Ethics

Protesting Without Violating Freedom of Speech

By Ed Brayton

I've written many times against protestors disrupting or drowning out a speaker because they do not like the message or what the speaker stands for. But I also strongly support the right to protest. The key is that the protest cannot cross the line into preventing the speaker from being heard. Here's a very clever example of effective protest:

The speaker had hardly finished his first sentence when about 25 Yale Law School students in the audience stood up and sheathed their heads in black trash bags, in imitation of hooded military prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The students were protesting an appearance at the Law School on Thursday evening by Jay Bybee, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit who, when he was head of the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel, signed off on a controversial policy for interrogation and detention of "military combatants" -- what critics have labeled the "torture memo."

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on February 11, 2008 (boomark / email).