by TChris

Concerned that protestors might exercise their First Amendment rights during an economic summit that President Bush will attend with world leaders at Sea Island on the coast of Georgia next month, the City of Brunswick and Glynn County enacted laws designed to inhibit demonstrations.

Brunswick and Glynn County approved laws in March requiring permits for groups of six or more people gathering on public property for any purpose aimed at attracting the attention of bystanders. The laws require groups to put up deposits equal to estimated costs for clean-up and police protection. They also prohibit participants from carrying signs larger than 2 feet by 3 feet, or on sticks that could be used as weapons.

The ACLU filed suit today asking a court to declare the laws unconstitutional. The ACLU has recent precedent on its side.

The lawsuit in federal court comes 18 days after a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a similar law in Augusta. The ACLU filed that suit on behalf of women's activist Martha Burk, who fought with the city last year over her right to demonstrate at the Masters golf tournament.

by TChris

In an op-ed piece published in today's NY Times, Jonathan Knee argues that the government should pursue "a more radical approach to censoring pornography." He builds his argument from a strange premise:

The value of laws against prostitution is well established. What if we were to enact laws that made it illegal to give or receive payment to perform sex acts?

Well, actually, that's exactly what laws against prostitutution do. Almost everywhere in the U.S., it is illegal to pay a person to engage in a sex act with another person; whether the act is performed on the payor or a third party doesn't matter. We all know how effective those laws have been in stamping out prostitution.

by TChris

Dress codes have their place, but dress codes imposed by a public employer shouldn't be allowed to interfere with religious freedom. Former New York police officer Jasjit Singh Jaggi, a Sikh who had been assigned to traffic enforcement, prevailed in the first round of his claim that the NYPD violated his civil rights by prohibiting him from wearing a beard or turban.

The Department argued that wearing a turban compromised public safety but couldn't muster enough evidence to convince an administrative judge that turbans are dangerous. The judge recommended to the state human rights commission that Jaggi be reinstated to his position.

by TChris

Although George Orwell warned about government surveillance of the innocent and the loss of privacy in his landmark novel 1984, governments continue their diligent efforts to transform fiction into reality. If you drive through Manalapan, Florida (an exclusive Palm Beach community), be aware that Big Brother is watching you.

Cameras will snap pictures of drivers [as they pass the town's "waterfront mansions"], their cars and their license plates and a computer will run the tag against a criminal database. If anything suspicious is found, a dispatcher is alerted and can call for police.

Assuming that a "criminal database" is simply a list of people who were once accused or convicted of crimes, it doesn't seem "suspicious" that people on the list might travel through Manalapan. Courts consistently hold that the police can't stop or detain drivers simply because they have criminal records.

Another Florida surveillance system proved to be a waste of money.

Tampa police used ... face-recognition technology during the 2001 Super Bowl and in the nearby entertainment district of Ybor City. That system is designed to recognize the facial characteristics of potential terrorists and criminals by matching people on the street with a database of 30,000 mug shots. But Tampa police scrapped the Ybor City program in August, citing its failure over two years to recognize anyone wanted by authorities.

The Manalapan system is likely to equally wasteful, but any system that tracks the movement of innocent people is a frightening proposition.

by TChris

War, deficits, public education, national security, and environmental destruction are among the issues that should give politicians a full plate, leaving little time to fret about the inconsequential. And so, naturally enough, some Republicans found time to criticize Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) for omitting the phrase "under God" when he led the Pledge of Allegiance in the House yesterday.

McDermott's people say the omission was inadvertent, that McDermott was merely reciting the pledge in the form that he learned as a child. In an interview last month, however, McDermott suggested that his omission of "under God" when he recites the pledge is a matter of principle.

"I personally don't think it adds anything to the Pledge of Allegiance, and I personally don't say, 'under God,'" McDermott is quoted as saying. "I consider it an infringement that I don't like. I don't like infringements of church and state. And so I don't know that I'm rigid, but I try to be consistent."

Good for McDermott, but he should have the courage to stand behind his belief, even if it affords Republicans an opportunity to avoid more pressing issues while taking shots at him.

Is Government spying on weblogs around the corner? This article says maybe. [hat tip to Big Tex]

As Gary of Amygdala writes, ordering a pizza may get you in hot water with the government:

It's dinnertime, and you're hungry and tired, so you pick up the phone and order your favorite pizza. But you might have just landed yourself a lot more than pepperoni and cheese. If you owe fines or fees to the courts, that phone call may have provided the link the state needed to track you down and make you pay. That's one of the strategies of firms such as a company being hired by the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator to handle its fine and debt collections.

David Coplen, the state office's budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people....A sampling in January of just three of Missouri's 114 counties found about $2 million owed to courts by people whose Social Security numbers were known, Coplen said. That finding suggests courts statewide could reap significant revenue once Dallas-based ACS Inc. gets to work this month pursuing people using phone numbers and addresses.

