American christianity is a cargo cult

American christianity is a cargo cult

Jesus loves me
Haha I sympathize with this meme. But it applies to the colonized as well as the colonizers. I do tend to fault impoverished people for shackling themselves to church dogma. Religion rationalizes and preserves inequity. Of course this ignores that African American congregations are community centers above everything else. To cast off religion would deprive believers of their whole social fabric. But isn’t that like arguing that slave plantations were more than places of involuntary employment? Obviously tobacco and cotton plantations were the centers of slave communities. To end slavery threatened a slave’s source of everything: sustenance, shelter, family and community. Small wonder most slaves resisted those agitating for abolition. Slave rebellions were always betrayed by fearful slaves. No churches advocated for abolition. Even the civil rights movement a century later, was resisted by African American churches, except for a tiny few associated with MLK. Everyone today pretends to have marched with MLK, even as they admonish their followers to stay in their pews! Ferguson ignited the Black Lives Matter movement despite local preachers incessantly calling for the protests to cease.

Five former leaders of the free world say YOU should pay for disaster relief

Five former leaders of the free world say YOU should pay for disaster relief

Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama, Bush, and Bush
THAT’S RIGHT. Five US ex-presidents, so-called most powerful men in the world, who each did their most to expropriate the public wealth for the super rich, who denied you healthcare, job security, infrastructure, a clean environment, even peace, every last POTUS son of a bitch, now think the rescue of America’s refinery capitol should be at your expense. Never mind that your taxes will already pay to rebuild Houston. These still-shilling salesmen-in-chief want whatever extra they can squeeze out of the American little person in the name of Christian Charity.

Occupy v. Martinez (Plaza Protest Ban) 2016 US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals Decision AFFIRMING Prelim Injunction

Occupy v. Martinez (Plaza Protest Ban) 2016 US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals Decision AFFIRMING Prelim Injunction


Yesterday I published the federal judge’s order to grant the 2015 preliminary injunction against the Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse. Since that time the city motioned to dismiss, there were show cause hearings, and depositions, and an appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. On April 8, 2016 the appeals court AFFIRMED the preliminary injunction. As a result this legal action is on the road to becoming a permanent injunction, to be decided at trial this April. The prospects look promising, based on how the appelate judges schooled our First Amendment adversaries. I’m reprinting their full decision below.

In particular you might enjoy Judge McHugh’s citing of US Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, writing in 1939 for the majority, in a decision to uphold public first amendment rights in Hague v. [AFL-]CIO. Robert affirmed that streets were traditional free speech areas:

“Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions. Such use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and liberties of citizens. The privilege of a citizen of the United States to use the streets and parks for communication of views on national questions may be regulated in the interest of all; it is not absolute, but relative, and must be exercised in subordination to the general comfort and convenience, and in consonance with peace and good order; but it must not, in the guise of regulation, be abridged or denied.”

Here’s the full 2016 opinion rejecting Denver’s appeal of our federal injunction:

Document: 01019599889 Date Filed: 04/08/2016

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT

_________________________________

ERIC VERLO; JANET MATZEN; and FULLY INFORMED JURY ASSOCIATION,

Plaintiffs – Appellees,

v.

THE HONORABLE MICHAEL MARTINEZ, in his official capacity as Chief Judge of the Second Judicial District,

Defendant – Appellant,

v.

THE CITY AND COUNTY OF DENVER, COLORADO, a municipality; ROBERT C. WHITE, in his official capacity as Denver Chief of Police,
Defendants – Appellees.

_______________

FILED ?United States Court of Appeals Tenth Circuit

April 8, 2016

Elisabeth A. Shumaker Clerk of Court

No. 15-1319

_________________________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado ?(D.C. No. 1:15-CV-01775-WJM-MJW)
_________________________________

Stephanie Lindquist Scoville, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General for the State of Colorado, Denver, Colorado (Cynthia H. Coffman, Attorney General; Frederick R. Yarger, Solicitor General; Matthew D. Grove, Assistant Solicitor General; Ralph L. Carr, Colorado Judicial Center, Denver, Colorado, with her on the briefs) for Defendant – Appellant.

David A. Lane, Killmer, Lane & Newman, LLP, Denver, Colorado, for Plaintiffs – Appellees.

Wendy J. Shea, Assistant City Attorney; Geoffrey C. Klingsporn, Assistant City Attorney; Evan P. Lee, Assistant City Attorney; Cristina Peña Helm, Assistant City Attorney, Denver City Attorney’s Office, Denver, Colorado, filed a brief on behalf of Defendants – Appellees.
_________________________________

Before BRISCOE, McKAY, and McHUGH, Circuit Judges.
_________________________________

McHUGH, Circuit Judge.
_________________________________

This is an interlocutory appeal challenging the district court’s grant of a preliminary injunction, enjoining in part the enforcement of an administrative order (Order) issued by Defendant-Appellant Judge Michael Martinez, acting in his official capacity as Chief Judge of the Second Judicial District of Colorado (Judicial District). The Order prohibits all expressive activities within an area immediately surrounding the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse in Denver (Courthouse). Plaintiffs-Appellees Eric Verlo, Janet Matzen, and the Fully Informed Jury Association (collectively, Plaintiffs) sought the preliminary injunction to stop enforcement of the Order against their expressive activities. Following an evidentiary hearing, the district court enjoined enforcement of a portion of the Order as against Plaintiffs. The Judicial District now appeals.

Based on the arguments made and evidence presented at the preliminary injunction hearing, we hold the district court did not abuse its discretion in granting Plaintiffs’ motion in part. Although we affirm the district court’s order granting a limited preliminary injunction, we express no opinion as to whether a permanent injunction should issue. Instead, we provide guidance to the district court and the parties regarding the factual inquiry and the applicable legal standard relevant to that question on remand.

I. BACKGROUND

The genesis of this case is an incident involving nonparties. On July 27, 2015, two men were distributing pamphlets on the plaza outside the Courthouse (Plaza). The pamphlets contained information about jury nullification, a practice in which a jury refuses to convict a defendant despite legal evidence of guilt because the jury members believe the law at issue is immoral. 1 Both men were arrested and charged with jury tampering in violation of Colorado law. See Colo. Rev. Stat. § 18-8-609(1) (“A person commits jury-tampering if, with intent to influence a jury’s vote, opinion, decision, or other action in a case, he attempts directly or indirectly to communicate with a juror other than as a part of the proceedings in the trial of the case.”).

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1 Jury nullification has been defined as “[a] jury’s knowing and deliberate rejection of the evidence or refusal to apply the law either because the jury wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.” Jury Nullification, Black’s Law Dictionary (10th ed. 2014).
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Plaintiffs, like the men who were arrested, wish to distribute literature relating to and advocating for jury nullification to individuals approaching the Courthouse who might be prospective jurors. Fearing they too would be subject to arrest, Plaintiffs brought suit against the City and County of Denver and Robert C. White, Denver’s police chief, in his official capacity (collectively, Denver) to establish their First Amendment right to engage in this activity. On the same day they filed suit, Plaintiffs also moved for a preliminary injunction, seeking to restrain Defendants from taking action to prevent Plaintiffs from distributing jury nullification literature on the Plaza. Two days later, Plaintiffs amended their complaint to also challenge the Order issued by the Judicial District.

That Order, entitled Chief Judge Order Regarding Expressive Activities at the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse, states in relevant part:

The Court has the responsibility and authority to ensure the safe and orderly use of the facilities of the Second Judicial District; to minimize activities which unreasonably disrupt, interrupt, or interfere with the orderly and peaceful conduct of court business in a neutral forum free of actual or perceived partiality, bias, prejudice, or favoritism; to provide for the fair and orderly conduct of hearings and trials; to promote the free flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic on sidewalks and streets; and to maintain proper judicial decorum. Those having business with the courts must be able to enter and exit the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse freely, in a safe and orderly fashion and unhindered by threats, confrontation, interference, or harassment. Accordingly, the Court hereby prohibits certain expressive activities on the grounds of the Courthouse, without regard to the content of any particular message, idea, or form of speech.

Prohibited Activities: The activities listed below shall be prohibited in the following areas: anywhere inside the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse, including courtrooms, corridors, hallways, and lobbies; the areas, lawns, walkways, or roadways between the Courthouse and public sidewalks and roads; and any areas, walkways, or roadways that connect public sidewalks and roads to Courthouse entrances or exits. This includes, but is not limited to, the Courthouse entrance plaza areas on the east and west sides of the Courthouse as depicted in the highlighted areas of the attached map.

