That’s
the score, at least according to Politifax, the weekly electronic New
Jersey political newsletter by PolitickerNJ.
Who knew New Jersey was the nation’s new hot spot for constitutional
crises? Well, over the summer, we’ve come across three stories that
have us asking just what is going on here.
ONE.
On February 26 – 21 days after New Jersey’s Super Tuesday
presidential primary – Andrew Gause was cited for displaying
two
Ron Paul signs on his Hawthorne lawn. However, a borough ordinance
prohibits the display of political lawn signs until 32 days before an
election and one week after. This ordinance earns a place in the Top
Ten Stupidest Laws of All Times, just a few notches below the 18th
Amendment to the Constitution, and, even though the borough
prosecutor dropped the charges because he realized the case was
“questionable” and even though the borough claims it has
never enforced this law, never will, and is in fact considering
changing it, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey
nonetheless filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the ordinance.
TWO.
ACLU-NJ also sent a cease-and-desist letter to
Shrewsbury,
which has a law, similar to Hawthorne’s, that bans political signs
until 60 days before and five days after an election and whose
officials told a resident to take down a Barack Obama sign or face a
citation…
…CONCLUSION. ACLU, 2; stupid
laws, 0 – with one case as yet unresolved. So, while New
Jersey may
not be the best example ever of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s marketplace
of free ideas, sanity and justice are winning here. At least most of
the time.
It’s just one of
several
recent
stories
about
our
civil
liberties
battles
this
month.
In the past few weeks, we defended clients who were told they
couldn’t
display political lawn signs, we sent
a letter
to Newark against an unconstitutional
ordinance
limiting
free speech in the city, and we
finally found out,
after a four-year fight, some of the groups that may be on a list of
potential
terrorist threats in the state.
They all remind
me of one of my favorite sayings of ACLU founder Roger Baldwin: “No
fight for liberty ever stays won.” But we’re doing our best to
make sure we win again and again.
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