The Thomas More Law Center has filed suit against the city of Dearborn, Michigan on behalf of Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones. They’ve already won one lawsuit against the city after they jailed Jones for refusing to post an illegal bond before they’d allow him to speak. Now the city has a new tactic in their battle against Jones, a “hold harmless” agreement that they demand he sign before getting a permit for a rally there. Here’s what it says, in part:
Standup America! and Wayne Sapp do hereby expressly, voluntarily, and willingly assume all risk and dangers associated with the participation in the activities on City of Dearborn property on April 7, 2012. These risks could result in damage to property, personal, and/or bodily injury or death, including injuries or death to the individual participants.
Standup America! and Wayne Sapp hereby agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the City of Dearborn, its officers, employees, agents, representatives, and departments from and against any and all claims and causes of action of any kind arising out of or in connection with their activities on City of Dearborn property.
The TMLC is right about this. There’s no way that agreement is legal. It is the job of the government to protect his right to speak. If they fail to do their job and are negligent in protecting him, he has the same right to sue the city that any other person speaking on any subject would have. That doesn’t mean he would win such a suit, of course; he’d have to prove that they were legally negligent. But he certainly doesn’t have to agree in advance that he has no right to sue no matter what the city does or doesn’t do in relation to the event.
Wayne Sapp is Jones’ associate, by the way; he applied for the permit, but Jones is the one organizing it and speaking.
Update: As predicted, the court wasted no time in siding with Jones and issuing an injunction against the city, allowing him to speak on public property across from a mosque. One of these days, the city of Dearborn is going to learn to abide by the First Amendment.
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Modusoperandi
April 9, 2012 at 12:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Typical liberalactivistjudges, oppressing Christians! (Nope!)
Typical liberalactivistjudges, hiding in fear of the Muslins! (No!)
Typical liberalactivistjudges, siding with dirty protesters! (There! Got it!)
erichoug
April 9, 2012 at 2:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This one does present an interesting problem. Is there any and should there be a line drawng on this sort of thing? In this case, a bigoted pastor coming to a nearly 100% Muslim town to prosletyze and generally be a dick.
Could he stand up in a public festival and shout islamophobic rants? Can he whip up the crowd until they riot and then just walk away with a smile on his face? I assume that there are time and place restrictions, like he may have a problem using a bullhorn in a residential neighborhood at 3 in the morning. But, what else can be done.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a free speech extremist, I don’t feel any speech should be illegal and I only make exceptions for time and place(as above) and private property (you don’t have the right to stand in my kitchen and scream whatever you like without being asked to leave). But this seems like a case where this guy is planning on starting a riot and then leave the city to pick up the pieces. Could they charge him in that case or sue him for damages?
Ed Brayton
April 9, 2012 at 2:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
erichoug wrote:
Dearborn is not nearly 100% Muslim. It has a large Arab population, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Muslim. A lot of them are Chaldeans, Arab Christians. But even if it was 100% Muslim, it would make no difference legally. There have been, and still are, plenty of towns that were nearly 100% Christian; that does not mean they should be allowed to prevent non-Christians from speaking, even if they are speaking against Christianity.
The only part that would be a problem potentially is “shouting.” There can be restrictions on volume as long as they are enforced uniformly. But the mere fact that his speech at any public event might be anti-Islam cannot be grounds for censorship.
Inciting a riot is against the law, of course, but it can’t be the case that one can be guilty of inciting a riot merely because they say things that are likely to make a crowd angry. In order to trigger the incitement to violence exception to the First Amendment, the speaker has to actually tell people to commit violence. Inciting a riot involves telling a crowd that agrees with you to take violent action, not saying things that might make a crowd that disagrees with you so angry that they commit violence.
See above. Also bear in mind that Jones has already spoken in Dearborn and said inflammatory things and there was no riot. But even if there was, the government’s job is to protect him against those who would commit violence in response to his words, not to punish him for saying things that pissed people off.
Pierce R. Butler
April 9, 2012 at 2:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Jones announced plans to move his church from Gainesville, FL, but it seems all that has been aborted because the deal to sell the church/warehouse property fell through.
Their new tactic to make everyone in the community hate them even more: a group of twelve-to-twenty (in number; maybe a bit above that in age range) loud-mouth jerks roaming the downtown area on many afternoons and evenings doing their best imitation of Westboro Baptist Cult, particularly bent on harassing any Muslim/LGBTQ/Occupy-related events in the central plaza and adjoining club district.
