Tag Archives: First Amendment to the United States Constitution
KKK group gets permit for rally at Gettysburg battlefield
Photo credit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
The Associated Press
on September 27, 2013 at 10:12 AM,
A Maryland-based Ku Klux Klan group received a special use permit to gather at the Gettysburg National Military Park, according to park officials.
The Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan plan to gather on the Gettysburg battlefield on Oct. 5 from 1 to 4 p.m., according to a news release from the National Park Service.
The rally, led by Richard Preston of Baltimore, will take place on the lawn area north of Gen. George Meade’s headquarters on Taneytown Road, the release states.
“The group requested the permit under the first amendment of the United States Constitution, which grants all citizens the rights to freedom of speech,” according to the release. “As custodians of land owned by the American people, the National Park Service has a responsibility to make that land available for exercising those rights.”
“It’s never been about racism. We’re not white supremacists, we’re white separatists. This is about America for Americans.” – Richard Preston
Judges order Christians to work for ‘gays’
Court rules photographers must violate religious faith
The New Mexico Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not protect the owners a photography company who refused to serve a Lesbian couple because of their Christian beliefs.
Jon and Elaine Hugunin of Albuquerque, the court said, “can no more turn away customers on the basis of sexual orientation – photographing a same-sex marriage ceremony – than they could refuse to photograph African-Americans or Muslims.”
Which Shall It Be, Freedom of Speech or Not?
photo credit: http://www.veteranstoday.com
Michael S. Rozeff
lewrockwell.com
August 10, 2013
Can a man speak freely in America without any fear of punishment or can he not? He cannot. Has the U.S. government concocted free speech “crimes” in order to suppress free speech? It has. Is the U.S. government investigating free speech activities with the notion that they may be terroristic? It is.
Being pro-liberty, I am pro-free speech. I think that liberty and being able to speak freely are part of what being a human being means. In addition, I think that free speech enhances human life. Favoring the human being, human life and its development, I favor free speech. This does not mean that I like or approve of everything that anyone says. I don’t, most assuredly. It doesn’t mean that groups of people may not voluntarily suppress free speech among themselves. Favoring free speech implies that I do not believe in forcibly curtailing speech.
If we wish, we can discuss free speech without reference to the U.S. constitution. The idea of free speech doesn’t depend on a constitution, but because the government is suppressing free speech and claiming that it is doing so legally, I am going to discuss some specific court cases that reference the Constitution.
Being pro-liberty, I am not in favor of a system that centralizes law-making in one man or a few men as the U.S. system under the Constitution does. What if they make bad laws? What if the system provides no effective means to alter those laws? What if the system actively suppresses and undermines the available means to alter those laws? What if great distress has to be endured for many years before laws are altered?
But in this article, I postpone speaking with my Spoonerite anti-Constitution hat on until the end. I mainly wish to explore how it is that the Supreme Court is undermining free speech under the cover of its claim to be the final arbiter of what U.S. law says. However, implicitly I am raising the question of what good a Constitution is under which rights written down in black and white can be effectively destroyed by the Supreme Court.
California man faces 13 years in jail for scribbling anti-bank messages in chalk
RT
June 26, 2013
Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old man who is being prosecuted for scrawling anti-megabank messages on sidewalks in water-soluble chalk last year now faces a 13-year jail sentence. A judge has barred his attorney from mentioning freedom of speech during trial.
According to the San Diego Reader, which reported on Tuesday that a judge had opted to prevent Olson’s attorney from ”mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial,” Olson must now stand trial for on 13 counts of vandalism.
In addition to possibly spending years in jail, Olson will also be held liable for fines of up to $13,000 over the anti-big-bank slogans that were left using washable children’s chalk on a sidewalk outside of three San Diego, California branches of Bank of America, the massive conglomerate that received $45 billion in interest-free loans from the US government in 2008-2009 in a bid to keep it solvent after bad bets went south.
The Reader reports that Olson’s hearing had gone as poorly as his attorney might have expected, with Judge Howard Shore, who is presiding over the case, granting Deputy City Attorney Paige Hazard’s motion to prohibit attorney Tom Tosdal from mentioning the United States’ fundamental First Amendment rights.
“The State’s Vandalism Statute does not mention First Amendment rights,” ruled Judge Shore on Tuesday.
Upon exiting the courtroom Olson seemed to be in disbelief.
“Oh my gosh,” he said. ”I can’t believe this is happening.”
Tosdal, who exited the courtroom shortly after his client, seemed equally bewildered.
“I’ve never heard that before, that a court can prohibit an argument of First Amendment rights,” said Tosdal.
