Dearborn’s First Amendment barbecue ( The Michigan View 04.26.11)

Posted by hpayne on April 26, 2011

By burning the First Amendment, Dearborn mayor John O’Reilly Jr. and his Wayne County cronies have managed to make nutty pastor Terry Jones a free speech hero, united the left-wing ACLU and right-wing Thomas More Law Center, stereotyped Muslims as intolerant zealots, and put Dearborn on the map as a bastion of small-town ayatollahs.

With friends like Mayor O’Reilly, who needs enemies?

O’Reilly’s outrageous action against the Quran-burning quack — resulting in a Wayne County jury’s conviction of Jones for planning a demonstration in front to the Dearborn Islamic Center on Good Friday — has made Dearborn the laughingstock of First Amendment constitutionalists everywhere.

“We were arrested for something we had not done,” said Jones, who has retained the conservative More Center in a lawsuit against the City of Dearborn.

“This should have never come to this point to begin with,” said Rana Elmir of the ACLU of Michigan. “The judge should have dismissed the case. It’s a complete abuse of the court process, and all those involved should be ashamed.”

“(District Judge Mark Somers) should have thrown this case out of court immediately,” agreed Wayne State Constitutional scholar Robert Sedler. “And (Wayne County prosecutor) Kym Worthy should know the law. People have a right to use the public street to express their views.”

Alas, Judge Somers only threw gasoline on O’Reilly’s fire by ordering Jones to stay away from the mosque for three years. Worthy defended her prosecution, claiming that “these proceedings were solely about public safety.”

Worthy, Somers and O’Reilly were surely concerned about a repeat of the deadly riots in Afghanistan that erupted after Jones barbecued a Quran last month (not to mention their election chances if they defied Dearborn’s mob). But it’s not hard to see where their paranoid policing of free speech leads.

Should Big Labor be denied the right to protest in Lansing for fear their Snyder-as-Hitler posters would lead to violence? Should Sarah Plain be denied a platform to “target Democrats for defeat” for fear of another Tucson massacre?

Indeed, the Dearborn case comes just weeks after the Westboro Baptist Church won a landmark Supreme Court case protecting right to protest outside military funerals.

First Amendment expert Leonard Niehoff of the University of Michigan says Dearborn’s action amounts to a “Heckler’s Veto” — a scenario where all speech is silenced for fear of potential backlash.

This threat to creator’s core freedoms is already frighteningly real after Islamic extremists’ fatwa’s against Danish cartoonists for drawing the prophet Mohammed. Tragically for the Dearborn’s Muslim community, Ayatollah O’Reilly & Co.’s actions only reinforce the stereotype that even American Muslims are intolerant extremists — not just the Mideast fringe.

“Their action innocently played into Jones’ objectives, which is to paint Dearborn as a pro-Sharia city that’s oppressing Christians, which is of course not true,” protested Dawud Walid, head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Worthy’s action wrongly equates “the actions of zealots in Afghanistan with Muslim-Americans in Dearborn.”

Following the national outcry over the injustice, Mayor O’Reilly tried to backpedal, seizing on the pyro-pastor’s plans to return this week to protest his muzzling in a “free speech zone” in front of Dearborn City Hall.

“If he had done this in the first place, there would have been no issue to begin with,” O’Reilly said, as if the issue was merely restricting the time, place, and manner of the pastor’s protest. But this is disingenuous since 1) Jones must follow Somers ruling pending appeal, and 2) O’Reilly’s lawsuit was never an issue of time and place but an effort to shut Jones up by forcing him to post a $45,000 “peace bond” to pay for police protection.

That’s flat-out unconstitutional, says Wayne State’s Sedler. Police are paid to provide public safety. This was most famously confirmed, says Sedler, in the City of Forsyth County vs. National Movement (1992). Indeed, the precedent has deep roots in Michigan itself where past protests by Klan and Nazi groups were given police protection in Ann Arbor and Southfield.

“The First Amendment is only valid if it allows us to say what other people do not like,” Jones said at his trial — a sentiment echoed by scholars. Forgotten will be his drivel that the Quran “promotes terrorist activities around the world.”

But with its unconstitutional legal actions, Dearborn leadership now sounds more threatening to our liberties than a crazy Florida preacher. Jones will likely win his appeal. And Dearborn will have blown an opportunity to show the world that not all Muslims are anti-speech ayatollahs.

 

 

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