1. Demonstrating; picketing; protesting; marching; parading; holding vigils or religious services; proselytizing or preaching; distributing literature or other materials, or engaging in similar conduct that involves the communication or expression of views or grievances; soliciting sales or donations; or engaging in any commercial activity; unless specifically authorized in writing by administration; ?

2. Obstructing the clear passage, entry, or exit of law enforcement and emergency vehicles and personnel, Courthouse personnel, and other persons having business with the courts through Courthouse parking areas, entrances, and roadways to and from Courthouse and Courthouse grounds;

3. Erecting structures or other facilities, whether for a single proceeding or intended to remain in place until the conclusion of a matter; or placing tents, chairs, tables, or similar items on Courthouse grounds; except as specifically authorized in writing by administration; and ?

4. Using sound amplification equipment in a manner that harasses or interferes with persons entering or leaving Courthouse grounds or persons waiting in line to enter the Courthouse. ?

The Order was accompanied by an image depicting an aerial view of the Courthouse and its grounds, with the areas in which the Order prohibited expressive activity highlighted in yellow (Restricted Areas).

The Courthouse is bordered on its north side by Colfax Avenue and on its west side by Fox Street. Both Colfax Avenue and Fox Street have public sidewalks running along the perimeter of the Courthouse. Immediately to the east of the Courthouse lies the Plaza. The Plaza is bisected by Elati Street, which is closed to traffic other than police vehicles. Elati Street runs through a large circular area (Main Plaza) between the Courthouse and the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center (Detention Center), which houses pretrial detainees. The Main Plaza contains planters, benches, public artwork, sidewalks, and gravel areas and is suitable for public gatherings.

Of relevance to this appeal are the Restricted Areas, which include an arc-shaped walkway and planter area immediately to the east of the Courthouse. The arced walkway runs from the corner of Elati Street and Colfax Avenue in a curved path across the front of the Courthouse and ends where it intersects with an open area in front of the Courthouse containing planters and benches (the Patio), which also forms part of the Restricted Areas. The Patio provides access to the main entrance on the east side of the Courthouse. Thus, the Restricted Areas encompass only the portions of the Plaza closest to the Courthouse.

The Judicial District opposed Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and, in doing so, defended the Order. In contrast, Denver entered into a joint stipulation (the Stipulation) with Plaintiffs. The Stipulation asserted that the entire Plaza between the Courthouse and the Detention Center—specifically including the Restricted Areas—was “a public forum and any content-based regulations must be narrowly drawn to effectuate a compelling state interest and reasonable time, place and manner regulations.” It further acknowledged that Plaintiffs were entitled to distribute jury nullification literature on the Plaza and pledged that Denver would not “arrest or otherwise charge Plaintiffs for handing out literature regarding jury nullification so long as Plaintiffs do not violate Colorado law or Denver’s Revised Municipal Code when they are handing out their literature.” The Stipulation specifically referenced the Judicial District’s Order, indicating Denver did not “intend to enforce [the Order] as written and will only impose content and viewpoint neutral reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on the use of the Plaza, and/or other exterior areas surrounding the Plaza if Denver determines that a compelling need exists to do so.”

At the preliminary injunction hearing, the parties called only two witnesses. Plaintiffs called Commander Antonio Lopez of the Denver Police Department. Commander Lopez described the Plaza as a public “open space” much like the city’s various parks. He testified that in the five years since the Courthouse opened he has witnessed “more First Amendment activity take place in [the Plaza] than [he] can recall.” Specifically, Commander Lopez described a variety of protest activities “at one point . . . averaging about two or three a week” in the Plaza. He further testified that the Denver Police Department had never taken steps to stop protest activity in the Plaza, other than intervening if protesters became violent or otherwise broke the law. Relevant to this appeal, Commander Lopez testified that in his experience, the entire Plaza—including the Restricted Areas—has traditionally been used for First Amendment protest activities. On cross-examination, Commander Lopez acknowledged that the “majority” of the protests in the Plaza occurred closer to the Detention Center, but that he had also seen protests directed at the Courthouse.

The Judicial District called Steven Steadman, administrator of judicial security for Colorado. Mr. Steadman testified that the Order was motivated by concern about anticipated protests of a verdict in a death penalty case being tried at the Courthouse.?Mr. Steadman explained that he met with Chief Judge Martinez to discuss security concerns relating to that verdict and recommended the Judicial District adopt a policy similar to one recently implemented in Arapahoe County during another high-profile capital trial.

Mr. Steadman also testified about the design of the Plaza, including the Restricted Areas. He indicated that the planters, gravel areas, and sidewalks were intentionally designed to “signal to the average user how to find their way, and where you should go and what the main travel ways are.” Mr. Steadman explained that the Patio and arced walkway’s “sole purpose is to allow people, the public, to enter and exit the [Courthouse] without being interfered with.” But Mr. Steadman also stated that, prior to imposition of the Order, protestors—including pamphleteers—were allowed to protest immediately in front of the doors to the Courthouse, provided they did not interfere with ingress or egress from the Courthouse. He explained that the “general response” of protestors was to cease their activities when requested by Courthouse security not to interfere with public access to the Courthouse. Mr. Steadman further testified that no person had ever been arrested for blocking ingress or egress from the Courthouse since it opened in 2010. Important to this appeal, Mr. Steadman acknowledged that Plaintiffs’ activities of passing out jury nullification literature did not present “any security risk” beyond what had previously been tolerated without incident throughout the time the Courthouse had been open.

The district court also accepted a proffer of Plaintiffs’ testimony, indicating that their intent was to approach people entering the Courthouse to discuss quietly the concept of jury nullification and to distribute their literature. Plaintiffs asserted that proximity to the front door of the Courthouse was key to their message because otherwise their intended audience—“people who are going to serve or are in fact serving on juries”—will “very frequently just bypass them” in the designated free speech zone by “walking on one of the sidewalks that is part of the [Restricted Areas].” By contrast, positioning themselves near the front door would allow Plaintiffs “to pass out literature to anyone who wants it” and “if people want to stop and talk about [it], they can then explain to them what the concept of jury nullification is.” Thus, according to Plaintiffs, the Order effectively prevented them from reaching their target audience. Finally, the district court accepted the parties’ jointly stipulated exhibits, which consisted of a series of images of the Plaza and Restricted Areas, as well as a copy of the Order.

Following the evidentiary hearing, the district court granted Plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction. In doing so, the district court relied on Denver’s Stipulation that the Plaza was a public forum and the Judicial District’s position that resolving the forum status was not necessary because the Order “would satisfy even the strictest test.” The district court concluded Plaintiffs had demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits because, treating the Restricted Areas as public fora, the Order’s complete ban on expressive activity was not narrowly tailored to accomplish a significant government interest.

Accordingly, the district court entered a carefully circumscribed preliminary injunction in favor of Plaintiffs. Specifically, the district court enjoined enforcement of Paragraph 1 of the Order against Plaintiffs “to the extent he or she is otherwise lawfully seeking to distribute and/or orally advocate the message contained in [Plaintiffs’ pamphlets]” in the Restricted Areas. But the district court expressly left the remainder of the Order in place.

Following entry of the preliminary injunction, the Judicial District moved to stay the injunction pending appeal pursuant to Rule 62(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In its motion to stay, the Judicial District introduced evidence that— subsequent to entry of the preliminary injunction—protesters had “descended on the Courthouse Plaza” and engaged in a pattern of disruptive and inappropriate behavior, including erecting canopies, harassing citizens seeking to enter the Courthouse, damaging the Courthouse landscaping, yelling and taunting court personnel, and posting signs in the planters and on the flagpoles in the Plaza. The Judicial District argued that a stay of the injunction was appropriate because protesters had been “emboldened” by the injunction to violate even the portions of the Order not subject to the injunction, thereby irreparably harming the Judicial District. The district court declined to stay the injunction, finding the Judicial District had not demonstrated a likelihood of success on appeal because the harm identified was not caused by the injunction. The district court reasoned the Judicial District and Denver were free to enforce the Order against the parties engaging in the complained-of disruptive behavior because such behavior was unlawful and not protected by the narrow injunction issued by the court with respect to Plaintiffs’ activities only.

The Judicial District now appeals. Exercising jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1), we affirm.

II. DISCUSSION

On appeal, the Judicial District raises two arguments. First, it asserts the district court erred when it concluded the Plaintiffs had demonstrated a likelihood of success in establishing the Restricted Areas are public fora. Second, the Judicial District argues the district court incorrectly applied strict scrutiny when evaluating the Order. As a result, the Judicial District asks this court to reverse the district court’s entry of the preliminary injunction and remand for further proceedings.

