I thought America was about the freedom of the people! Now it seems like America of limited freedom for the people. Not only that, it also seems like Corporate America, always doing it for the money. 'Specially with high-ranking people in the U.S. voting to give themselves pay raises (or so I've heard).

Got a more reliable source?

It's definitely possibly dumb in the case of Oberwetter in '08, but it doesn't really compare to stuff like, say, the Patriot Act.

Tough for me to get riled up about this.


Word.

These people were being disobedient and annoying. Also, apparently they were given a warning but that part was cut out of the footage. It's the law..obey it and you wont get arrested. As far as the appropriateness of dancing, would you like people dancing at your funeral?

If someone thought the best way to eulogize me was through dance, then I'd be fine with that, but that's not really the case. They were dancing at Jefferson's memorial--not his grave or in Arlington. I think it's just a matter of tastefulness: Oberwetter dancing to commemorate Jefferson is tolerable in my opinion, but being prohibited from doing so really isn't some huge blight on American civil liberties. They ought to just get over it and dance at home or something, rather than act like a bunch of sods.

I agree with the laws. It's the same reason people don't yell loudly in libraries, men don't use the women's restrooms, circus performers don't do tricks at Arlington Cemetery, and museums don't allow photography of ancient artifacts in many cases.

There is a time and a place for such things, and a memorial probably is not one of those places. If the people in charge of enacting it don't wish for there to be disturbances there, and the people visiting these monuments wish for an environment of quiet and reflection, I believe enforcing laws set up for the benefit of everyone else are reasonable.

Protesting as well has its time and place. HOW you protest is just as important as WHAT you protest. I can believe that a rule limiting my right to drink before I was 18 is unfair, but it would be stupid to protest that law by illegally buying a bunch of beer before I was of legal age and then selling it to school kids to "make a point".

If these people wished to protest, they had a TON of ways to do it without directly violating the law they were against. But maybe getting arrested was what they wanted, because it brought attention to their cause.

Still, it's all about perspective. According to people on the scene, the protesters were disturbing the peace. Would people be so quick to defend them if you had traveled to a historic monument dedicated to a country's hard-fought history and a clown was there yelling into a megaphone about how great the new Shia LeBouf movie is and upsetting everyone else?

The thing that I don't like about this is that it shows a blatant double standard about where protesting can be done and what qualifies as "disturbing the peace" before law enforcement will intervene. Perhaps the five dancers were disturbing the peace by dancing and kissing at a monument, but looking at an example somewhat brought on by kingjolly here, I've yet to see the Westboro Baptist Church members stopped from protesting any soldier's funeral by policemen, despite how much their antics and noise disturb the peace. One could argue that they are not on the grounds of the actual cemeteries, but they are no less disturbing the peace and the solemn silence mourners deserve. Considering the only thing that seems to quiet them is having louder protestors go against them, I fail to see why dancing at that memorial should be considered "disturbing the peace."
Either enforce the concept of freedom of speech the way it should be enacted, i.e., anytime and anywhere without fear of hate and persecution, or enforce the "proper time and place" concept and not slot it down an invisible middle line that varies between dead soldiers and dead presidents.

Just because it is the law, doesn't mean it is the right thing.

There is actually a law in Georgia stating that it is illegal to hum hymns on Sunday. Does anyone abide by it? Of course not, because it is unjust and it violates the 1st Amendment, just like the one in that video.

That was the whole point of the protest. The law, like many laws in the U.S., is unjust.

You can disagree with the law all you want, but you still need to respect the law of the land if you want to avoid going to jail. This wasn't the right way to go about a protest. Protesting by breaking the law itself is naive. They should have protested in a place that was appropriate for protesting. Not at a memorial where they were disrupting the peace.

"There is actually a law in Georgia stating that it is illegal to hum hymns on Sunday."

Source?

Don't you know? Freedom of speech is only for the privileged.



Protests that recognize and respect a system of laws designed to quash or preempt civil disobedience are similarly naive, not to mention completely impotent. Nobody ever enacted or enabled any sort of social justice by behaving like a domesticated pet. Granted, this protest wasn't very effective, and there are far more heinous crimes people ought to be devoting their time, energy, and moral outrage to.

That same impotence won India independence from British Empire. Sure, aside Ghandi there were militant hindu and muslim elements, but most of the time, it was Ghandi and their perseverance that did the job internationally.

Or the 68 Prague Spring which actually propted the creation of a multi party system in a communist regime. Only the interventionof the Warsaw Pact due to the Brezhnev doctrine stopped the democratization of Czechoslovakia.

Could go on. Point is, this is the only method that civilized people should use.

USA! USA! USA!

...sigh.

A law should does not need to be obeyed if it was illegally passed. That is, this particular law is unconstitutional. Here, you have citizens exercising their first amendment right, and cops, who have taken an oath to uphold the constitution, arresting them. This is not the 'land of the free home of the brave'. This is the type of thing that would be done in a fascist totalitarian government. The way they went about it was the best way to go about it, they made noise and have people talking. They were doing something as trivial as dancing where Thomas Jefferson's memorial is, for the record - this is a quintessential example of the type of law Mr. Jefferson would oppose, and were arrested.

The point has been made, and unless people in the United States wake up, essential liberties are going to be gone and turned into privileges granted by the state at the whim they so choose. Those are not the elements of a free society.

Freedom doesn't mean you should be loud and obnoxious whenever you want.

Er, I think you're proving my point here, because, as you probably already know, there was plenty of civil disobedience going on during both Ghandi's movements and the post-Soviet-invasion Prague Spring. I think maybe you're interpreting my post in a militaristic way, as if by "civil disobedience" I meant "coalesce into mobs, lynch the guilty, turn cars over, destroy property" etc, which I did not intend. By "civil disobedience" I mean "break the law," i.e. any law designed to counter or neutralize vital civil freedoms. Gandhi did just this, and in fact he believed it was the only way to overcome tyranny short of physical force.

That said, if faced with certain destruction, self-defense through violent resistance is the only rational response.

So long as you are not infringing on the rights of others... that may not be the definition of freedom, but you should have the freedom to do as you will so long as you are not interfering with others!

"Any country that sacrifices freedom for temporary security deserves neither and will lose both." Benjamin Franklin.

You need to realize that if a society is truly free and expressive you need to let people be who they are and not look to the government to be the be all end all to society!

"When the people fear the government you have tyranny, when the government fears the people you have liberty."

America was founded on the principles of freedom. The founding fathers envisioned a society where the public may grow content and the constitution was drafted with the bill of rights to suppress the power of the government while protecting the liberties of the people.

BTW here's an update, the people dancing at the memorial returned today with 20 others and this time, NO ARRESTS WERE MADE, THE POLICE FOLLOWED THE CONSTITUTION! SUCCESSFUL PROTEST = YES!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5nJIx8CA8I&sns;=fb

Good. The more hippies get beaten, the better off we'll all be.

Except slaves.