The only things I find fearsome in this story are the fact that several state legislatures banned a particular shirt, and the continuation of Bush's illegal Iraq War, which the shirt protests.
Lawmakers in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas passed state laws designed to prohibit selling a shirt that lists names of thousands of soldiers who were killed in the war. It was surprising that any legislature would pass such a silly law. (Even in an era when lawmakers regularly hold the Constitution in contempt, this law was a shock.)
The law was clearly unconstitutional on free speech grounds if it was used to go after sellers of such a shirt. If this law was allowed to be used for such a purpose, what's to stop journalists from being prosecuted for reporting that a soldier was killed? You can't censor facts.
But now a federal judge has permanently barred Arizona from using this law to prosecute the shirt's seller.
Arizona actually tried enforcing this law? Prosecutors really stepped right into a lawsuit, didn't they?
The seller isn't completely free of legal troubles yet. He now faces a class action civil suit by a Tennessee plaintiff that seeks to make him pay $40,000,000,000 just for selling the shirt.
(Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/20/soldiers.names.ap)
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Antiwar shirt ruled legal
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