No
Free Speech for Nazis
by
Edgar J. Steele
July 10, 1999
Couer
d’Alene, Idaho.
Main street of this sleepy backwater in Northern Idaho echoed with the
sounds of hatred on this gorgeous Saturday morning.
Richard Butler and his motley band of Aryan Nation adherents were here
for their annual parade, along with hundreds of spectators, mostly from the
nether reaches of the West Coast. But
it wasn’t Butler (Pastor Butler to his followers) and his crew slinging the
epithets, crossing police barricades and breaking the law.
They weren’t even making much noise, not that they could have been
heard over the crowd’s taunts or the bullhorns wielded by out-of-state
incendiaries.
Eerily silent just minutes
before 10am, the parade’s scheduled start time, sidewalks were mostly clear as
a horde of police officers in partial riot gear cordoned off Sherman Avenue.
Then, from the east end of the street, a white pickup truck bearing twin
Confederate flags slowly began rolling west.
Richard Butler, octogenarian head of the Aryan Nations and a local
resident, walked behind the truck, flanked by two uniformed followers, each
bearing an early American revolutionary flag.
As the procession reached the halfway mark, another young man with a
bullhorn led a band of youngsters through the police barricade and onto the
street just a block further on. Sitting
down in a line, they unfurled a banner proclaiming, “They shall not pass,”
and vowing, “Idaho will be the tomb of facism.”
Police
did nothing to remove protestors from the parade’s path, preferring to divert
Butler and company down a side street, for an early and quiet finish.
Deprived of their target, the line of protestors at first cheered their
apparent victory, then rushed up the street to join their comrades.
Seemingly disappointed with being denied a confrontation, the throng of
mostly younger people staged an impromptu sit-in at the town’s main
intersection, with several circulating in the party atmosphere, waving their
placards aloft. An arrest or two
finally occurred when some of the activists actually pushed police officers. Perhaps
the most curious sign of the lot boldly proclaimed, “No Free Speech for
Nazis,” with its owner seemingly oblivious to the apparent inconsistency
inherent to brandishing such a sentiment.
From
left to right:
Until the very eve of the parade, it was questionable whether the Aryan Nations would even march this year. Couer d’Alene had hired a Seattle lawyer to rewrite its parade permit ordinance with the express purpose of thwarting Butler in his annual exercise in free speech. The city council refused to allow Butler his parade on the previous weekend, when the Aryan Nations held its annual World Congress, with members and sympathizers flying in from around the globe.
In
an inexplicable interpretation of the ordinance they had commissioned, the town
fathers routed Butler away from the downtown area and through what was
previously the city dump.
The ACLU intervened in the form of two local volunteer lawyers who
quickly filed suit. A federal judge
ruled, just two days prior to the parade, that the city council could not deny
the Aryan Nations access to a downtown parade route which, only seven days
prior, had hosted both a Fourth-of-July and a children’s parade.
“There
oughta be a law,” one might say. There
is one, of course, embodied in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
But, it seems increasingly reserved only for the most politically-correct
of those among us.
"I didn't say it would be easy. I just said it
would be the truth."
- Morpheus
Copyright © Edgar J. Steele, 2002
Forward as you wish. Permission is granted to circulate
among private individuals and groups, post on all Internet
sites and publish in full in all not-for-profit publications.
Contact author for all other rights, which are reserved.
Write to me at Steele@ConspiracyPenPal.com
ConspiracyPenPal.com
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