Turning Freedom of Speech Inside Out
March 31, 2008
80-Year-Old Deacon Arrested at Mall for Antiwar T-Shirt
Democracy Now! reports today:
In Long Island, New York, an eighty-year-old church deacon was removed from a shopping mall Saturday and arrested after he refused to remove a t-shirt protesting the Iraq war. Deacon Don Zirkel was handing out antiwar pamphlets when he was approached by security guards at the Smith Haven Mall. The guards placed him under citizen’s arrest after he refused orders to turn his t-shirt inside out. When the local police arrived they charged him with criminal trespassing and resisting arrest.
I don’t know what message the t-shirt bore that made the guards so determined it be turned inside out. Could it have been “No More Blood for Oil” or “Bush Lied, 4000 Died” or “Five Years Down, 95 to Go”?
Or maybe its message conveyed a touch of irony beyond the guards’ sense of humor: “The Surge is Working” or “God Bless America, Home of the First Amendment”?
Someone ought to send Cheney a few t-shirts to wear to mark the fifth anniversary of the war that was supposed to be over in three weeks. Quoting his own public pronouncements, one could say: “So?” and another, “4,000 deaths–they volunteered.”
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