Parade of Strawmen

The Curmudgeonly Clerk – currently guest-blogging at Crescat Sententia – disagrees with both myself and PG of En Banc regarding a parade in Florida, in which parade organizers kicked out Veterans for expressing “patriotically incorrect” opinions about the war on Iraq.

Wait, no, that’s not true. The Curmudgeonly Clerk didn’t disagree with me, or with PG, for the most part; he just made up some strawmen to disagree with. From CC’s post:

Although I am firm believer in broad, nearly absolutist free speech rights, both Ampersand and PG are overlooking necessary corollaries of our constitutional speech rights—freedom of association and freedom from compelled speech….

What I think that Ampersand and PG fail to understand is that this situation is not about whether the VFW was entitled to squelch those with whom it disagrees… It is about whether the VFW could be compelled to convey a message that it finds offensive and distasteful…

It would be authoritarian to require the VFW to involuntarily adopt, associate with, or distribute a political or moral message with which it disagreed. To do so would be unconscionable, despicable even.

I entirely agree with all of that. And I never said or implied otherwise.

Of course the VFW is entirely within their rights to kick veterans out of their parade for expressing “patriotically incorrect” views. Of course this is an essential free speech right – just as newspaper editors have an essential free speech right to choose not to publish an article.

Nothing I or PG wrote can fairly be read as advocating forcing “the VFW to involuntarily adopt, associate with, or distribute a political or moral message with which it disagreed.” For CC to imply that either I or PG would advocate such a thing is unfair and untrue.

* * *

Here’s the thing.

The VFW, as a private group, has a first amendment right to organize a parade.

They also have a first amendment right to kick Veterans who state “patriotically incorrect” opinions out of their parade.

I in turn – as I’m sure CC would acknowledge – have a first amendment right to criticize the VFW for their decision.

CC apparently believes that if I utilize my first amendment right to criticize the VFW, I am advocating taking the VFW’s first amendment rights away. But CC is mistaken; just because I criticize how the VFW used their first amendment rights, it in no way follows that I think they shouldn’t have first amendment rights.

* * *

Unlearned Hand (also of En Banc) has also replied to CC. Unlearned attributes CC’s strawman reading to “the dangerous tunnel vision that comes from spending too much time with law and legal arguments.” Or, as the cliche goes, to someone holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

* * *

Also on Crescat Sententia, Will Baude – responding to Unlearned Hand’s response to CC – stages a defense of the parade organizer’s actions. (Unlearned Hand has also posted a response to Will, which I wholeheartedly endorse).

I’m afraid I’m unmoved. Baude points out that there are ways in which the parade organizers could sincerely believe that allowing a group called “Veterans Against the War” to march would be disrespectful to veterans.

I don’t question the organizer’s sincerity. I do question their views, and their methods.

Adina, in the comments to my previous post, stated it very well:

The people who organize Veteran’s Day Parades do so to honor veterans. When you decide to stop doing that, it stops being a Veteran’s Day parade, and just becomes a pro-war parade that happens to be held on Veteran’s Day.

I’m not arguing that this group had a “right” to participate: it was, after all, a private parade. I do, however, think that men and women who have served their country deserve, at the very least, to have their voices heard on the day dedicated to them. They’ve earned that much, if not more.

As I said earlier, I feel the parade was organized in bad faith; it’s not about honoring veterans, as it claims to be. It’s about honoring veterans with “patriotically correct” opinions.

Will writes “In other words, kicking people out of a parade because they don’t support what the parade does is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”

I disagree. The reasonable thing for the parade’s organizers to do – if they really couldn’t abide a veteran’s parade which included a diversity of opinion – would have been to turn down the marchers when they applied to be in the parade. After all, it’s not difficult to infer what a group called “Veterans against the War” might stand for. How it is reasonable to accept their money and their application to march, only to kick them out once the parade had begun?

