A recent On Your Mind complaint in the Sierra Vista (AZ) Herald newspaper regarding Congressman Ron Barber’s secret meeting with area Democrats questioned whether being excluded from the public/private meeting was a violation of First Amendment (free speech in particular) rights. The answer is yes…and no. The U.S. Supreme Court has historically interpreted the right to free speech very liberally – ergo the profane trash uttered and displayed in public media. However, the right to express one’s self is not unfettered. The Court’s general guideline has been the famous “no one can yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” Americans are allowed great latitude in expressing their opinions (more than anywhere in the world by the way) but that right ends when that expression endangers the public welfare or infringes on another’s right to the same. Oversimplified it’s the cliché’ “your rights end when they infringe on another’s.”
A common hypothetical given aspiring law enforcement applicants during LAPD and LASO interviews used to be: “You are the designated officer in charge of monitoring a demonstration by the Ku Klux Klan downtown. The KKK is waving rebel flags and one of their members is dressed as a gorilla prancing up and down the street. The NAACP has organized a counter-demonstration. Tempers are flaring on both sides and a riot seems imminent. What do you do?” There isn’t always a “correct” answer during these interviews. Hypothetical situations are given to see how an applicant responds under pressure. In this case the best answer is: Remove the gorilla from the scene. This is the equivalent of removing the person yelling fire in a theater.
Last summer I observed members of the Arizona Tea Party demonstrating against amnesty on a street corner just a few blocks from the state legislature. They had the required permit and were observing the rules by blocking neither vehicular nor pedestrian traffic. As usual, they were the best behaved demonstrators America has seen in the last fifty plus years. Shortly after the first speech began behind a small dais, several unkempt youth crossed the street and waded belligerently into the Tea Party crowd. These shaggy, dirty young adults were wearing T-shirts with the anarchy symbol and, true to form, began yelling “F__K DEPORTATION!” through megaphones repeatedly among the peaceful demonstrators. The two plain clothed Maricopa sheriff lieutenant and sergeant assigned to the demonstration for security merely stood in place and laughed among themselves at Amerika’s Brown Shirts violating peaceful Americans’ right to free speech. Both were Hispanic – which shames them and their department even more as law enforcement officers sworn to uphold the peace. The Tea Party demonstrators responded by singing God Bless America as the anarchists yelled loudly enough to spew spittle.
Ron Barber’s recent public-made-private meeting with local Democrats is just an extension of politicians reacting to the guerilla journalism of a relatively unknown man. James O’Keefe, author of the book Breakthrough and president of Project Veritas, is best known for organizing the clandestine videotaping of the corruption and hypocrisy of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics. Using Saul Alynsky’s Rules for Radicals as a guide he turns the tactics back against the Leftists and anywhere else there is official smokescreening. He quickly found out how far the America of our Founding Fathers has disintegrated. Using their correct identification cards, he and his crew were arrested in a New Orleans federal building while simply sitting in the waiting room of a Louisiana congresswoman. They wanted to know if it was true her office was having technical difficulties with her phones – an excuse she explained on local television as the reason she was unable to respond to multiple complaints about ObamaCare. She called the FBI and the Secret Service who handcuffed O’Keefe and crew, threw them into a van, drove them to several disparate jails without being informed of the charge against them for several days before being released. Later a federal judge who was a major contributor to the congresswoman convicted O’Keefe of a federal misdemeanor! It would be difficult to find a lawyer in this country who has ever heard of such an offense. O’Keefe’s punishment for doing what mainstream “journalists” should have been doing was three years’ probation confined to the spacious state of New Jersey where he lived.
America has come a long way from the arduous compromise of the first Constitutional Convention. Robert Bork nailed it when he called it the Slippery Slope to Gomorrah. If Ron Barber and his party –or the GOP elite who had security officers escort Tea Party members out of the last national convention- had tried closing a meeting to our Founding Fathers the upstarts would have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail (…hmmm!). But the Constitution is now a document to be interpreted according to “global” standards and the Bill of Rights is being considered for a rewrite –just like the Oath of Allegiance and the Code of Conduct. Thus “some animals are more equal than others” – a poke at the hypocrisy of Stalin’s Soviet Union – is becoming the law of the land. Our Founding Fathers had a response to this usurpation of human rights: Lexington and Concord.
