Michael Bray

Author of A Time To Kill

Police Breach the Public Trust

For Uncle Raisin, Fall 2007

A Nasty November
Police Breach the Public Trust

It was not a good month for certain citizens (Christian preachers) in California and Georgia. Law enforcers throughout the land seem to taking a hostile posture toward Christians wherever they speak out for justice as it relates to sexual behavior and abortion. (See our report on “Diversity” Propaganda blog on “Monday, August 20, 2007” in our report on Kutztown University.)

On November 13 at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California three members of Survivors were arrested and abused by the campus police in ways that would shock your normal Berkley leftist or average ACLU devotee. Eleven days later in Mall of Georgia in Buford Gwinnet County, Georgia Robert Roethlisberger Jr., 44, of Belton, Missouri was arrested and his truck, bedecked with pictures of butchered babies, was impounded. It was the day after Thanksgiving, 24 November, but not a sound made in the local media until the Atlanta Constitution-Journal reported it after three days had passed.

It is the content of the speech in both cases which seems to be at issue. The content of the speech at issue is simply graphic representations of abortion designed to display its horror and induce people to consequently and properly avoid and oppose this neo-Holocaust. The suppression of this speech – opposition to abortion –arouses no indignation in the bosom of conventional free speech advocates.

And what explains this dispassionate response? Ideology. Most major media institutions support the “abortion rights” which produce the human carnage which the “obscene” pictures depict.

Georgia

The Atlanta Constitution-Journal reported the occasion for the police action in Georgia as follows:

“After someone called police to report “gory” images, officers jailed the driver on a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge. They cited a provision that refers to “the display of obscene and vulgar images visible to persons under age 14” (Andrea Simmons, “Gory abortion banners on truck land driver in jail,” November 27, 2007).

By 4 December the Associated Press reported that the prosecutor “has dropped a disorderly conduct charge against an anti-abortion activist” whose truck the police had impounded and from which it had removed the banners.

Operation Rescue reported that President President Troy Newman drove another Truth Truck on Saturday, 1 December, to the Gwinnett County Police Station to “hand-deliver a letter” from an attorney warning of legal action along with the announced plan to tour the area with the same graphic signs. OR reports that he arrived at the police station “only to find the doors to the station locked. Efforts to get police to open the doors so the letter could be delivered failed.”

The report continues:

“We rang the doorbell and knocked on the door, but no one would answer. We could see there were police inside, but none would come to the door. It was really bizarre behavior, in my opinion,” said Newman . . .

Newman and the other pro-lifers drove through the county without incident.

“We were left to wonder what would happen if the Truth Truck were to encounter Gwinnett County Police on the road without the media present,” said Newman. “Would they again arrest our people and slash our signs? We just don’t know. Currently there are no guarantees that the First Amendment protections will be respected here.”

Indeed.

California

Joey Cox, and brothers James and Jason Conrad were arrested at Chaffey College. The three men in their early twenties had learned through many experiences to record their dealings with authorities and opposition for their own protection: legal and otherwise. At Chaffey, the young men had both video and audio recorders running. Cheryl Conrad, co-founder of Survivors and mother of two of the men, recorded in the December report some bizarre encounters with the campus police.

This was not the first time the Survivors had been to Chaffey and they had no major problems previously. The report says:

“After talking with the administration they set up their signs in the free speech area and began distributing literature. A police officer approached the team to inform them activities, but asked them to move to the other side of the quad in order to separate the two groups that would be occupying the quad. Kortney complied and moved the team.

“A little later the same officer approached Kortney Blythe and Joey Cox and explained that he must have not been clear enough. He then told them they would all have to stand around an 8-foot-square planter. There are 8 team members, and Kortney knew that just wouldn’t work.

“So Joey went to the on-campus police station to talk to Chief Ramirez. He explained that confining 8 people to that space was unreasonable and impractical. The small area was not adequate to accommodate the group, and according to the administration the free speech area included the entire quad. Joey asked the chief on what authority he was making this rule. The chief mocked him saying, ‘I’m the Chief of Police, and I decided this and ‘stop being insubordinate.'”

Joey kept trying to reason with the uncooperative chief, and finally said he wasn’t sure he could comply but that he would talk with the team. As Joey stood up to leave, the chief grabbed his arm, twisted it and placed one handcuff on his wrist. Three other deputies joined in by slamming Joey into a corner. After yelling, “stop resisting!” they flung him to the ground face down while one officer dug both his knees and all his body weight into Joey’s shoulders. During this entire time, Joey did not fight or resist any of the officers.

The report goes on to recount the cuffing and transporting of Mr. Cox off campus and his release from the police car. In the mean time the other two men were arrested after they inquired after the removal of their fellow preacher and transported without seat belts to the jail. They were held for two days on felony eavesdropping charges. (Later the charges were reduced to misdemeanor charges of obstructing a police officer and disturbing the peace.) Joey had been charged with trespassing.

Ideological Prejudice!

The Atlanta Constitution-Journal reported: “An officer asked Roethlisberger to take down the banners in favor of something more subdued that still bore the anti-abortion message, a police statement said, but Roethlisberger wouldn’t” (November 27).

Maybe those pictures the left used to arouse opposition to the Viet Nam war ought to have been “more subdued.” May graphic pictures of lynching be used to arouse our ire against slavery and bigotry?

How ironic that the statute, designed, one would assume, to discourage the propagation of things “obscene and vulgar” which debase and offend the viewers is enforced here to achieve the opposite ends. The showing of the pictures is intended to expose that which is obscene and vulgar – viz., the butchering of children – so as to discourage the behavior (viz. abortion) which produces the very obscene and vulgar result which the pictures represent!

We have a big dose of ideological prejudice and hypocrisy in evidence. And we know it isn’t confined to the coasts. America is also sick in the very heartland. Keep your eyes on Tiller the Killer and bleeding Kansas.

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