An interesting situation is developing here in Michigan. The Dearborn International Arab Festival was last weekend and the rules limited the handing out of literature to a particular section of the festival grounds. A preacher named George Saieg filed suit against those rules and the district court said that because those rules were applied to everyone regardless of viewpoint, they were a reasonable time, place and manner restriction. But the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a TRO just before the start of the festival preventing enforcement of the rules against Saieg himself but not others.
Members of a second group of preachers, Acts 17 Apologetics Ministries, were arrested on Friday inside the festival grounds and charged with disorderly conduct. And without video footage of what preceded that arrest it is impossible to know whether the arrest was justified. It is not uncommon for police to use disorderly conduct charges to rid themselves of a headache for a day or two, long enough for the problem to go away, and then quietly drop the charges. Whether that is what was going on here is not known without having some video of what the men were doing prior to the arrest. But the Acts 17 folks have now released a video from the following day, when they returned and tried to hand out literature outside the festival on a public sidewalk. They were not arrested this time, but they were apparently told that they had to go at least five blocks away in order to hand out their literature. That looks to me like a clear violation of the First Amendment. In addition, one of the officers then places his hand over the camera of another man who was filming this and told him he had to stop recording what was going on. This also looks like a clear violation of the First Amendment. Here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smw9QuH1xkA The Thomas More Law Center represented Saieg in his suit against the rules governing the inside of the festival and they are now representing the men arrested on Friday as well. Unfortunately, both the TMLC and the Acts 17 folks are using undue rhetoric to make their case. The TMLC sent out a press release claiming that "Sharia law is being enforced in Dearborn," while the Acts 17 folks claim that the Dearborn police are "defending Islam against the Constitution." That kind of overblown rhetoric is likely to impugn their credibility rather than enhance it. But regardless of all the rhetoric, the video above does show clear police misconduct, in my view. It's the sort of thing the ACLU has filed hundreds of cases over on behalf of street preachers all around the country. Thoughts from the real experts on the list? Ed
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