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New York Protester Restrictions

By Jeralyn, Section Civil Liberties
Posted on Thu Aug 12, 2004 at 07:26:06 AM EST
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Update: The Guardian has news of the latest police strategies for handling protesters.

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Slate's Dahlia Lithwick is a guest columnist this month for the New York Times. Today she tackles planned restrictions of protesters at the RNC in New York.

So it has come down to this: You are at liberty to exercise your First Amendment right to assemble and to protest, so long as you do so from behind chain-link fences and razor wire, or miles from the audience you seek to address.

The largely ignored "free-speech zone" at the Democratic convention in Boston last month was an affront to the spirit of the Constitution. The situation will be only slightly better when the Republicans gather this month in New York, where indiscriminate searches and the use of glorified veal cages for protesters have been limited by a federal judge. So far, the only protesters with access to the area next to Madison Square Garden are some anti-abortion Christians. High-fiving delegates evidently fosters little risk of violence.

Where, Dahlia asks, is the connection between protesters and terrorists? Nowhere, except in the minds of Bush and Ashcroft:

There is no such link, except in the eyes of the Bush administration, which conflates the two both as a matter of law and of policy. It started with Attorney General John Ashcroft's declaration, shortly after 9/11: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." This was an early attempt to couple disagreeing on civil liberties with abetting terrorists.

Dahlia warn, and she's right:

Enormous national events will inevitably be terror targets. So will the president. But before we single out the anarchists and the environmentalists and the puppet-guys for diminished constitutional protections - before we herd them into what are speech-free zones - we might question whether they represent the real danger. If we don't recognize the distinction between passionate political speech and terrorism now, it may be too late to protest later.

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