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Virginia town goes overboard in controlling public gatherings in public places--an affront to Americans' freedom of expression Date published: 3/28/2008
BERRYVILLE, a pretty market town So it appears from a recent contretemps in the Clarke County community, where the Virginia Organizing Project planned to hold a rally to promote affordable housing. Berryville officials dissuaded the group from doing so, citing the town's ordinance regulating such gatherings. This startling ordinance is an affront to all who cherish American freedoms. It requires a $300 permit for any demonstration by three or more people; bars a group from holding more than two demonstrations per year in the same place; decrees that protests can be denied if they're "detrimental to the public convenience" (whatever that nebulous phrase means); allows the Town Council to require liability insurance, in any amount it deems fit; and limits demonstrations to two two-hour periods on weekdays, 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. Berryville officials must have all had bellyaches the day teacher explained the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which guarantees "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." Town fathers certainly can't have been following U.S. Supreme Court cases on the same subject, because Berryville's law is buckshot in the face of decades of court rulings on what localities can and can't do to regulate assembly. Last Friday, the ACLU of Virginia made Berryville aware it had gone too far--so far Voyager 1 hasn't gotten there yet--and advised the town that it should repeal its ordinance or face a legal challenge. The town manager has now replied, saying Berryville takes the ACLU's concerns "very seriously," and that the Town Council will review the law with its attorney. That's a right good idea. "In more than 20 years of dealing with local ordinances that regulate demonstrations in Virginia, I've never seen a more restrictive one," said Kent Willis, the Virginia ACLU's chief. "The Berryville ordinance can be used to prohibit practically all public gatherings." How could any community in the Old Dominion, the cradle of American liberty, have such a law on its books? At best, Berryville's flip disregard for the people's hard-won rights to picket, protest, and gather reflects ignorance--ignorance that should send city fathers to a remedial civics class.
Sorry, but this doesn't suprise me. In the 80s, Virginia has a law you couldn't sell a drink to somebody who "habitually breaks the law" and being gay, and in those days, sodomy being a felony, meant I couldn't go to Fuddrucker's and order a beer. But the real purpose of the law was to keep gay bars out of Virginia, which it did, until the early 90s, when Mary Sue Terry, the attorney general, admitted the law was unconstitutional, and thus Alexandria got it's first gay bar. Chilling, ain't it?
As bucolic as Berryville may sound, it screams out intolerance. Maybe we should send the town leaders back in time to England before we declared independence. We would not have had the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence it if weren't for those opposed to the status quo speaking out. They need to read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings and leave their little caccon and join the real world.........
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