Olson, who worked as a former staffer for a US Senator from Washington state, was said to involve himself in political activism in tandem with the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
On October 3, 2011, Olson first appeared outside of a Bank of America branch in San Diego, along with a homemade sign. Eight days later Olson and his partner, Stephen Daniels, during preparations for National Bank Transfer Day, the two were confronted by Darell Freeman, the Vice President of Bank of America’s Global Corporate Security.
A former police officer, Freeman accused Olson and Daniels of “running a business outside of the bank,” evidently in reference to the National Bank Transfer Day activities, which was a consumer activism initiative that sought to promote Americans to switch from commercial banks, like Bank of America, to not-for-profit credit unions.
At the time, Bank of America’s debit card fees were among one of the triggers that led Occupy Wall Street members to promote the transfer day.
“It was just an empty threat,” says Olson of Freeman’s accusations. ”He was trying to scare me away. To be honest, it did at first. I even called my bank and they said he couldn’t do anything like that.”
Olson continued to protest outside of Bank of America. In February 2012, he came across a box of chalk at a local pharmacy and decided to begin leaving his mark with written statements.
“I thought it was a perfect way to get my message out there. Much better than handing out leaflets or holding a sign,” says Olson.
Over the course of the next six months Olson visited the Bank of America branch a few days per week, leaving behind scribbled slogans such as ”Stop big banks” and ”Stop Bank Blight.com.”
According to Olson, who spoke with local broadcaster KGTV, one Bank of America branch claimed it had cost $6,000 to clean up the chalk writing.
Public records obtained by the Reader show that Freeman continued to pressure members of San Diego’s Gang Unit on behalf of Bank of America until the matter was forwarded to the City Attorney’s office.
On April 15, Deputy City Attorney Paige Hazard contacted Freeman with a response on his persistent queries.
“I wanted to let you know that we will be filing 13 counts of vandalism as a result of the incidents you reported,” said Hazard.
Arguments for Olson’s case are set to be heard Wednesday morning, following jury selection.
Judge blasts speech limits at Supreme Court building
But Supremes bash back with new set of ‘regulations
A federal judge has blasted the Supreme Court’s plaza policy, which forbids people frombeing in “assemblages” or carrying signs that are intended to attract attention, declaring such limits in the shadow of the building where the First Amendment is supposed to be protected unconstitutional.
With hours, the Supremes bashed back, installing a new set of restrictive “regulations” specifying what can and cannot happen on the high court property including the plaza.
It was Judge Beryl Howell who wrote in an opinion this week that such limits – outlined in federal law and based on the “dignity” of the location – are unconstitutional and unenforceable.
“The absolute prohibition of expressive activity in the statute is unreasonable, substantially overbroad, and irreconcilable with the First Amendment,” the judge wrote. “The court therefore must find the statute unconstitutional and void as applied to the Supreme Court plaza.”
Lindsey Graham Isn’t Sure If Bloggers Deserve ‘First Amendment Protection’
Of course they do. But the question at hand is whether a media shield law should protect them as well.
(AP Photo/Matt York)
Whether bloggers count as journalists has mostly been a matter of esoterics for reporter types. But as Congress weighs a media shield law in response to the Associated Press/Justice Department subpoena scandal, the question is gaining an urgency that lawmakers are finding hard to ignore as they turn to writing the bill.
Track Officials Disqualify High School Runner for Thanking God
Critics say official ruling impedes free exercise of religion
Adan Salazar
Infowars.com
May 4, 2013
A Texas high school track team was prevented from advancing to the state finals after the student who landed first place in the boys 4×100-meter relay pointed towards the sky in a gesture of faith, prompting the team’s disqualification.
In a perverted interpretation of a rule governing high school sports, which prohibits any excessive celebration, relay anchor Derrick Hayes’ act of lifting his finger by his ear and pointing to the heavens was deemed to be a gaudy celebratory motion, on par with dancing or spiking a football in the end zone.
Last week’s controversial judgment has members of the community and critics alike asking if the rule is a violation of the First Amendment, which prohibits the making of laws impeding the free exercise of religion.
“I don’t see what the big deal is. When people are thanking God, I mean, he’s the reason we live,” Columbus resident Laporchia Miller told WFAA-TV.
Columbus school district superintendent Robert O’Connor told WFAA his hands were tied: “I don’t think that the situation was technically a terrible scenario as far as his action, but the action did violate the context of the rule.”
According to O’Connor, Hayes beat the second place runner by seven yards, making it their fastest race of the year.
Parents have complained to the state, but as the rule stands almost all hand gestures are strictly prohibited.
“It was a reaction,” the boy’s father KC Hayes said. “I mean you’re brought up your whole life that God gives you good things, you’re blessed.”