We review the district court’s grant of a preliminary injunction for abuse of discretion. Planned Parenthood of Kan. & Mid-Mo. v. Moser, 747 F.3d 814, 822 (10th Cir. 2014). “A district court abuses its discretion when it commits an error of law or makes clearly erroneous factual findings.” Id.

A. Scope of Review

Before addressing the merits of the parties’ arguments, we pause to clarify the scope of our review. The district court granted a narrow preliminary injunction drafted to address Plaintiffs’ First Amendment concerns related to their specific expressive activities. Although Plaintiffs asked the district court to prohibit enforcement of the entire Order, the court enjoined only the first paragraph, which imposes a complete ban on First Amendment activities—picketing, pamphleteering, protesting—within the Restricted Areas. The district court left in place the rest of the Order, including the prohibitions against obstructing Courthouse entrances, erecting structures, and using sound amplification equipment in the Restricted Areas.

The district court further limited the scope of the preliminary injunction by enjoining the first paragraph of the Order only as to Plaintiffs’ specific pamphleteering activities. In fact, the court enjoined enforcement of the Order only as to Plaintiffs’ distribution and discussion of two specifically identified pamphlets. The Judicial District remains free to enforce the first paragraph of the Order—even against Plaintiffs—for all other First Amendment activities within the Restricted Areas.

Finally, the district court limited the geographic scope of the injunction. Although the Order prohibits First Amendment activity both inside and outside the Courthouse, the district court enjoined enforcement of Paragraph 1 as to Plaintiffs only outside the Courthouse, leaving the entirety of the Order intact within the Courthouse. And the district court did not enjoin enforcement of any part of the Order within those portions of the Restricted Areas dedicated to Courthouse landscaping and security features. Thus, the Order continues to prohibit all expressive activity in the planter boxes or other landscaping and in the gravel security areas. Accordingly, the features of the Restricted Area to which the preliminary injunction applies are limited to (1) the arced walkway running south from Colfax Avenue between the gravel security area (to the west of the walkway) and a raised planter (to the east of the walkway) and ending at the Patio area at the main entrance on the east side of the Courthouse; 2 and (2) the Patio area at the main entrance. 3

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2 As discussed, the Order’s prohibition on expressive activities in the planter and gravel security areas were not enjoined by the district court.

3 The evidence presented about the geographic layout and physical features of the Restricted Area consisted primarily of approximately fifteen photographs. Because the record contains little testimony about the photographs, we rely on our own review of them to describe the Restricted Areas. In particular, it is unclear whether and to what extent the Restricted Areas include the sidewalk running along Fox Street on the west side of the Courthouse. The exhibit appears to highlight some areas of the sidewalk, but counsel for the Judicial District conceded at oral argument that it would be “constitutionally questionable” to prevent speech on a public sidewalk, and then indicated “[t]hat is precisely why the order here does not extend that far.” Therefore, we do not treat the Fox Street sidewalk as part of the Restricted Areas for purposes of our analysis.
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Our task in this appeal is to determine whether the district court abused its discretion when, based on the record before it at the preliminary injunction hearing, it issued this narrow, targeted injunction. But the Judicial District asks us to consider events occurring after the preliminary injunction hearing to determine whether the district court abused its discretion in issuing the preliminary injunction. Specifically, the Judicial District points to evidence introduced during the Rule 62(c) hearing on the motion to stay the injunction pending appeal, which indicated that following the injunction, protestors had engaged in a series of inappropriate and disruptive behaviors. Some of these behaviors included harassing court personnel seeking to enter the Courthouse, erecting canopies and signs, and trampling Courthouse landscaping. According to the Judicial District, these post-injunction events demonstrate the “concrete concerns” motivating the creation of the Restricted Areas and therefore should have been considered by the district court.

Although we share the Judicial District’s concern about the disruptions created by some protestors following issuance of the injunction, these post-injunction events are not relevant to our resolution of this interlocutory appeal for two reasons. First, this evidence relates to events occurring after the preliminary injunction issued, and therefore none of it was presented to the district court at the hearing. We will not hold that the district court abused its discretion based on evidence not before it when it ruled. See Adler v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 144 F.3d 664, 671 (10th Cir. 1998) (noting the general principle, in the context of de novo review of a summary judgment disposition, that we conduct our review “from the perspective of the district court at the time it made its ruling, ordinarily limiting our review to the materials adequately brought to the attention of the district court by the parties”); Theriot v. Par. of Jefferson, 185 F.3d 477, 491 n.26 (5th Cir. 1999) (“An appellate court may not consider . . . facts which were not before the district court at the time of the challenged ruling.”). Cf. Ambus v. Granite Bd. of Educ., 975 F.2d 1555, 1569 (10th Cir. 1992) (“[W]e will not reverse the grant of summary judgment . . . based on evidence not before the district court.”). Accordingly, our review is limited to the evidence before the district court at the time of the preliminary injunction hearing, and we will not consider post-injunction events.

Second, even if we were to consider the post-decision evidence, it would not alter our analysis. The evidence the Judicial District relies on to demonstrate the negative effects of the preliminary injunction, in fact, does not implicate the injunction at all. As discussed, the preliminary injunction enjoins enforcement of Paragraph 1 of the Order specifically against Plaintiffs’ pamphleteering activities in certain parts of the Restricted Areas. The district court expressly allowed the Judicial District to continue enforcing the entire Order as to all other parties and all other First Amendment activities in the Restricted Areas. Importantly, the preliminary injunction does not affect the Judicial District’s ability to enforce the Order against any protestors, including the Plaintiffs, who engage in disruptive behaviors. For example, the injunction does not prohibit the Judicial District from taking action against protestors who obstruct Courthouse entrances, damage the Courthouse landscaping, or erect structures. All of this behavior remained prohibited by the Order after issuance of the injunction. In short, nothing in the preliminary injunction before us on appeal interferes with the Judicial District’s or Denver’s ability to enforce the Order against anyone, including Plaintiffs, engaging in such behavior.

The evidence of post-injunction bad behavior of some protestors may be relevant on remand to a motion to modify the injunction4 or to the district court’s ultimate decision on whether to issue a permanent injunction. But for the purposes of this appeal, we limit our review to the evidence before the district court at the time it issued the preliminary injunction.

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4 As the district court noted, the Judicial District did not move to modify the preliminary injunction based on changed circumstances. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b)(5) (allowing a party to obtain relief from a judgment or order when “applying [the judgment or order] prospectively is no longer equitable”); Horne v. Flores, 557 U.S. 433, 447 (2009) (noting that under Rule 60(b)(5) “[t]he party seeking relief bears the burden of establishing that changed circumstances warrant relief”).
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B. Abuse of Discretion

We now turn our attention to the question of whether the district court abused its discretion when it issued the preliminary injunction.

To obtain a preliminary injunction the moving party must demonstrate: (1) a likelihood of success on the merits; (2) a likelihood that the moving party will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is not granted; (3) the balance of equities is in the moving party’s favor; and (4) the preliminary injunction is in the public interest.

Republican Party of N.M. v. King, 741 F.3d 1089, 1092 (10th Cir. 2013). In the First Amendment context, “the likelihood of success on the merits will often be the determinative factor” because of the seminal importance of the interests at stake. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, 723 F.3d 1114, 1145 (10th Cir. 2013) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Heideman v. S. Salt Lake City, 348 F.3d 1182, 1190 (10th Cir. 2003) (“[T]he loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”).

1. The district court did not abuse its discretion in finding the second, third, and fourth factors weighed in Plaintiffs’ favor.

Here, the district court found the second (irreparable harm), third (balance of equities), and fourth (public interest) factors weighed in Plaintiffs’ favor in light of the important First Amendment interests at stake. As an initial matter, the Judicial District has not challenged the district court’s determination as to these factors beyond a single footnote in its opening brief stating it had challenged them before the district court. A party’s offhand reference to an issue in a footnote, without citation to legal authority or reasoned argument, is insufficient to present the issue for our consideration. See San Juan Citizens All. v. Stiles, 654 F.3d 1038, 1055–56 (10th Cir. 2011). Accordingly, the Judicial District has waived any challenge to the district court’s findings related to the elements of irreparable harm, the balance of equities, and the public interest. But even if the Judicial District had properly challenged these factors on appeal, we would nevertheless affirm the district court’s conclusion that they weigh in Plaintiffs’ favor.

The Supreme Court has instructed that “[t]he loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.” Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 373 (1976); see also Awad v. Ziriax, 670 F.3d 1111, 1131 (10th Cir. 2012) (“[W]hen an alleged constitutional right is involved, most courts hold that no further showing of irreparable injury is necessary.”). There is no dispute that Plaintiffs’ pamphleteering constitutes First Amendment activity. See McCullen v. Coakley, 134 S. Ct. 2518, 2536 (2014) (recognizing that one-on-one communication and leafletting are First Amendment-protected activities). And the Judicial District does not dispute that the Order would bar Plaintiffs from engaging in their pamphleteering in the Restricted Areas. Accordingly, the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding that the factor of irreparable harm weighs in Plaintiffs’ favor.