Sooner or later somebody’s going to give them the violence they try so hard to provoke…
erichoug
April 9, 2012 at 3:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed, thanks for the reply. I suppose I will have to come back to what I always say: Freedom is messy.
d cwilson
April 9, 2012 at 3:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Whether the latter case fits the legal definition of inciting to riot or not, it’s clear that’s the kind of outcome the City of Dearborn fears. I can understand the city’s desire not to be left holding the bag in the event that Jones and his followers do cause some kind of violence ot occur, but they didn’t have a constitutional leg to stand on here.
Their best recourse now is to maintain a strong, visible police presence during Jones’ speech in order to deter any violence that may occur from either side.
vmanis1
April 9, 2012 at 3:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Speaking as a (non-observant) Jew, I would have real problems with an individual giving a speech in which they claimed (a) that Jews caused the financial collapse;P (b) Jews want to brainwash non-Jewish children into becoming one-world secular humanists and traitors; and (c) Jews kill Christian babies and use their blood for Passover (all false claims that have been made many times before by anti-semites). Perhaps the speaker also says that 9/11 was caused by Jewish traitors who `stabbed the U.S. in the back’ (cf Hitler’s `stab in the back’ claim about World War I). The speaker need not actually advocate any illegal act to rouse a crowd to commit illegal acts.
That’s of course the point of Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar; he calls the conspirators `honorable men’, but lays on the sarcasm so thickly that eventually the crowd is completely swayed against them.
I’m not saying that the Dearborn folks are right, just that there may well be reasonable limits to how far a speaker is entitled to go. Perhaps in future they should seek a lawyer who understands the First Amendment to advise them. So far, the case against restraining Jones hasn’t yet been made, and maybe it can’t be made. Still, Terry Jones does give me a very bad case of the creeps.
Ed Brayton
April 9, 2012 at 4:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
vmanis wrote:
I would have real problems with anyone saying those things too, but there is absolutely no doubt that they are constitutionally protected. Terry Jones is a major league asshole and a bigot, but the First Amendment protects him too. And yes, it is the government’s job to protect him against an enraged mob just as much as it is to protect any other speaker who says things that make people angry.
valhar2000
April 10, 2012 at 3:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Comment threads to posts like this one always seem to confirm a fact that saddens me greatly: even though most people say they believe in freedom of speech, very few people actually do.
Michael Heath
April 10, 2012 at 6:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
valhar2000 writes:
This makes no sense. Only one commenter, vmansi1, advocated for the suppression of speech. erichoug advocated for speech while investigating whether the speaker should also be held either criminally or financially liable if and after the speech, the speaker is responsible for inciting a riot that causes damages. He came to conclude that no, a defense of speech is warranted even when competing rights are in play where some are harmed by violence – unless of course the incitement of violence was clear coming from the speaker (assumed, he appeared to concede Ed’s point in response in full).
In addition, this was a lightly commented thread; there’s no way anyone can infer what any population concludes about the margins of our speech rights given a mere five commenters weighed-in, not including Ed. Even then some commenters didn’t even address whether this type of speech should be protected or not. So we don’t know what Ed’s readers conclude based on this blog post, nor those readers who comment.
vmanis1
April 10, 2012 at 1:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just to clear up any confusion, I did not advocate restricting free speech. I did point out that there is a kind of speech that on the surface appears not to advocate violence, but whose consequences can (and often are) extremely violent. As one of many many examples, the Hep-Hep anti-semitic riots circa 1820 in Germany started with Jewish communities asking for full emancipation (equal rights); the response was vicious condemnation by intellectuals and opinion leaders; and the result of that was riots. Speech can be dangerous (as Oliver Wendell Holmes once said about fire in a theater).
Jones is most likely a tinpot ranter who can do no damage; but if he ever could accumulate an audience, he might cause a great deal of damage. My point was that if he reached that point, even if he wasn’t explicitly encouraging violent action, he might need to be restrained.
What I said was that if Dearborn wanted to try this again, they should find a lawyer who understood the First Amendment. If respecting the First Amendment makes me a person who wants to restrict free speech, then I guess I stand guilty.
Michael Heath
April 10, 2012 at 7:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
My apologies vmanis1, I re-read what you wrote and you are of course correct.
Body Wraps`
April 15, 2012 at 6:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Body Wraps`…
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