The student’s hand gesture disqualification is just the latest example illustrating a disturbing trend of religious demonization seemingly occurring nationwide.
In April, Fox News discovered that a U.S. Army training instructor was leading a class presentation that listed Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as examples of “religious extremism,” casting them alongside such groups as Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Ku Klux Klan.
Earlier this month, Breitbart also reported that the Pentagon released a statement confirming they would court martial soldiers for religious proselytization, specifically targeting soldiers promoting the Christian faith. An excerpt from the article follows:
This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life. It’s difficult to imagine how a member of the clergy could give spiritual counseling without saying anything that might be perceived in that fashion.
Having a “strapping, young Muslim Socialist” as president, perhaps we should not be so surprised, after all, it was German sociologist Karl Marx, the Father of Communism, who rejected religion, calling it the “opiate of the masses.”
It’s Not About Guns: Gun Control Is People Control
Commentary By Gordon King
This video is so AWESOME!!! You must see it. A very brave and honorable man. We need more people like this in our country to stand up and make their voices heard. Too bad we don’t have politicians like this! This man makes me feel patriotic again!
Watch the former Obama Secret Service member’s speech below:
Anthony Gucciardi
Infowars.com
April 29, 2013
Gun free zones don’t lower crime rates or even prevent mass shootings, so what do they do? Gun control allows megalomaniacal politicians to exercise control over law-abiding citizens through unconstitutional legislation that paves the way towards eroding the Bill of Rights at large.
The simple fact of the matter is that the attacks on the Second Amendment should concern you, even if you don’t own a gun. In fact, I am definitely not someone you would consider a ‘gun nut’. Far from it, I actually grew up with the impression that guns were killing weapons that the average person would never truly need. After all, you could simply call a gun-wielding police officer if anything went wrong. So what drove me to become passionate on protecting the Second Amendment, even to the point of producing the new documentary Disarmed: A History of Gun Control?
It comes down to the fact that gun control and the attacks on the Second Amendment amount to much more than guns themselves. In fact, the Second Amendment’s fall will signify the fall of the Constitution at large — the very fabric of the United States. You see if the government can override the Second Amendment, why can’t they override the First Amendment? Or how about the Constitution as a whole? If we can confiscate all modern firearms and override the Constitution through federal or state law, then the Constitution now becomes a secondary piece of paper.
THE POLITICAL DOMINO EFFECT
Now gun control advocates would never want to give up the First Amendment. In fact, virtually everyone who hates the Second Amendment (which is actually an extreme minority blown up by the media) loves the First Amendment. They would tell you that giving up the First Amendment would ruin the country, no one would be granted free speech — our freedom would collapse overnight.
The error here is assuming that we can permit the government, a government full of power-hungry sociopaths, to eradicate one Amendment while assuming we will preserve the others. How could anyone think this? The answer is that they aren’t thinking, they’re responding to events that the media broadcasts to them in a certain light. Mass shootings in schools and movie theaters have pushed the mantra that it’s the guns that are to blame and nothing else.
You’re not supposed to ponder on why Batman shooter James Holmes traveled out of his way to the one movie theater that did not allow attendees to bring in their legal concealed carry weapons. You’re not supposed to ask about the fact that the Sandy Hook shooting occurred in one of the most extreme ‘gun free’ zones in the nation. You’re especially not supposed to investigate into why Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold was so afraid of the looming concealed carry law in the area. Instead, you’re supposed to emotionally react to the issue of guns. And from that reaction, your response is not supposed to be logical but emotional.
It’s not logically to think that destroying the Second Amendment and eroding our rights to own a weapon will not cause a political domino effect that leads to the dismantling of our Bill of Rights. No, it’s an emotional response that says ‘ban the guns’ without logical thought. Even examining the statistics reveals this to be the case as well.
FORMER OBAMA SECRET SERVICE: IT’S PEOPLE CONTROL, NOT GUN CONTROL
Former Obama Administration Secret Service member Dan Bongino stated it correctly when he explained in a passionate speech that gun control is not about controlling guns. Instead, it’s about ‘people control’. After withdrawing from the Secret Service without retirement pay to inform the public regarding gun control, Dan Bongino reveals that he is also not a ‘gun nut’ as some might think. It simply comes down to protecting our rights.
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Real agenda of ACLU exposed at last
Revelations blow lid off plan forged by communist founders
The American Civil Liberties Union has planned a “war on God” from its beginnings, claims a new book by New York Times bestselling author Jerome Corsi, a scheme born from the group’s foundation, steeped in communist goals.
Corsi told WND history may have conveniently forgotten the ACLU’s original objective, but his new book, “Bad Samaritans: The ACLU’s Relentless Campaign to Erase Faith from the Public Square,” digs up what the ACLU doesn’t want you to remember.