The third factor—balance of equities—also tips in Plaintiffs’ favor. Before the district court, Plaintiffs proffered testimony that the Order would substantially impair their ability to convey their intended message to their target audience because it would prevent Plaintiffs from approaching potential jurors and engaging in a meaningful discussion of jury nullification. The district court also heard testimony from Mr. Steadman that Plaintiffs’ distribution of jury nullification literature and one-on-one discussions with potential jurors did not present a security risk. And the Judicial District presented no evidence that Plaintiffs’ activities otherwise interfered with Courthouse functions. On this record, the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding the balance of equities weighed in favor of Plaintiffs. See Awad, 670 F.3d at 1132 (“Delayed implementation of a [governmental] measure that does not appear to address any immediate problem will generally not cause material harm, even if the measure were eventually found to be constitutional and enforceable.”).

As to whether the preliminary injunction is in the public interest, we agree with the district court that “it is always in the public interest to prevent the violation of a party’s constitutional rights.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted); Pac. Frontier v. Pleasant Grove City, 414 F.3d 1221, 1237 (10th Cir. 2005) (“Vindicating First Amendment freedoms is clearly in the public interest.”). The district court did not abuse its discretion in finding the public interest was served by issuing the preliminary injunction to prevent the violation of Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.

Thus, we agree the second, third, and fourth factors weigh in Plaintiffs’ favor. The only remaining question, then, is whether the district court abused its discretion in finding Plaintiffs demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits. 5 Specifically, we must determine whether the Order violated Plaintiffs’ First Amendment right to distribute jury nullification pamphlets and engage in one-on-one conversations with individuals entering and leaving the Courthouse.

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5 The Tenth Circuit has modified the preliminary injunction test when the moving party demonstrates that the second, third, and fourth factors “tip strongly” in its favor. See Oklahoma ex rel. Okla. Tax Comm’n v. Int’l Registration Plan, Inc., 455 F.3d 1107, 1113 (10th Cir. 2006). “In such situations, the moving party may meet the requirement for showing success on the merits by showing that questions going to the merits are so serious, substantial, difficult, and doubtful as to make the issue ripe for litigation and deserving of more deliberate investigation.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). But because we conclude the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding Plaintiffs demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits, we need not decide whether this more lenient test applies.
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2. On this record, the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding Plaintiffs demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits.

To demonstrate a violation of their First Amendment rights, Plaintiffs must first establish that their activities are protected by the First Amendment. See Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Def. & Educ. Fund, Inc., 473 U.S. 788, 797 (1985). If so, a court must identify whether the challenged restrictions impact a public or nonpublic forum, because that determination dictates the extent to which the government can restrict First Amendment activities within the forum. See id. Finally, courts must determine whether the proffered justifications for prohibiting speech in the forum satisfy the requisite standard of review. Id. We address each element in turn.

a. Plaintiffs’ activities are protected by the First Amendment

The Supreme Court recently reaffirmed that pamphleteering and one-on-one communications are First-Amendment-protected activities. See McCullen, 134 S. Ct. at 2536. The Court “observed that one-on-one communication is the most effective, fundamental, and perhaps economical avenue of political discourse” and that “no form of speech is entitled to greater constitutional protection” than leafletting. Id. (internal quotation marks and alteration omitted). The Court went on to state, “[w]hen the government makes it more difficult to engage in these modes of communication, it imposes an especially significant First Amendment burden.” Id. Thus, Plaintiffs’ activities are protected by the First Amendment.

b. The district court did not abuse its discretion by assuming for purposes of analysis that the Restricted Areas are public fora

To properly place the district court’s decision in context, we begin with a brief discussion of the significance of forum status to the protection afforded under the First Amendment to public speech on government property. We then review the argument presented by the Judicial District to the district court regarding the forum status of the Restricted Areas here. Because the Judicial District either made a strategic decision to forgo any argument that the Restricted Areas are nonpublic fora, or inadequately presented that argument to the district court, we conclude the argument is waived. As a result, the district court did not abuse its discretion by scrutinizing the Order under public forum analysis for purposes of the preliminary injunction motion.

Turning now to the constitutional restrictions on speech, our analysis is guided by Plaintiffs’ wish to engage in First Amendment-protected activity on government property. “Nothing in the Constitution requires the Government freely to grant access to all who wish to exercise their right to free speech on every type of Government property without regard to the nature of the property or to the disruption that might be caused by the speaker’s activities.” Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 799–800. But in some instances, the public may have acquired by tradition or prior permission the right to use government property for expressive purposes. See id. at 802. To determine when and to what extent the Government may properly limit expressive activity on its property, the Supreme Court has adopted a range of constitutional protections that varies depending on the nature of the government property, or forum. Id. at 800.

The Court has identified three types of speech fora: the traditional public forum, the designated public forum, and the nonpublic forum. Id. at 802. Traditional public fora are places that by long tradition have been open to public assembly and debate. See id.; Perry Educ. Ass’n v. Perry Local Educators’ Ass’n, 460 U.S. 37, 45 (1983) (“At one end of the spectrum are streets and parks which ‘have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.’” (quoting Hague v. Comm. for Indus. Org., 307 U.S. 496, 515 (1939))). In these traditional public fora, the government’s right to “limit expressive activity [is] sharply circumscribed.” Id. A designated public forum is public property, not constituting a traditional public forum, which the government has intentionally opened to the public for expressive activity. Id. The government is not required to retain the open character of the property indefinitely, but “as long as it does so, it is bound by the same standards as apply in a traditional public forum.” Id. at 46. If the property is not a traditional public forum and it has not been designated as a public forum, it is a nonpublic forum. “Access to a nonpublic forum . . . can be restricted as long as the restrictions are ‘reasonable and are not an effort to suppress expression merely because public officials oppose the speaker’s view.’” 6 Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 800 (brackets omitted) (quoting Perry Educ., 460 U.S. at 46).

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6 Not relevant to this appeal, the Supreme Court has also recognized that the government can create a “limited public forum” by allowing “selective access to some speakers or some types of speech in a nonpublic forum,” while not opening “the property sufficiently to become a designated public forum.” Summum v. Callaghan, 130 F.3d 906, 916 (10th Cir. 1997) (citing Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of the Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 829–30 (1995)).
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Because the nature of the forum dictates the standard of scrutiny with which restrictions on speech are reviewed, courts typically begin the analysis of a challenge to restrictions on speech involving government property by identifying the nature of the forum involved. See, e.g., Doe v. City of Albuquerque, 667 F.3d 1111, 1128 (10th Cir. 2012). But the procedural posture of this appeal restricts the scope of our inquiry. That is, we need not determine whether the Restricted Areas are, in fact, public or nonpublic fora to resolve this interlocutory appeal. Rather, our task is to determine whether the district court abused its discretion when it found, based on the evidence and arguments presented, that Plaintiffs had demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits. See Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Ry. Co. v. Lennen, 640 F.2d 255, 261 (10th Cir. 1981) (“It is only necessary that plaintiffs establish a reasonable probability of success, and not an ‘overwhelming’ likelihood of success, in order for a preliminary injunction to issue.”). Because the Judicial District waived any argument that the Restricted Areas are nonpublic fora, we conclude the district court did not abuse its discretion by evaluating the Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success under the scrutiny applicable to public fora.

To explain our rationale for this conclusion, we track the evolution of the Judicial District’s arguments in the district court regarding the forum status of the Restricted Areas. Plaintiffs argued in their motion for preliminary injunction that the entire Plaza, including the Restricted Areas, constitutes a traditional public forum. Denver also stipulated with Plaintiffs that the Plaza is a public forum.

In response to the motion for preliminary injunction, the Judicial District claimed Plaintiffs were unlikely to prevail on the merits of their First Amendment claim because “[i]rrespective of Denver’s view of the courthouse plaza, it is not a traditional public forum. And even if it were, the [Order] comes nowhere near banning all expressive activity in that area. To the contrary, it is a reasonable time, place, and manner restriction.” But the Judicial District did not then provide any support for its assertion that the Plaza is not a public forum. Rather, it first claimed that Plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the Order and then continued its argument under the heading, “This Court need not decide whether the plaza is a traditional public forum for the purposes of this proceeding.” Under that heading, the Judicial District asserted that the Stipulation between the Plaintiffs and Denver did not bind the Judicial District or the district court and that therefore “[t]he status of the plaza is an open question.” But, again, rather than present argument on the correct forum status of the Plaza or ask the district court to reach a contrary conclusion, the Judicial District stated the district court need not identify the precise forum status of the Restricted Areas “because [the Order] would satisfy even the strictest test.” That is, the Judicial District claimed that “[e]ven if Plaintiffs were correct that the entire plaza is a traditional public forum,” and thus subject to a higher standard of review, the Order was constitutional as a reasonable time, place, and manner restriction. The Judicial District maintained this tactical approach through oral argument on the motion for a preliminary injunction.

