Your Opinion on Free Speech Zones

What do you think of free speech zones?

  • They're good

    Votes: 1 2.8%
  • I'm indifferent

    Votes: 4 11.1%
  • They're bad

    Votes: 27 75.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 4 11.1%

  • Total voters
    36
Is the event freely open to the public? Are the organizers paying rent for use of the space?

Is it constitutional to confine activists to these areas? Is it permissible to use free speech zones? The first question is about the legality of FSZs while the second is about their morality, in your opinion.
I'm talking more about the constitutionality of free speech zones and whether you support them than your opinion on this specific case, but feel free to comment on that as well.

If they're being herded there from public property like a streetcorner it's straight-up unamerican. Blatantly unconstitutional.

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 gets somewhat murky, I suppose, when things get disruptive. I'm warily accepting restrictions on intentionally disruptive behavior. I await good arguments.

Some of us have jobs and have to work. We dont need to be tied up in traffic because a bunch of protestors are in the way.

Go around bro. You can't call dibs on a highway or a sidewalk or whatever.

If you hire a venue, unless it's in the contract, why should you be forced to allow protestors to enter it?

So just put it in the contract.
 
The obvious problem with a free-speech zone is that everywhere else becomes a non-free-speech zone by implication. So I have no problem with a free speech zone, just as long as it is the size of the whole country.
 
Are you serious? Can you explain why? Again, not talking about HOW the money is earned (Which is the difference between Capitalism and Socialism) I'm talking about why I can't own what I do earn?
Ownership is properly understood not as something that exists between people and things, but rather between people. It's an agreement not to touch stuff which we attribute as "belonging" to other people, and for them to similarly avoid messing with things that are attributed to us. If this takes the form of a truly voluntary agreement, then it is constantly renegotiable, the distribution of ownership being determined by a consensus of concerned parties, which in most cases means through the consensus of a given community. Communal peasant societies, for example, would redistribute land on a yearly basis to the extent that it was divided, and utilise what remained collectively. What's mine is mine because we have agreed that this is so.

Private property, however, is not renegotiable; that is what makes it historically significant. It is not a claim of access or utilisation derived from the community, but a claim of absolute disposal; it is in principle asserted by the individual, rather than agreed upon by the community. Because this is not a consensual form of ownership-attribution, not something that we actively volunteer to participate in, it is therefore something that must be enforced; an agreement that we are threatened with or subjected to violence if we fail to adhere to. If I pirate a CD, for example, I may have violence levied against me in the form of arrest and even imprisonment, regardless of whether or not I ever gave the barest suggestion that I accepted the authority of the publisher and the state to impose its intellectual property legislation upon me.

Thus, property is a relationship of domination, a command to act in a certain way- to respect certain property claims- backed up by violence. As a libertarian, I oppose all forms of domination, regarding only voluntary relationships as acceptable for human beings, and so cannot but reject property is a petty tyranny.

The pertinence of this critique to the OP, just as to keep this from straying too far off topic, is that what we see private property manifesting in an overtly coercive form: an individual being kept from entering into a given area and expressing himself peacefully within it, regardless of whether he had ever agreed to accept the right of the state, or those renting from it, to dispose of that land in a unilateral fashion.
 
So you don't oppose property in general, but the modern method of its aquisition? I guess that makes more sense. But, if the community designates property, can they also take it as a whim?
 
I thought it was an abomination when I first heard of them under Pres Bush. Cordoning people off to an area several blocks away from an event where they can't be seen or heard was, to my mind, patently unconstitutional. I never learned how Bush was able to get away with it, or how it still goes on.

Excluding political events, there have been instances where people's right to speak was acknowledged, but a certain distance was required... those Christians who protest gay funerals for example.

In this instance, I think a more appropriate concern would be the likelihood of inciting violence, not free speech zones. For example, I seem to recall a case where the KKK wanted to march in Harlem, and local authorities denied permission. Going to an area with the sole/primary/consequential effect of violence/disturbance seems to be a case where gvt has claimed justification in denying a person their right to free speech. This follows along the reasoning of yelling fire in a theatre, since your speech may result in physical harm.
 
I thought it was an abomination when I first heard of them under Pres Bush. Cordoning people off to an area several blocks away from an event where they can't be seen or heard was, to my mind, patently unconstitutional. I never learned how Bush was able to get away with it, or how it still goes on.

Excluding political events, there have been instances where people's right to speak was acknowledged, but a certain distance was required... those Christians who protest gay funerals for example.

In this instance, I think a more appropriate concern would be the likelihood of inciting violence, not free speech zones. For example, I seem to recall a case where the KKK wanted to march in Harlem, and local authorities denied permission. Going to an area with the sole/primary/consequential effect of violence/disturbance seems to be a case where gvt has claimed justification in denying a person their right to free speech. This follows along the reasoning of yelling fire in a theatre, since your speech may result in physical harm.


Yeah, but the direct incitement rule established after Brandeburg v. Ohio has always been difficult to use. It needs to be very difficult to prove or else the restriction of free speech would be easily stripped in any number of situations under the account that said speech can cause harm. Johnson has been doing this at this parade for a few years and I haven't seen it written anywhere that his actions have caused violence in the past so there is no reason to think that it will do so in the future. Also, if something as simple as passing out Bibles could be restricted because of the likelihood of causing harm, I can only imagine what Glenn Beck's Rally to Restore Honor is capable of.
 
This quote from the 2nd linked article goes into a reason that this person's activities could reasonably be restricted -- if the quote is true.

Minneapolis StarTribune said:
"He's a very open, likable gentleman," Belstler said. "He would talk to people and kind of engage them in conversation and then would go into, that they're going to hell, they're an abomination. That's really kind of the exact opposite of our message of pride in being OK with who you are."

As a general thing, I'm not in favor of the "free speech zone", on the grounds that it implies the rest is not subject to free speech. In theory, the organizers could stuff anyone they want into this zone, for the slightest divergence from the organizers' message. If the organizers have a legitimate problem with an individual, that can be proven in court, then they should get a specific court order. If they don't have reasonable, legitimate grounds that can be proven in court, then they shouldn't be able to restrict his activities at all.
 
Johnson has been doing this at this parade for a few years and I haven't seen it written anywhere that his actions have caused violence in the past so there is no reason to think that it will do so in the future.
Oh, I wasn't saying that he had been, I was saying that that seemed the most likely way to exclude him, slim though that might be. I don't see how FSZ would be (or should be) a valid means.
 
Well, yeah. Simple solution. But unless it actually was in the contract in this particular case, I don't see why the guy who wanted to give out Bibles can have cause for complaint.

He can complain that it should have been. :D
 
I find it ironic that at the local university our "Martin Luther King Commons" is not a free speech zone. ><
 
Oh, I wasn't saying that he had been, I was saying that that seemed the most likely way to exclude him, slim though that might be. I don't see how FSZ would be (or should be) a valid means.

I think it would be absurd to deny speech using the direct incitement rule unless the person who's speech is being restricted is actually stating that others should be harmed. It is a quite slippery slope.
 
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