What better place to demonstrate capricious police state goonery than at the Thomas Jefferson memorial? A few weeks ago a group of libertarians were celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday by having a silent dance party. If you’ve never seen one before, it’s basically a group of people dancing like they would in a club, except they’re plugged into their iPods and you can’t hear the music. It’s funny to see, but hardly a threat to public security. Or so you’d think:
Brooke [Oberwetter] was arrested for asking a Park Policeman why she was being told to stop her silent dancing and leave the Jefferson Memorial. Everyone pretty much expected that after they’d annoyed her by taking her to jail, the police would drop the charges.
Not only haven’t they dropped the charges; they’ve added a new one, “demonstrating without a permit”, even though the gathering clearly does not meet park guidelines for a “demonstration”. Brooke is having to pay for a criminal attorney to shepherd her through a federal court case. This has gone from mild harassment to outrageous, not to say perfectly ridiculous, [expletive deleted].
The original charge, interfering with an agency function, is also perfectly ridiculous. Making it stick would require proving that Brooke had disobeyed a lawful order. Since the order does not appear to have been lawful, this will be difficult.
So for the ‘crime’ of questioning authority, this person now has to bankrupt herself to pay for lawyers. It’s preposterous. Read through any of Jefferson’s writings and you’ll find very few calls for obeisance to the piffling tyrants of the DC Parks Police. Here are just a few apt quotes:
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
You can find out more about the cause, see videos of the arrest, and contribute to Oberwetter’s legal defence on the Free the Jefferson 1 blog. I especially hope Conservatives take the time to visit that blog. A lot of us are up in arms now because of the abusive thugs on the Human Rights Tribunals. But as soon as we’ve toweled down from that fight, too many will go back to our day jobs cheer-leading for the cops. But cop or HRC chair, it’s the same big government mentality we need to keep in check, and as vigilant as we are of the HRC’s we need to be ten times as vigilant of the police.
0 Responses to “Random outrage of the day: Free the Jefferson 1”