After the close of evidence at the hearing on Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, the district court attempted to clarify the Judicial District’s position:

THE COURT: In your briefing the Attorney General took the position that it doesn’t matter whether the area in question is a public forum or a non-public forum area, because the Attorney General believes that you can establish the grounds necessary under the standards to apply in either case.

JUDICIAL DIST.: To be clear, our position is that this is not a public forum. However, that is a factually intensive question that I don’t think the Court has been presented with sufficient evidence to decide today.

THE COURT: Well, I have a stipulation from the owner of the property that it is a public forum area.

JUDICIAL DIST.: I understand that. I don’t think that binds either [the Judicial District] or this Court.

THE COURT: Well, that’s something I need to decide, right?

JUDICIAL DIST.: Not necessarily.

THE COURT: Okay. But here’s what I am getting at. Your position is, whether it’s public or non-public, you believe that the . . . Plaza Order . . . is sufficiently narrowly tailored to meet the concerns of ingress and egress to the courthouse and threat to the public safety. Is that your position?

JUDICIAL DIST.: Yes. Our position is that the order satisfies time, place, and manner requirements. . . .

The discussion then proceeded under the assumption that the Order impacted a public forum and therefore had to be narrowly tailored. Recall that the government has broad discretion to restrict expressive activity in a nonpublic forum, irrespective of whether the restrictions are narrowly tailored. Perry Educ., 460 U.S. at 46. But, as will be discussed in more detail below, even content-neutral restrictions on speech in a public forum—whether a traditional public forum or a designated public forum—must be narrowly tailored to advance a significant government interest. See id. at 45–46.

Consistent with its acquiescence to the district court’s application of a public forum analysis at the preliminary injunction stage, the Judicial District limited its oral argument on the motion for preliminary injunction to the proper definition of “narrowly- tailored.” Tellingly, the Judicial District provided no argument relevant to whether the Restricted Area was, in fact, a public forum, or that the restrictions did not have to be narrowly tailored at all because they impacted only nonpublic fora. Instead, the Judicial District conceded that the evidence was insufficient to allow the district court to determine the forum status of the Restricted Areas. But it claimed the district court could proceed to the merits under a public forum analysis nevertheless, because the result would be the same whether the Restricted Areas were public or nonpublic fora. That is, the Judicial District argued the district court could assume for purposes of analysis that the Restricted Areas are public fora. And the district court did as suggested in its Order Granting Motion for Preliminary Injunction.

In the Preliminary Injunction Order’s discussion of the likelihood that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits, the district court discussed forum in a section titled, “Is the Courthouse Plaza a Public Forum?” In this section, the district court considered the significance of the nature of the forum, the disagreement between Denver and the Judicial District on that issue, and the Stipulation between Denver and Plaintiffs that the Restricted Areas are public fora. Relying in part on the Stipulation, the district court concluded Plaintiffs are “likely to prevail in their claim that the Courthouse Plaza is at least a designated public forum, if not a traditional public forum.” But the district court also notes “the Second Judicial District has not specifically argued for a finding that the Courthouse Plaza is a nonpublic forum. Rather, it says that ‘resolving [the type of forum at issue] is not necessary for the purposes of this proceeding because the [Plaza Order] would satisfy even the strictest test.’”

Our review of the record is consistent with the district court’s assessment of the Judicial District’s argument. During the briefing and argument to the district court in opposition to Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction, the Judicial District never provided legal argument supporting its conclusory statement that the Restricted Areas are nonpublic fora. As noted, it instead indicated the forum status of the Plaza was an open question the district court need not decide, and further conceded it was a question the district court could not decide based on the evidence presented. In sum, the Judicial District made the strategic decision to accept Plaintiffs’ characterization of the Restricted Areas as a public forum for purposes of analysis and to present only an argument that the Order is constitutional under the scrutiny applicable to restrictions of speech in public fora. And the Judicial District maintained that position throughout the district court proceedings.

The Judicial District filed a motion in the district court to stay the injunction pending appeal, in which it stated “courthouse plazas are not traditional public fora,” and cited, without further analysis, Hodge v. Talkin, 799 F.3d 1145 (D.C. Cir. 2015), a new decision at the time holding the plaza of the Supreme Court building is not a public forum. But again, the Judicial District did not seek a ruling that the Restricted Areas are nonpublic fora or provide reasoned analysis to support such a claim. Consistent with its earlier strategy, the Judicial District argued that “even if the [Courthouse Plaza] were a traditional public forum,” the district court applied the wrong level of scrutiny. Significantly, the Judicial District never claimed it could bar or reasonably restrict speech in the Restricted Areas because they were nonpublic fora; it argued the district court had erred because “[s]trict scrutiny applies only to content-based restrictions on speech in a public forum.”

For the first time on appeal, the Judicial District provides substantive argument for the claim that the Restricted Areas are nonpublic fora and, therefore, the district court should have considered only whether the content-neutral restrictions contained in the Order were reasonable. When a party pursues a new legal theory for the first time on appeal, we usually refuse to consider it. See Richison v. Ernest Grp., Inc., 634 F.3d 1123, 1127–28 (10th Cir. 2011); Lone Star Steel Co. v. United Mine Workers of Am., 851 F.2d 1239, 1243 (10th Cir. 1988) (“Ordinarily, a party may not lose in the district court on one theory of the case, and then prevail on appeal on a different theory.”).

As noted, the Judicial District was aware of the “open question” with respect to the forum status of the Restricted Areas but made the strategic decision to forgo presenting meaningful argument on this point. In its response brief to Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction filed with the district court, the Judicial District cited three cases in support of its statement that the forum question remains open. But it provided no argument incorporating those decisions into a cogent legal analysis of the Restricted Areas as nonpublic fora. See United States v. Wooten, 377 F.3d 1134, 1145 (10th Cir. 2004) (“The court will not consider such issues adverted to in a perfunctory manner, unaccompanied by some effort at developed argumentation.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). And although forum status is a fact-intensive inquiry, the Judicial District failed to explain how the particular facts here color that analysis. Cf. Fed. R. App. P. 28(a)(8)(A) (providing that appellant’s opening brief must contain an argument section that includes “appellant’s contentions and the reasons for them, with citations to the authorities and parts of the record on which the appellant relies”).

Thus, the Judicial District has waived this issue, at least for purposes of our review of the preliminary injunction order. Richison, 634 F.3d at 1127 (explaining that if a party intentionally chooses not to pursue an argument before the district court, “we usually deem it waived and refuse to consider it”). 7 And the forum status issue is not properly before us even if we generously conclude the Judicial District presented alternative arguments to the district court that (1) the Restricted Areas are not public fora; or (2) even if the Restricted Areas are public fora, the Order can survive the applicable level of scrutiny. Although the Judicial District presented cogent legal argument on the second issue, it failed to present reasoned argument on the first to the district court. See Ark Initiative v. U.S. Forest Serv., 660 F.3d 1256, 1263 (10th Cir. 2011) (holding that the “scant discussion” of an issue in the district court “appear[ed] as an afterthought, and [did] not meet the standard for preserving an issue for review”).

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7 Even if this argument had been merely forfeited, it would nevertheless be an inappropriate basis for reversal because the Judicial District has not argued plain error. See Richison v. Ernest Grp., Inc., 634 F.3d 1123, 1131 (10th Cir. 2011) (“And the failure to do so —the failure to argue for plain error and its application on appeal— surely marks the end of the road for an argument for reversal not first presented to the district court.”). Nor are we inclined to exercise our discretion to consider the forum status issue despite the failure to raise it to the district court because we agree with the Judicial District that the preliminary injunction record is inadequate for that purpose. Cf. Cox v. Glanz, 800 F.3d 1231, 1244–45 (10th Cir. 2015) (exercising discretion to consider forfeited argument on “clearly established” prong of qualified immunity).
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Our conclusion that the Judicial District failed to adequately present this issue to the district court is further supported by the district court’s view that “the Second Judicial District ha[d] not specifically argued for a finding that the Courthouse Plaza is a nonpublic forum.” Id. (“Not surprisingly, the district court never addressed” the issue.). Accordingly, the argument that the Restricted Areas are nonpublic fora was waived either by the Judicial District’s strategic decision not to present it, or by the Judicial District’s failure to adequately brief the issue. As such, the district court’s application of a public forum analysis is not a legitimate ground on which to reverse the preliminary injunction order.