Via Law Prof Michael Froomkin at Discourse.Net:

One of the marks of a free country is that you can criticize the Maximum
Leader without fear of investigations or reprisals. Not in Seattle, USA, where a boy was investigated by the Secret Service, then disciplined by his School, for drawing Bush as the devil in an art class assignment on the Iraq war.

by TChris

The Justice Department has withdrawn the subpoena that it issued to New York-Presbyterian Hospital for the records of women who received abortions. Other courts confronting similar Justice Department subpoenas have protected the privacy of those records, but Judge Casey in the Southern District of New York held the hospital in contempt for failing to produce redacted versions of the records. The Justice Department contended that the records would help it defend a constitutional challenge against a law that bans a particular abortion procedure.

The Justice Department says it changed its position because it wants the case to be resolved promptly. Maybe. Or maybe the Justice Department knew it would lose on appeal. Or maybe the Justice Department realized that its position was inconsisent with the President's pledge to support the privacy interests of patients. In any event, if the judge grants the Department's request to vacate the contempt order, the Department's misguided attempt to obtain the records will finally be laid to rest.

The Christian Science Monitor has a very good article on the rise of skinheads in the Pacific Northwest. The citizens there are banding together to oppose them.

It was a Saturday morning recently when Jason Martin heard a knock at his front door. As he stepped outside, he was astounded to find 200 people there cheering, then singing "God Bless America," and praying the "Lord's Prayer" together. "It made me feel very humble, very received, very respected, very encouraged," he recalls. Later that day, more than 500 people in town marched and rallied in support of Mr. Martin, an African-American minister who had wakened up three nights earlier to find a cross burning on his front lawn.

Pastor Martin's story - especially how his community responded to a frightening example of bigotry - is an important chapter in the Pacific Northwest's evolution from recurring racism and hate to what experts say is an inspiring model of how communities can reverse this troubling legacy of national life.....There's been a second cross-burning in Washington State. Racial profiling has become an issue in Portland, Ore., where there have been two recent instances in which black motorists pulled over by white police officers were shot and killed. There have been several episodes of hateful literature distributed in the region, most recently last week in a suburb of Portland where white supremacist tracts were included in bags of candy meant to attract kids.

The number one authority on this topic in our book is Journalist and Author David Neiwart, who writes the blog Orcinus from his home in the Pacific Northwest.

In related news, white supremacist Matthew Hale, leader of the former World Church of the Creator (now known as the Creativity Movement), was convicted today of soliciting the murder of a federal judge and obstruction of justice.

by TChris

Jarred Gamwell is the kind of politician our country needs. He believes that being honest and open is the best way to run for office. He stands up for his principles. He thinks voters will respond to a self-deprecating sense of humor.

Too bad you can’t vote for Jarred. He’s running for student council president at James Hunt High in Wilson, N.C. And Jarred is getting an ugly lesson in politics from Principal Bill Williamson.

Williamson took down two posters containing slogans that helped define Jarred as a candidate: "Queer Eye for Hunt High" and "Gay Guys Know Everything!" Williamson deemed the messages "disruptive of the educational process" and irrelevant to the campaign for student president. But the slogans aren’t irrelevant to Jarred, who believes that political candidates are entitled to stamp their unique identities upon their campaigns.

Defending Williamson’s judgment that references to sexual orientation are inappropriate in student elections, the school district’s attorney said: "There are North Carolina Statutes that make certain acts in a homosexual relationship criminal in nature." The district’s lawyer hasn’t made it to the law library lately -- apparently hasn’t read a newspaper, and certainly hasn’t read TalkLeft -- or he would realize that he’s basing his argument on unconstitutional statutes.

Political speech lies at the core of the First Amendment. A school that does not respect the First Amendment cannot teach students to respect the Constitution. Student governments help students learn about democracy in a hands-on way, by participating in the democratic process. Ironic then, that a school would use that process to teach students that discrimination is better than diversity, that censorship is preferable to free speech.

by TChris

The Supreme Court has elected not to review a lower court decision holding unconstitutional the reading of a prayer before supper to cadets attending the Virginia Military Institute. The decision cements the lower court's ruling as the final disposition in the case.

While the chief counsel for The American Center for Law and Justice mischaracterizes the ruling as banning voluntary prayer before dinner, the First Amendment protects the right of cadets to pray or not to pray, as they choose, prior to eating. The ruling does not ban prayer. Rather, it prohibits the reading to cadets of a daily prayer written by the school's chaplain. When a government employee imposes his or her own version of religion upon students at a school (even a military school), the government endorses religion in general or particular religious beliefs, a practice that violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.