“The book exposes the roots of ACLU in the 1920s among socialists and communists who were opposing World War I,” Corsi told WND. “It’s founder, Roger Baldwin, was a draft resister in 1917 who went to prison. Among the early board members were outright communists, including William Foster, who was at one time the general secretary of the Communist Party USA and wrote the book ‘Toward Soviet America.’
“The initial impulse of the ACLU was to fight for a definition of civil liberties that lined up with atheist, communist ideals,” Corsi continued. “Primary among the objectives was to eliminate God. [Communist philosopher Karl] Marx’s idea was that religion was the ‘opiate of the people,’ so the idea of God had to be broken down to establish the basis for communism, namely scientific materialism, which clashed with the religious conviction of America’s Founding Fathers, who believed our rights were inalienable, granted by God, and chief among those was freedom of religion.”
Thus, rather than defending the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, as many today believe the ACLU does, the group’s goal has been from the beginning to destroy the very basis for those rights, which, as the Declaration of Independence explains, are “endowed by our Creator.”
In fact, Corsi contends, the First Amendment protecting freedom of religion, rather than being sacrosanct to the ACLU, actually stands in its way.
“Through a good public relations job over the years, the ACLU has tried to represent itself as defending liberties,” Corsi told WND. “Most people don’t know its real history, haven’t studied the cases it championed, don’t understand the extent to which it has advanced not civil liberties, but an extreme leftist agenda.”
Corsi pointed to one of the ACLU’s first cases, the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, in which the ACLU brought its own Clarence Darrow to defend John Scopes, accused of illegally teaching evolution at a Tennessee high school. But more importantly than defending Scopes, Corsi contends, was the ACLU’s intent to attack biblical Christianity.
“Barrow, the ACLU attorney, was trying to pit evolutionary science as knowledge and reason against the intellectual ‘prejudice’ of the Bible – in other words, to make the case only stupid people believe in the Bible,” Corsi told WND. “The whole idea, perpetuated later by the movie ‘Inherit the Wind,’ was to establish in the public mind the primacy of science and human reason, these are the things the left looks to transplant belief in God and religious morals.
“That kind of case was the ACLU trying to get God banned from schools, education, from the public square,” Corsi continued, “but not by attacking the First Amendment head on, rather by attacking religion as a prejudice that violated ‘civil liberties.’”
The founding principles of the ACLU, however, haven’t been relegated to the dustbin of history, Corsi contends, but have continued in a steady march for nearly 100 years.
“Bad Samaritans” lays out in a straightforward, no-nonsense style a pattern Corsi contends demonstrates the ACLU has not only undermined the First Amendment, but also conducted a “war on God.” As recently as March 2013, for example, the ACLU brought forth cases to challenge a portrait of Jesus Christ at a middle school in Ohio, a North Carolina county has been sued over its traditional Christian invocations at meetings and Mississippi’s pending school prayer law is being threatened.
“Since the organization was created in 1920, so many constitutional battles have been lost to the ACLU that time has grown short to stop the onslaught,” the publisher’s release asserts. “Over its history the ACLU has been the archetypical dad Samaritan – a stranger to the nation’s religious tradition, whose founders instilled within the organization values designed to erase all vestiges of the nation’s Judeo-Christian roots. … Even more insidiously, the ACLU strategy devised by its founders was predicated on a determination to wage its war on God in a stealth fashion in which the ACLU intends to destroy religious freedom by appearing on the scene as a defender of religious freedom.”
“For decades, the Bad Samaritan of the ACLU has beaten and robbed the First Amendment’s statement of religious freedom to the point that Judeo-Christian believers have been left lying by the side of the road, as if abandoned to die,” notes Corsi. “As our Founding Fathers aptly reminded us, only a moral people can preserve the liberty required to build a bright future for America in which individual initiative and free enterprise can thrive once again.
“The point of the ‘Bad Samaritans’ book is that the hour is late, but the battle is not yet lost,” explains Corsi. “It’s not intended as a comprehensive compendium of Supreme Court cases dealing with religion. Instead, I want to unmask the ACLU’s hypocritical facade of defending civil liberties that the organization strives to sell to a secular public unable to appreciate how deeply liberty will be lost if God is abandoned.
“I will expose the secret history of the ACLU in order to encourage supporters of our faith to enter the war on God’s side,” Corsi concluded. “We must win the war against our faith if we are to preserve for future generations the heritage of liberty our Founding Fathers so generously left for us. If the ACLU wins its war on God, our founding documents – including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – will not be worth the parchment on which they were written.”
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End Time Bible Prophecy 
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