We now address the only other challenge the Judicial District makes to the preliminary injunction: that the district court abused its discretion by applying the wrong test, even if the Restricted Areas are public fora.

c. The district court did not apply the wrong standard to the content-neutral restrictions imposed by the Order

Having determined the district court did not abuse its discretion by treating the Restricted Areas as public fora for purposes of analysis, we next consider whether the district court abused its discretion when it found Plaintiffs had demonstrated a likelihood of success on the question of whether the Order violated their constitutional rights under the relevant First Amendment standards. 8 In a public forum, the government cannot ban all expressive activity. Perry Educ., 460 U.S. at 45. But even in a public forum, the government can restrict speech through “content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions that: (a) serve a significant government interest; (b) are narrowly tailored to advance that interest; and (c) leave open ample alternative channels of communication.” Doe, 667 F.3d at 1130–31. Content-based restrictions, however, “must satisfy strict scrutiny, that is, the restriction must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest.” Summum, 555 U.S. at 469.

The Judicial District argues the district court abused its discretion by applying an incorrect legal standard. Specifically, the Judicial District contends the district court applied the stringent strict scrutiny analysis reserved for content-based restrictions. And because the Order imposes only content-neutral restrictions, the Judicial District claims this was an abuse of discretion. Although we agree the restrictions are content-neutral, we are not convinced the district court applied the more stringent standard applicable to content-based restrictions.

The district court explained that under the relevant standard, “[t]he state may . . . enforce regulations of the time, place, and manner of expression which [1] are content- neutral, [2] are narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest, and [3] leave open ample alternative channels of communication.” On its face, then, the district court appears to have invoked the correct legal standard. Cf. Doe, 667 F.3d at 1130–31 (same). Nevertheless, the Judicial District argues that in considering whether the restrictions are “narrowly tailored,” the district court inappropriately applied the more demanding standard applicable to content-based regulations.

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8 “Government restrictions on speech in a designated public forum are subject to the same strict scrutiny as restrictions in a traditional public forum.” Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 555 U.S. 460, 470 (2009). Thus, our analysis does not turn on whether the Restricted Areas are considered traditional or designated public fora.
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The term “narrowly tailored” appears in the tests for both content-based and content-neutral regulations on speech. See Doe, 667 F.3d at 1130–31 (indicating a content-neutral regulation must be “narrowly tailored” to advance a significant government interest); Pleasant Grove, 555 U.S. at 469 (stating that content-based restrictions “must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest”) (emphasis added)). And, as the Judicial District correctly notes, there are subtle differences in the way courts apply the concept of narrow tailoring in the two contexts. For the purposes of a content-neutral regulation, “the requirement of narrow tailoring is satisfied so long as the regulation promotes a substantial government interest that would be achieved less effectively absent the regulation, and does not burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s legitimate interests.” Wells v. City & Cty. of Denver, 257 F.3d 1132, 1148 (10th Cir. 2001) (ellipsis and internal quotation marks omitted). In contrast, a content-based restriction is narrowly tailored only if it is the least restrictive means of achieving the government’s compelling objective. See Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656, 666 (2004); United States v. Playboy Entm’t Grp., Inc., 529 U.S. 803, 813 (2000).

According to the Judicial District, the district court considered alternatives to the Order that might have been employed to achieve the Judicial District’s objectives, and such consideration proves the district court applied the “least restrictive means” standard. In the Judicial District’s view, any inquiry into alternative means of achieving the government objective is inappropriate where, like here, the restrictions are content-neutral, rather than content-based, and thus not subject to the least restrictive alternative form of narrow tailoring. We disagree.

The Supreme Court has not discouraged courts from considering alternative approaches to achieving the government’s goals when determining whether a content- neutral regulation is narrowly tailored to advance a significant government interest. Although the Court has held that a content-neutral regulation “need not be the least restrictive or least intrusive means of serving the government’s interests,” it has also explained that “the government still may not regulate expression in such a manner that a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance its goals.” McCullen, 134 S. Ct. at 2535 (internal quotation marks omitted). And when considering content-neutral regulations, the Court itself has examined possible alternative approaches to achieving the government’s objective to determine whether the government’s chosen approach burdens substantially more speech than necessary. Id. at 2537–39. That is, the government may not “forgo[] options that could serve its interests just as well,” if those options would avoid “substantially burdening the kind of speech in which [Plaintiffs’] wish to engage.” Id. at 2537; id. at 2539 (“The point is not that [the government] must enact all or even any of the proposed [alternative approaches]. The point is instead that the [government] has available to it a variety of approaches that appear capable of serving its interests, without excluding individuals from areas historically open for speech and debate.”). Thus, “[t]o meet the requirement of narrow tailoring [in the context of content-neutral regulations], the government must demonstrate that alternative measures that burden substantially less speech would fail to achieve the government’s interests, not simply that the chosen route is easier.” Id. at 2540.

As a result, we cannot conclude the district court applied the wrong legal standard merely because it considered whether the Judicial District had options other than the complete ban on speech contained in Paragraph 1 of the Order that would equally serve its interests. We now turn our attention to whether, under the standard applicable to content-neutral regulations in a public forum, the district court abused its discretion when it found Plaintiffs had demonstrated a likelihood of success on the question of whether the Order survives constitutional scrutiny.

d. The district court did not abuse its discretion by concluding that Plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits

As discussed, for purposes of the preliminary injunction analysis, the Judicial District acquiesced in the district court’s acceptance of Plaintiffs’ characterization, and Denver’s Stipulation, that the Restricted Areas are public fora. Under that assumption, we can easily conclude the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding Plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that a complete ban of their expressive activities violates the First Amendment. Our resolution of this issue is informed by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McCullen, which is highly analogous.

In McCullen, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a state law creating thirty-five-foot buffer zones around the entrances of facilities where abortions are performed. Id. at 2525. The McCullen plaintiffs wished to approach and talk to women outside such facilities —to engage in “sidewalk counseling”— in an attempt to dissuade the women from obtaining abortions. Id. at 2527. The buffer zones forced the McCullen plaintiffs away from their preferred positions outside the clinics’ entrances, thereby hampering their sidewalk counseling efforts. Id. at 2527–28. The McCullen plaintiffs brought suit, arguing the buffer zones restricted their First Amendment rights and seeking to enjoin enforcement of the statute creating the buffer zones. Id. at 2528. After the First Circuit upheld the statute as a reasonable content-neutral time, place, and manner restriction, the Supreme Court granted certiorari. Id.

The Court began its analysis by recognizing that the buffer-zone statute operated to restrict speech in traditional public fora: streets and sidewalks. Id. at 2529. It then held the buffer-zone statute was a content-neutral restriction because violations of the act depended not on what the plaintiffs said, but on where they said it. Id. at 2531 (“Indeed, petitioners can violate the Act merely by standing in a buffer zone, without displaying a sign or uttering a word.”). The Court then proceeded to apply the test for content-neutral restrictions in a public forum, assessing whether the buffer-zone statute was “narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest.” Id. at 2534. Because the plaintiffs had not challenged the significance of the government’s asserted interests, the Court’s analysis largely focused on the question of whether the statute was narrowly tailored to serve that interest.

The Court noted the buffer zones placed serious burdens on the plaintiffs’ speech activities. Id. at 2535. Specifically, by preventing the plaintiffs from engaging in quiet, one-on-one conversations about abortion and distributing literature, the buffer zones “operate[d] to deprive petitioners of their two primary methods of communicating with patients.” Id. at 2536. Although the First Amendment does not guarantee a right to any particular form of speech, the Supreme Court explained that some forms of speech -one-on-one conversation and leafletting on public sidewalks— “have historically been more closely associated with the transmission of ideas than others.” Id. The Court held that “[w]hen the government makes it more difficult to engage in [one-on-one communication and leafletting], it imposes an especially significant First Amendment burden.” Id.

The Court also rejected the idea that the buffer zones were constitutional because they left ample alternative channels for communication. Id. at 2536–37. In McCullen, the size of the buffer zone made it difficult to distinguish persons headed to the clinic from passersby “in time to initiate a conversation before they enter[ed] the buffer zone.” Id. at 2535. As a result, the plaintiffs were often forced to raise their voices from outside the buffer zone once they identified the clinic patients, thereby forcing a mode of communication contrary to their compassionate message and preventing them from distributing pamphlets. Id. at 2535-36. Where the plaintiffs wished to engage in quiet conversations with women seeking abortions and not in noisy protest speech, the Court held it was “no answer to say that petitioners can still be ‘seen and heard’ by women within the buffer zones.” Id. at 2537. Instead, the Supreme Court concluded the thirty-five foot buffer zones had “effectively stifled petitioners’ message” by prohibiting the plaintiffs’ chosen means of communication. Id.

