.
Stop and think about what constitutional rights are there for. The entire point of their existence is to override laws. If they couldn’t take an illegal action and make it legal then they would have no power or meaning whatsoever.
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.
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But my point is that if something is legal when it is not a protest, combining it with a protest makes Constitutionally protected speech (or petition) into something illegal – in effect the violation is not the action but the protected speech.
That is something that has a very long history and none of it favorable to the laws in question.
I’m responding to your post here that articulates a kind of speech supremacy. I don’t know enough about the Oklahoma law to have an opinion on it. Speech rights coexist with other rights in the American system of ordered liberty. They do not cancel out other rights. Someone’s right to own a home or a downtown retail store and use them lawfully are not cancelled out just because someone is protesting. If I oppose private property and am protesting, I don’t get to burn down someone’s house or store and have that be legal. I can’t just declare something speech and suddenly laws don’t apply. “…the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” is protected. Protest is not a grant of royal privelege that gives someone rights to violate other peoples’ rights.
I’m not arguing for the supremacy of speech rights - if I were writing a constitution for a country right now I would not even include freedom of speech or expression in it. I’m pointing out the supremacy of the constitution over legislation because that’s a legal fact.
As I said:
There are tests in law that judges apply to determine whether something counts as protected expression. Violence and arson aren’t going to make the cut. But if someone is going to come and tell me that standing in front of construction equipment to prevent a pipeline from being built is not protected expression, I think they should be able to explain the legal principles that show that. If not, why wouldn’t I assume they are just pulling confirmation bias ala:
I’m just sick of arguments that say that the right to be paid to deliver hate speech is protected but the right to laugh at your government isn’t. They all follow similar lines. Free speech is inviolable when someone is saying something odious, but there’s always some kind of legalistic-sounding argument for what it doesn’t apply to actual protests.
But free speech vs. ownership of property is not a constitutional clash. There is no constitutional right to own property.
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I really think you have this one wrong. The placard example does not seem likely or sensible, so I will use another, more likely one. I mentioned my equipment on the ranch. That includes a bulldozer. There are plenty of people right now in my state who believe that disabling or burning bulldozers are a form of protest. If those people would ask me, I could tell them that we use this equipment to repair damage from erosion as part of our effort to restore the prairie and forest. But I won’t get a chance to explain that, and I should not have to. It is already illegal to trespass on my land and burn my bulldozer. Arguing that doing it because of “protest” should make it acceptable or legal is just not sensible.
Maybe another, better way to think of it would be to imagine what tactics you would find acceptable if used by people on the opposite side. This is very important to do, because that sort of change happens. But I can use an example from the present. Think about the nutty religious abortion protesters. They would like nothing better than have their protest rights extended to[quote=“anon50609448, post:54, topic:100509”]
doing things that are otherwise illegal
[/quote]
like “willfully damage, destroy, vandalize, deface, tamper with equipment, or impede or inhibit operations of the facility” , to borrow from the text of the Oklahoma law.
You have to assume that the tactics that can be legally used by activists that you agree with will also be used by activists that you oppose.
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No, I’m right. I don’t think I’m right. This is an objective fact that everyone ought to know.
The first amendment reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It is explicitly about preventing and overriding laws. The fact that constitutional rights trump legislation is just a plain fact. Go ask any lawyer: “Which takes precedence, the constitution, or legislation?”
Does that mean that someone can burn things down or kill people as a form of free expression? No. But the legal principles that determine that those things would never be classified as free speech aren’t written in legislation. Such a piece of legislation would be meaningless.
To say free speech doesn’t apply because something is illegal is just a complete misunderstanding of the law.
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Ok, so lets assume you are in Southern Colorado, and you want to protest my bulldozing, for whatever reason. Right now, it is parked about half a mile from the road, well inside a marked fence. What do you think your interpretation of the Bill of Rights lets you do?
The Bill of Rights doesn’t allow anyone to do anything (least of all me and other non-Americans), it prohibits the government from doing some things.
If you’d like me to list what it prohibits the government from doing, I’d be glad to:
- making a law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
- making a law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
- making a law abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
If you’d like to know how that applies to any particular set of problematic facts, you’d have to take it up with lawyers and courts. But the idea that part of the analysis would be whether the possibly-protected thing was illegal is just straight up wrong. You can check, again, with literally any lawyer on that. The very idea that legislation could overrule the constitution is nonsensical.
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