In 1945 George Herbert Walker Bush honeymooned with his bride Barbara on a misty island off the coast of south Georgia. Almost sixty years later, the couple’s first son will consecrate the marshes and highlands of this beautiful North Atlantic islet, sanctifying its edifices as capitalism’s august cathedrals and ordaining the surrounding sea a bulwark defending a desecrated Adam Smith.
Wise men will come bearing not gold, frankincense and myrrh, but will cross this moat of injustice with animosity, greed and golf clubs. Ironic, the soil of Sea Island, Georgia remains tainted by the forced perspiration, melancholy tears and brave blood of a forgotten mass of African slaves who toiled there decades before, imprisoned by the greatest of all barricades — the insurmountable, inescapable sea.
141 years after the delivery of the Emancipation Proclamation and ensuing freedom of capitalism’s most egregiously victimized, Lincoln’s wayward party posterity (i.e. Bush the younger) will host the most powerful industrial democracies in the world, as well as the EU, at Sea Island in June for the annual G-8 summit.
Now, instead of caging the Old South’s unwilling chattel, the tyrannical brine will divorce the governed from those that govern, symbolically trampling upon the First Amendment and lightheartedly throwing into the salty breeze the shards of the glorious nexus between America and classical liberalism, a bond previously shattered by the horrid Patriot Act.
The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The Associated Press recently reported, “The coastal city of Brunswick (the closet inland town to the summit) … passed a law [in March] that placed conditions on public demonstrations… Organizers must put up refundable deposits equal to the city’s estimated cost for cleanup and police protection. Demonstrations may last only 2 hours, 30 minutes…And the signs may not be larger than 2 by 3 feet.” In Savannah, “City officials have said that protesters wanting to use public parks will be charged the same fees — $150 to $700 per day — as people renting those spaces for private events. Groups of 150 or more must pay maintenance deposits of $1.50 per head.”
According to current constitutional interpretation, the government may curtail speech through time, place and manner restrictions if the respective law is content neutral. The courts then weigh the importance of free expression against the government’s interest furthered by the regulation. Traditionally, political speech garners the highest constitutional protection,which means the restrictions must be highly tailored and the government interest promulgated be extremely pertinent.
Can anything be more chilling than the necessity to reach into one’s pocketbook to perform an action?
Obviously, the restrictions in Brunswick and Savannah are broad. In attempt to limit violence and other illegal activity, the municipalities have chilled legitimate speech.
National security often justifies speech strangulation in times of war. But when a government preemptively attacks a country in which over 50 percent of its citizens are under the age of 15 for what are likely economic reasons, is it not the responsibility of that government’s constituents to say that the action is wrong in an economic forum? When the preemptive action threatens its international economic supremacy because of its complete disregard for international diplomacy, shouldn’t that government’s constituents be worried about maintaining their standards of living? Where will their lethargic voices be heard and not marginalized and suppressed?
Where is the hypocritical Calhoun? Jefferson? Madison? Where is liberty in this time of all-conforming fear?
Who is to stop this neo-McCarthyism? How slippery is the slope of exclusions and exceptions to essential freedoms?
If tangible protest is discouraged, how far has America strayed from its founding ideals?
If the G-8 summit is a limited celebration of the economic free market, or perhaps quite the opposite, how appropriate an intellectual free market would be?
Restricting free speech
April 26, 2004