A legal case worth watching

Now as a recovering attorney, I generally don't waste too much time on lawsuits or other court cases, but this one taking place in Colorado has got my attention.

The case revolves around some leftists who attended a political event in that state where President Bush (El Presidente, to his illegal alien fan base) was going to speak. Their stated intention was to disrupt the event and interrupt the President's speech to demand that he answer their questions regarding the war.

The leftist would-be hecklers, Leslie Weise and Alex Young, were foiled when an alert volunteer noticed the anti-war bumper stickers on their car and they were evicted from the event. And like Liberals so often do when they don't get their way, they filed lawsuits and dragged as many parties as they could identify into court, claiming that somehow their rights were denied them. They claim that they had every right to go there since they have First Amendment rights. However so does the President, according to lawyers for the defendants, and they've framed the central question of this case as one of "whose speech is at issue - the president's or the plaintiffs'?" They argue that the President has a right to deliver his message, and the message of the Republican Party, and that people trying to shout him down would detract from and lessen that message.

Frankly I wasn't all that willing to bite on this argument until I got to the last line of the news story where heckler Leslie Weise stated: "Perhaps if the president and his team were more willing to engage differing viewpoints we wouldn't have the catastrophic and unnecessary loss of life in the wars we are still fighting, not to mention the astronomical costs they have burdened us taxpayers with."

And suddenly my support for the Defendants' argument gelled. Here's Weise demanding that a forum put together for the President and his supporters be turned over to her and her fellow stalker just because they got inside and wanted to usurp the forum. But that assembly was not called together to be a debate and Weise and Young hadn't been invited to speak. However Weise admits that her purpose for going was to force the President to engage her publicly even though that's not what the event was about.

Fact is, Weise and Young have every right under the First Amendment to host their own event, be it a debate, a pep rally, or a whine-fest. Granted they probably would not have the President in attendance or the media that he attracts, but the fact that their personas and their message isn't as popular as the President's doesn't mean that they have a right to hijack this event just because he's there and has drawn a greater crowd. The First Amendment says that you have a right to speak--it does not mean that you can do it anywhere you want or that you have a right to address any group of people just because they've created an audience.

I'm hardly the President's biggest fan right now, but I hope that his people win this one, if only because pushy people trying to claim the right to take over other people's forums and hijack other people's events for their own purposes ultimately poses a greater danger to the free expression of ideas than does the exclusion of unwelcome people--especially those with disruptive intentions--from said forums.