Obi - regarding you "just give them a refund policy", I guess the next time I'm giving a concert (I'm secretly a rock star, you know), I guess I'll just keep all the fags and jews out, right? And I'll give them a refund and it'll be OK...

What it applies to is Congress making laws restricting it. Private individuals can restrict it in their areas as they see fit. Including the college, including the company hosting the speech, et cetera. It decriminalizes speech, it doesn't mean that you can say anything without repercussions, just that they can't be criminal repercussions (and there's actually some laws that do infringe it and have been found constitutional, sadly). None of them were arrested, therefore it's working as intended.

And the fact that they mention tickets being required means that it wasn't a public meeting, public meaning open to anyone. Tickets often have a contract attached to them saying that you promise not to do certain things, and usually indicate that you can be removed from the event for any reason.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-09-20/world/35494672_1_youtube-video-political-ads-pakistanis

If Obama is involved in this, it reminds me of this very, very unfortunate incident.

"Freedom of speech as I understand it ... is the ability to say what you like without fear of arrest. It doesn't mean I can go to anywhere I can conceivably gain access to and speak there. One person has no obligation to listen to another if they don't want to."

That is correct. However, on public lands, there would have to be some kind of actual reason why you couldn't speak in that place. Those exist in great abundance with respect to verbal speech (there are lots of places where you can't go give a speech, for example because it would interfere with the main usage of the locale), but for written political speech such as on a tee shirt, there are only very few places where there could be restrictions, and a political event is the place farthest from the list.

"He is supposed to be the President of all of us. Not just the ones who like him."

I'm not American, that's what I meant by 'he isn't my president'.

@SD,

" Private individuals can restrict it in their areas as they see fit. Including the college, including the company hosting the speech, et cetera."

Well, first of all, it was a public university, so no, they can't. (Public universities can restrict quite a few types of student speech, actually, but not at political events).

I also doubt there was a "company hosting the speech" that would be more controlling than the public university campus. And finally, there remains the fact that it was *probably* secret service. The "company hosting the speech," if it was they, would just give their reason, not cite "security concerns."

There's a further fact, of course, that even if it was not an *illegal* restriction of free speech (we don't really have enough facts to adjudicate that for sure, though there is a decent chance it was), it was still a restriction of free speech that should not have happened in our polity.

@dipplayer sorry if I misunderstood you there. You might not have been addressing me now that I look at it.

@semck
As pointed out by SacredDigits this was a ticketed event. At such events conditions may be attached to attendance. Again, the stated reason was security (and I want to stress that the amount of information on this is very low just going by the OP link).

I knew it was. I wasn't really addressing you.

@Hereward,

"As pointed out by SacredDigits this was a ticketed event. At such events conditions may be attached to attendance. "

Actually, at a public political event hosted at a public university, giving up nonverbal free speech rights could *not* be an attached condition of attending.

You'll find that almost all of the most interesting people support free speech entirely - the ACLU and Glenn Greenwald come to mind. To say that this isn't something that liberals are concerned about is simply not true. You seem to confusing liberals with obama-bots, and the two are not the same thing at all.

Point taken, I don't know your rules as well as you do!

Still...the stated reason is security, not political opposition. Without more information it's by no means clear whether this is a violation of anything.

It's not a public event if it requires tickets. The moment a ticket is involved, it becomes private.

" Point taken, I don't know your rules as well as you do!"

That's fine, and sorry for confusing your nationality before.

"Still...the stated reason is security, not political opposition. "

I think you'll find that suppression of free speech is almost always done in the name of something else. If a case like this landed in court, they would look to see if there was actually a security motivation that passed the smell test. If other people were being let in with tee shirts, and only people with a particular point of view on their tee shirts were not, they would conclude viewpoint discrimination, and there is not a chance they would allow that a particular viewpoint was a per se security concern.

@SD,

"It's not a public event if it requires tickets. The moment a ticket is involved, it becomes private."

That's not true at all. It matters how you get the tickets, and their purpose. If they were just a first-come, first-served attendance control measure, it absolutely would be a public event. ("Get your free ticket at the student union!") Colleges do that kind of thing all the time for public events.