Finally, the Court held the buffer zones burdened substantially more speech than necessary to achieve the state’s asserted interests in public safety, preventing harassment of women and clinic staff seeking entrance to clinics, and preventing deliberate obstruction of clinic entrances. Id. Although the Court acknowledged the importance of these interests, it determined the state’s chosen method of achieving them —categorically excluding most individuals from the buffer zones— was not narrowly tailored. Id. at 2537–41. That is, the Court held the government had not demonstrated “that alternative measures that burden substantially less speech would fail to achieve the government’s interests.” Id. at 2540. In so doing, the Court expressly rejected the argument that the government could choose a particular means of achieving its interests merely because that method was easier to administer. Id.

Here, the Order imposes substantially similar restrictions on Plaintiffs’ First Amendment activities as the buffer-zone statute did in McCullen. Specifically, the Order imposes a categorical ban on First Amendment activity within the Restricted Areas. This ban effectively destroys Plaintiffs’ ability to engage in one-on-one communication and leafletting within the Restricted Areas. And the record is silent on whether Plaintiff could adequately identify and thereby engage in their preferred method of communication before the public entered the Restricted Areas. Where the district court’s preliminary injunction analysis was based on a public forum analysis and the record does not contain facts to distinguish McCullen, we cannot conclude that the district court abused its discretion in finding that the Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claim.

Moreover, the Judicial District’s asserted interests in banning First Amendment activity in the Restricted Areas are largely identical to the government interests asserted in McCullen: unhindered ingress and egress and public safety. See id. We agree these interests are legitimate. But on this record at least, the district court did not abuse its discretion in concluding the means chosen to achieve those interests —a total ban on expressive activity— is not narrowly tailored, as even content-neutral regulations in a public forum must be. 9

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9 This is not to say that the Judicial District cannot impose content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions that are narrowly-tailored to advance the significant interests it identifies. Indeed, several of the provisions contained in the Order were not enjoined by the district court. As one example, paragraph 4 of the Order prohibits the use of sound amplification equipment. This type of content-neutral restriction has long been upheld. See Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 796–97 (1989).
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In summary, the district court did not abuse its discretion by analyzing the issues at the preliminary injunction stage as if the Restricted Areas were public fora, or by considering alternative means of achieving the governmental interests in determining whether the Order is narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest. Similarly, the district court did not abuse its discretion by finding Plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claim that the complete prohibition of Plaintiffs’ plans to distribute pamphlets to people in a public forum is unconstitutional. See United States v. Apel, __ U.S. __, 134 S. Ct. 1144, 1154–55 (2014) (Ginsburg, J., concurring) (“When the Government permits the public onto part of its property, in either a traditional or designated public forum, its ‘ability to permissibly restrict expressive conduct is very limited.’” (quoting United States v. Grace, 461 U.S. 171, 177 (1983)).

Nevertheless, because the question of the forum status of the Restricted Areas will remain central to the district court’s permanent injunction analysis on remand, we now address principles relevant to the resolution of this issue. See Cook v. Rockwell Int’l Corp., 618 F.3d 1127, 1142 n.15 (10th Cir. 2010) (“[I]t is proper to . . . decide questions of law raised in this appeal that are certain to arise again . . . in order to guide the district court on remand.”). In doing so, we express no opinion as to the merits of that question.

C. Issues on Remand

To determine whether a permanent injunction should be granted, the district court must reach a final decision on the First Amendment issues in this case. Because the relevant First Amendment test varies according to the nature of the forum involved and because the Judicial District will presumably contest Plaintiffs’ characterization of the Restricted Areas as public fora, the district court is required to first determine the forum status of the Restricted Areas. In resolving this question, the parties must present evidence, and the district court must enter factual findings supporting its conclusion, that each of the Restricted Areas constitutes a traditional public forum, a designated public forum, or a nonpublic forum. See, e.g., Huminski v. Corsones, 396 F.3d 53, 90–92 (2d Cir. 2004) (separately considering the forum status of state courthouses, court lands/grounds, and parking lots); Sammartano v. First Judicial Dist. Ct., 303 F.3d 959, 966–68 (9th Cir. 2002) (concluding plaintiffs were likely to succeed on First Amendment challenge to rule restricting expressive clothing in municipal complex, including courtrooms, because the rule “does not differentiate between courtrooms and other public areas”), abrogated on other grounds by Winter v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, Inc., 555 U.S. 7 (2008); United States v. Gilbert, 920 F.2d 878, 884 (11th Cir. 1991) (Gilbert I) (holding portions of courthouse grounds were designated public fora, while other parts of the grounds were nonpublic fora). We summarize the relevant precedent on these issues now in an attempt to aid the district court and the parties in this task on remand. In addition, we provide some limited guidance to the district court and the parties on the tension between the Judicial District and Denver over the appropriate use of the Restricted Areas.

1. Traditional Public Fora

The Supreme Court has long recognized “that public places historically associated with the free exercise of expressive activities, such as streets, sidewalks, and parks, are considered, without more, to be public forums.” United States v. Grace, 461 U.S. 171, 177 (1983) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Perry Educ. Ass’n v. Perry Local Educators’ Ass’n, 460 U.S. 37, 45 (1983) (identifying as “quintessential” public fora those spaces that “time out of mind[] have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions”). Here, the Restricted Areas include the arced walkway that runs from the corner of Elati Street and Colfax Avenue in a curved path across the front of the Courthouse to the Patio in front of the main entrance to the Courthouse. The inclusion of this area raises at least a question concerning its status as traditional a public forum.

The Supreme Court has also cautioned, however, that not all streets and sidewalks are traditional public fora. See United States v. Kokinda, 497 U.S. 720, 727 (1990) (discussing a postal sidewalk “constructed solely to provide for the passage of individuals engaged in postal business” from the parking area to the post office door); Greer v. Spock, 424 U.S. 828, 835–37 (1976) (speech restrictions on a military reservation that contained streets and sidewalks). Instead, the particular characteristics of a sidewalk are highly relevant to the inquiry. See Grace, 461 U.S. at 179–80. “The mere physical characteristics of the property cannot dictate” the outcome of the forum analysis. Kokinda, 497 U.S. at 727. Rather, “the location and purpose of a publicly owned sidewalk is critical to determining whether such a sidewalk constitutes a public forum.” Id. at 728–29.

The Supreme Court’s discussion in Grace is likely to be of particular relevance on remand. In Grace, the Court considered whether a federal statute prohibiting expressive activities on the Supreme Court’s grounds could be constitutionally applied to the adjacent public sidewalks. 461 U.S. at 172–73. The Court found the public sidewalks along the perimeter of the grounds were physically indistinguishable from other public sidewalks in Washington, D.C. Id. at 179. “There is no separation, no fence, and no indication whatever to persons stepping from the street to the curb and sidewalks that serve as the perimeter of the Court grounds that they have entered some special type of enclave.” Id. at 180. See also Int’l Soc’y for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee, 505 U.S. 672, 680 (1992) (“[W]e have recognized that the location of property also has a bearing [on whether it is a traditional public forum] because separation from acknowledged public areas may serve to indicate that the separated property is a special enclave, subject to greater restriction.”). In the absence of some physical distinction between typical public sidewalks and the sidewalks making up the perimeter of the Court grounds, the Court in Grace held the perimeter sidewalks were traditional public fora, subject only to those restrictions normally allowed in such spaces. 461 U.S. at 180. Thus, on remand here, the district court must determine whether the evidence supports a finding that the arced walkway is physically distinguishable from other public sidewalks.

But the physical similarity to public sidewalks is not alone determinative of these sidewalks’ forum status. In Kokinda, the Supreme Court held that a sidewalk owned by and in front of a United States Post Office was not a traditional public forum, despite the fact that it was physically identical to a public sidewalk across the parking lot from the post office entrance. 497 U.S. at 727. The Court reasoned the post office sidewalk did not share the characteristics of a sidewalk open to the public at large. Although the public sidewalk formed a public passageway that served as a general thoroughfare, in contrast, “the postal sidewalk was constructed solely to provide for the passage of individuals engaged in postal business.” Id. As a result, the Court held the postal sidewalk was not a traditional public forum. Id. at 729–30. Accordingly, the evidence and findings of fact on remand should be focused on the physical characteristics and the intended and actual use of any sidewalks included in the Restricted Areas.