It’s not just that the organizers kicked out these veterans (although I find that bad enough); it also appears they went out of their way to do so in the most humiliating and hurtful manner imaginable. And that, to me, is not a “reasonable” act.

Nor do I accept Will’s implied assumption that using political ideology to select which veteran groups will or won’t be able to march in a parade honoring veterans is reasonable. Veterans are not being honored for their support of George Bush; they are being honored for their courage, and for the sacrifices they made for the sake of the nation. Since it is not reasonable to suppose that liberal veterans were not courageous and did not make sacrifices, I don’t think it’s reasonable for parade organizers to exclude people for expressing liberal views.

(Note that I am not denying that the VFW has a right to act in a way that I consider unreasonable.)

Will points out that the VFW didn’t kick out all anti-war Veterans, only those who spoke out. However, I don’t find “you can march with us, but if you disagree with our politics you better keep your damned mouth shut” to be a reasonable attitude.

On the contrary, I think that a better Veteran’s Day parade would want to honor all veterans for the sacrifice they made. And understanding and respecting that even honored veterans hold a diversity of views is, to my way of thinking, a far better way of honoring not only the veterans themselves, but of honoring the American ideals that veterans fought for.

POSTSCRIPT: Two further thoughts.

One, I should clarify that the title of this post – “Parade of Strawmen” – was a reference to CC’s post, not to Will’s.

Second, in my comments, The Arbitrary Aardvark wondered if the kicked-out veterans might have a breach of contract claim. I have no idea, but since so many bloggers of legal experts are watching this debate, I wonder if any of them have an opinion?.

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8 Responses to Parade of Strawmen

  1. Mithras says:

    The Arbitrary Aardvark wondered if the kicked-out veterans might have a breach of contract claim.

    Not likely. They don’t have expectations of making a profit from marching in the parade. More importantly, they probably have no contract right to march in the parade, since the parade organizers can decide who will participate and who will not.

  2. JRC says:

    Sure, Mithras, but considering they’d already registered, paid, gone through the effort to organize their group to march, etc. . . I mean, it’s not as if the organizers told them up front they wouldn’t be allowed in, they took their cash and played along until the last instant.

    Also, Amp said that Will said:
    “In other words, kicking people out of a parade because they don’t support what the parade does is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”

    Oh, I’m in total agreement with this. . .and if the parade was a Bush/Cheney campaign rally, Veterans Against the War could be reasonably excluded with nary a peep from me. The same would be true if the parade was for “Let’s Go Kill Those Iraqis” day or something. . .but the fact is, it wasn’t. It was explicitly a Veteran’s Day parade. The goal was honoring Veterans. I fail to see how it can be claimed that “Veterans Against the War” fail to support that.

    —JRC

  3. Raznor says:

    Well, JRC, supporting veterans is supporting the troops, and as we all know, the only way to support the troops is to blindly agree with whatever the deserter in chief says, even if it includes cutting veterans benefits and service pay. That’s the American way.

  4. yvelle says:

    Question: Is there some sort of law giving public land over to a private purpose during a parade? I mean, what’s to stop someone from just “walking down the street” at the same time as the parade? I guess I’m curious what ‘parade laws’ there are.

    Like, for instance, at the “Palestinian Land Day” march in DC there was this old guy marching with a nazi sign. And people were harassing him and trying to get him to leave, but I don’t recall anyone being like “this is our parade you have to leave”… of course, I guess it wasn’t a parade, but a demostration.

  5. tor says:

    In order to suceed in a breach of contract claim, you would have to look at the exact contract involved. More likely than not, somewhere in the contract is something about the permission to march is a license that can be revoked at any time, for any reason. It’s what I would put in there anyway…

  6. John Isbell says:

    Great post.

  7. I think that your assessment of my counterarguments as “strawmen” is principally a function of the fact that you have the skewed the facts in a manner that the original reporting does not support. In short, I think that your depiction of the facts is mistaken. I have elaborated on this a bit here.

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