Protesting Without a Permit
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
This morning Yahoo! News carried an article about Cindy Sheehan resuming her anti-war protests. While reading the article, I ran across this sentence:
Those arrested got $50 tickets and authorities charged them with protesting without a permit.
Immediately my blood began to boil. How free are we if we have to ask the very entity that we intend to protest against for it's permission to protest against it? If the government didn't like the message the protesters were trying to send, could they be silenced by simply denying their permit to protest? I think so. We are not "free"... we haven't had unrestricted liberty for quite some time. I don't think this is quite what Patrick Henry had in mind when he said, "Give me liberty... or give me death!"
posted by Don Bangert | 7:52 AM
2 Comments:
No, no, no. Patrick Henry really said, "Give me a permit or give me death".
The 18th century meaning of "liberty" was a "free pass" or a permit. We've gone 2 and a half centuries believing that Henry was a lover of liberty. Wrong.
Wasn`t that part of the bill of rights? Isn`t there an amendment which says ``the right of the people to assemble peacably shall not be abridged provided the populace has first acquired an assembly permit in triplicate, notarized by a lawfully recognized entity, and executed via circuit court after an appropriate assembly permit fee not to exceed twenty thousand dollars has been paid to the Treasury of the United States``?
Gee, I can`t seem to find it in my copy...
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