aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, February 02, 2006
The tale of two t-shirts…
...and my First Amendment preview post.
WaPo looks at a tempest in a t-shirt:
The drama in cotton unfolded when Sheehan, who received a spectator ticket from Rep. Lynn C. Woolsey (D-Calif.), took her seat and unzipped her jacket, revealing her antiwar message. Sheehan’s son, Casey, was a soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
A Capitol Police officer spotted the words, pointed to her and yelled, “Protester!” Sheehan said. “He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat, and roughly . . . shoved me up the stairs,” she said, adding that she was handcuffed, taken away, fingerprinted and booked.
That was before the speech.
About 45 minutes into the speech, an officer asked Beverly Young to step outside, where he told her: “We consider you a protester” because of her shirt, she said.
She said she angrily challenged officers to explain what law she had violated, and they threatened arrest.
Threatened arrest? Cindy was hauled out in hand-cuffs and arrested. Young was not. I’m with http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002357.htm” target="_blank">Brad on this one:
Both T-shirts were in support of our troops. Both shirts made a political statement of sorts. One woman was arrested, the other was not.
In fact, the other was not even asked to leave until after the speech had already started. After Sheehan had been arrested and after the authorities knew they had a politically sticky situation on their hands. All of which begs the question of whether Mrs. Young would have been asked to leave the chamber at all, had not Sheehan’s arrest occurred previously.
(That promised First Amendment post is still coming. Teaser preview: it’s been bought and paid for by corporate media and, like Fair Use, is effectively out of reach for the individual. How many among us have the deep pockets to fund a First Amendmet fight? Especially since the courts are the culprits who handed over the First Amendment to corporate media in the first place!)
SEE ALSO: The self-correcting blogosphere.
