In the US, free speech is legal. You also have a right to congregate but lots of institutions find ways to subvert that, often by creating private spaces that seem public (and effectively are public but I am not a lawyer). The whole concept of civil disobedience in the US goes back to the Mexican American war, which many Americans felt was an opportunity to expand slavery to new states. Another example is the civil rights movement, where people thought it was acceptable to sit in the wrong part of the bus, even though it was against the law.
I am not advocating for breaking the law. You have to understand that if a police person or a security guard violates your rights of free expression you may not get bailed out by the ACLU.
There’s some strategic ambiguity going on here. If you’re going to a protest that looks like the Women’s March on Inauguration Day of 2017, you don’t have to worry about this kind of thing. If you’re starting fires or breaking into the Capitol building, you definitely do have to worry about this sort of thing. And just to make things even muddier, the exact same protest can radically change from one to the other based on specifics of time and place. In the summer of 2020, Seattle and Portland had mostly peaceful and uneventful protests by day in the exact same places where shootings and arsons would break out after dark, while on January 6th, just as some of the rioters were trying to force their way through the windows on one side of the Capitol building and clashing with Capitol Police, on the other side of the Capitol they were peacefully walking through wide open gates and doorways and milling around in the hallways as the Capitol Police looked on. And yeah, the peaceful ones get prosecuted sometimes too.
I think the "strategic ambiguity" here is ethics. Civil rights protestors were clearly breaking the law when they sat at diners that wouldn't serve black people. But who today thinks they were wrong? When I was a kid, students protested at Universities to divest from Apartheid era South Africa.
People can agree on what the law is, but they don't always agree on what is right. Sometimes a democratic government will zealously defend a law, war or principal that later generations of the same government will disavow.
> Civil rights protestors were clearly breaking the law when they sat at diners that wouldn't serve black people.
Sure, and then they let the police arrest them because the sight of peaceful people being hauled off to jail for sitting at the wrong diner or on the wrong seat on the bus is the statement. It’s called civil disobedience; Thoreau both practiced it and wrote about it a century before the civil rights movement. What none of those people did was try to obscure the fact that they were breaking the law or evade the consequences. Their plan was to go to jail over and over again to make the injustice of the system constantly manifest. So how does this even remotely apply to the article, which is about trying to avoid legal consequences?
I think you misunderstood me. My point is not that the law should align perfectly with my morality, it’s that in a functional democracy, there will _always_ be parties that have a moral position that does not align with the law. I believe it should be legal for them to protest, but in many cases it is not (speaking globally, not just in the USA). So I think it is good for protesters to be able to protect themselves, because my aspiration is that anyone who disagrees with the state should be able to make their voice heard.
So yes, to answer your question, I think my political opponents should be able to protest. If the state doesn’t allow them to, I am fine with them using tools to protect themselves legally.
The line I draw this at is violence and looting from innocents.
It seems you phrased your response as a “gotcha” but I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make?