Hopefully the students in question will go get the ACLU to file a Section 1983 suit against everyone in sight, and then we'll all get to see this play out in full and public detail.

I worked events at a public university when I was going to college. Those sorts of events, the "come get your free ticket" ones, absolutely had conditions, usually for instance that you be a student, and students could get additional tickets for other people. Those are restrictions, and the ticket itself usually has additional restrictions.

Now, in the most similar event that I worked, absolutely we didn't turn people away. It was a Bruce Springsteen appearance to stump for Obama and sign up people to vote. But anyone could go to it. In fact, I can only think of one time that we enforced the "removed for any reason" part of the ticketing policy, and that had nothing to do with politics. But it was there.

@SacredDigits,

Even if the event was restricted to students, that would be a public event for purposes of the first amendment.

They put their signs away. They had on T-shirts that were "patriotic" or "Republican". They were not being disruptive.

This is spiteful exclusion, with no basis besides punishing those who disagree with you.

So did Congress make a law restricting them from being there for purposes of the First Amendment? It doesn't sound like it. That'd be a hell of an emergency session.

Uh, SD, do you actually think the First Amendment only applies to actual acts of Congress these days, and other official suppression of free speech is just fine?

Or are you just an ultra-textualist who refuses to recognize the past 200 years of Supreme Court precedent?

Because if not, your arguments are getting pretty desperate.

I'd say, if you're going to make the argument that they're unlawfully restricted from a public event, it'd be more of a freedom to assemble argument than freedom of speech. Still the first, but a different aspect of it.

I disagree with the argument, but that's where the argument is, to me.

My argument, and I hold by it, is that I don't consider it a public event given the data that exists. I guess if they sue over it we'll see what the courts think.

"I'd say, if you're going to make the argument that they're unlawfully restricted from a public event, it'd be more of a freedom to assemble argument than freedom of speech. Still the first, but a different aspect of it.

I disagree with the argument, but that's where the argument is, to me. "

It's freedom of speech because the exclusion was based on the content of their speech. The issue is not that the negative effect was exclusion from an event; it could have been anything, like not getting an invitation to the Summer Cookie Extravaganza or getting one fewer credit hour in Introduction to Free Speech. The point is just that they received a negative outcome due to the content of their speech, hence there was a violation of free speech.

As far as the data on a public event -- it was 2500 people, and was not (so far as I am aware) marketed to anything but the entire campus community -- a public university community, to be more specific. If those suppositions are true, then it was certainly too public an event for speech suppression to be going on.

(Of course, it's also true that the *particular* negative outcome here also had the effect of suppressing the actual speech, i.e., keeping their tee shirts, as well as them, out of the event, so it is even more directly a violation of free speech. Thus, there are in some sense two closely related free speech claims.)

Receiving a negative outcome as a result of your speech is against freedom of speech? So if I tell someone I think the electoral system in the UK is bad and they refused to talk to me thereafter that would be a violation of free speech because I have suffered/received a negative outcome as a result of my speech? Really?

If you're going to restrict reacting negatively to the content of some speech then things get very messy.

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_5341085

I hope the ACLU wins both of those cases, dirge. Just as I hope this incident ends up in court and the students win. Restricting someone with tickets because you *think* they might disrupt the speaker is total bullshit.

The very interesting side story here is what is reported to be items causing restricted access. It wasn't *just* blatant "Republican" clothing, it was the very nebulous idea that "Patriotic" clothing was banned. You know, those damned fools wearing American flags, and things that say "Patriot" on them...real divisive stuff.

Which leads one to ask: what the fuck is wrong with the Democrat party? There used to be a time when they, too embraced the Constiution, Patriotism, love of country and flag...and yet in the last, what? 5 years or so? the Democrat party has come to despise Patriotism, the flag, and those that love it.

Why is this not a concern to main-stream, blue-collar Democrats who, as far as I can tell, are still in love with this country? My union working, blue-collar,beer drinking neighbors that voted for Bill Clinton still love this country...so what's going on with the Democrat party?

You mean the party that wants us change our name to the United Sociatisl States of America?