Importantly, the mere fact a sidewalk abuts a courthouse or its grounds is not determinative of the forum status of the sidewalk. 10 The Grace Court expressly rejected the idea that a traditional public forum could be transformed into a nonpublic forum merely because of its physical proximity to government property. 461 U.S. at 180. The Court stated

[t]raditional public forum property occupies a special position in terms of First Amendment protection and will not lose its historically recognized character for the reason that it abuts government property that has been dedicated to a use other than as a forum for public expression. Nor may the government transform the character of the property by the expedient of including it within the statutory definition of what might be considered a non-public forum parcel of property.

Id.; see also Rodney A. Smolla, 1 Smolla & Nimmer on Freedom of Speech § 8:32 (“With the development of modern public forum doctrine, courts increasingly have come to recognize that they are not immune from the rules set down for other public property.”). In Grace, the Supreme Court concluded, “[w]e are convinced . . . that the [statute], which totally bans the specified communicative activity on the public sidewalks around the Court grounds, cannot be justified as a reasonable place restriction primarily because it has an insufficient nexus with any of the public interests [asserted].” 461 U.S. at 181. Similarly, the fact that the arced walkway abuts the Courthouse here is not determinative alone of its forum status.

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10 The cases relied on by the Judicial District do not support the blanket proposition that all courthouse grounds are automatically nonpublic fora merely because they physically abut a courthouse. Rather, these cases first conclude the grounds are not a traditional public forum and then carefully consider the physical characteristics of the government property, as well as the prior use of that property for expressive activities, to determine its forum status. See Huminski v. Corsones, 396 F.3d 53, 90–92 (2d Cir. 2004) (holding courthouses were nonpublic fora where buildings housing the courts had not been traditionally open to the public for expressive activities and such activities inside the courthouse would likely be incompatible with the purposes the courthouse serves); Sammartano v. First Judicial Dist. Ct., 303 F.3d 959, 966 (9th Cir. 2002) (holding civil complex, including courts and public offices had not “by long tradition or by government fiat” been open to public expression and agreeing with parties that it was a nonpublic forum), abrogated on other grounds by Winter v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, Inc., 555 U.S. 7 (2008). See also United States v. Gilbert (Gilbert I), 920 F.2d 878, 884–85 (11th Cir. 1991) (considering prior expressive activities on different areas of court grounds and holding some portions had been designated as public fora, while other parts of the grounds were nonpublic fora).
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The district court will also be required to decide the forum status of the Patio before it can apply the proper standard to restrictions on expressive activity in that Restricted Area. The D.C. Circuit recently applied the Court’s forum analysis in Grace to the question of whether the plaza in front of the Supreme Court was a traditional public forum. See Hodge v. Talkin, 799 F.3d 1145, 1158 (D.C. Cir. 2015), petition for cert. filed, 84 U.S.L.W. 3388 (U.S. Jan. 4, 2016) (No. 15-863). The court’s analysis focused on the plaza’s physical characteristics, emphasizing the architectural integration of the plaza with the Supreme Court building itself, as well as the physical separation between the plaza and the perimeter sidewalks. Id. at 1158–59. In particular, the D.C. Circuit relied on evidence that the Supreme Court plaza is elevated from the public sidewalk by a set of marble steps that contrast with the public sidewalk, but match the steps leading to the entrance of the Supreme Court building. It also relied on evidence that the plaza is surrounded by a low wall that matches the wall surrounding the Supreme Court building. Id. at 1158. According to the court, a visitor would be on notice that the pathway to the Supreme Court begins on the plaza. Id. Because the physical characteristics of the plaza indicated an intentional separation from the surrounding sidewalks and because the plaza had not traditionally been a space open for expressive activities, the D.C. Circuit held the Supreme Court plaza was a nonpublic forum. Id. at 1159–60.

Here, the parties should present evidence and the district court should make findings about the physical characteristics of the arced walkway and Patio, with attention to the ways in which each is distinguished from public sidewalks and the public areas of the Plaza. Specifically, the district court should consider whether it would be apparent to a visitor that by entering the Patio he is entering an enclave connected with the Courthouse and whether the use of the arced walkway is limited to courthouse ingress and egress.

?2. Designated Public Fora

If the district court finds that one or more of the Restricted Areas is not a traditional public forum, it must next consider whether the Restricted Area has been nevertheless designated as public fora. The Supreme Court has explained that “a government entity may create ‘a designated public forum’ if government property that has not traditionally been regarded as a public forum is intentionally opened up for that purpose.” Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 555 U.S. 460, 469 (2009) (holding that placement of certain privately donated permanent monuments in public park while rejecting others constituted government, not public, speech). To create a designated public forum, “the government must make an affirmative choice to open up its property for use as a public forum.” United States v. Am. Library Ass’n, Inc., 539 U.S. 194, 206 (2003) (holding that library’s provision of internet access did not open a designated public forum, but was offered as a technological extension of its book collection). The Court has further cautioned that “[t]he government does not create a public forum by inaction or by permitting limited discourse, but only by intentionally opening a nontraditional forum for public discourse.” Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Def. & Educ. Fund, 473 U.S. 788, 802 (1985). See also Walker v. Tex. Div., Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., ___ U.S. ___, 135 S. Ct. 2239, 2249–50 (2015) (holding that Texas did not intentionally open its license plates to public discourse). Thus, the government’s intent is the focus of this inquiry. See Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 802; see also Gen. Media Commc’ns, Inc. v. Cohen, 131 F.3d 273, 279 (2d Cir. 1997) (“Governmental intent is said to be the ‘touchstone’ of forum analysis.”), as corrected and reported at 1997 U.S. App. LEXIS 40571, *15 (March 25, 1998).

The Supreme Court has further instructed that it “will not find that a public forum has been created in the face of clear evidence of a contrary intent, nor will [it] infer that the government intended to create a public forum when the nature of the property is inconsistent with expressive activity.” Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 803. If the “principal function of the property would be disrupted by expressive activity,” the Supreme Court is “particularly reluctant” to conclude the government designated it as a public forum. Id. at 804. Consequently, prohibitions on speech within a courthouse have been routinely upheld. 11 See, e.g., Hodge, 799 F.3d at 1158 (upholding statute banning expressive activities within Supreme Court building); Mezibov v. Allen, 411 F.3d 712, 718 (6th Cir. 2005) (“The courtroom is a nonpublic forum.”); Huminski, 396 F.3d at 91 (collecting cases and holding that the interior of a courthouse is not a public forum); Sefick v. Gardner, 164 F.3d 370, 372 (7th Cir. 1998) (“The lobby of the courthouse is not a traditional public forum or a designated public forum, not a place open to the public for the presentation of views. No one can hold a political rally in the lobby of a federal courthouse.”); Berner v. Delahanty, 129 F.3d 20, 26 (1st Cir. 1997) (holding that courtroom is a nonpublic forum).

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11 The preliminary injunction here does not enjoin the Order’s restrictions on speech within the Courthouse.
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Under facts similar to those here, the Seventh Circuit held the plaintiffs had no First Amendment right to distribute jury nullification pamphlets in the lobby of the county courthouse. Braun v. Baldwin, 346 F.3d 761, 764 (7th Cir. 2003) (“[Plaintiffs] have no greater right than a criminal defendant’s lawyer to tell jurors in the courthouse to disobey the judge’s instructions.” (emphasis added)). See also United States v. Ogle, 613 F.2d 233 (10th Cir. 1979) (upholding conviction for jury tampering where the defendant, who did not raise a First Amendment defense, attempted to have jury nullification literature delivered to a juror in a pending case).

Although there is little doubt the interior of a courthouse is a nonpublic forum, the forum status of a courthouse’s exterior is dependent upon the unique facts involved. Compare Grace, 461 U.S. at 182 (acknowledging “necessity to protect persons and property or to maintain proper order and decorum within the Supreme Court grounds,” but striking as unconstitutional a ban on expressive activities on abutting sidewalks), with Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 559, 562–64, 572–74 (1965) (upholding statute prohibiting demonstration outside a courthouse intended to affect the outcome of pending criminal charges, but reversing defendant’s conviction pursuant to the statute under the circumstances). In determining whether the government “intended to designate a place not traditionally open to assembly and debate as a public forum,” the Supreme Court “has looked to the policy and practice of the government and to the nature of the property and its compatibility with expressive activity.” Walker, 135 S. Ct. at 2250 (internal quotation marks omitted).

Applying these principles, the Eleventh Circuit reached contrary conclusions regarding different portions of the grounds of a federal building housing a federal district court and federal agencies. Gilbert I, 902 F.2d at 884. In Gilbert I, the plaintiff challenged an injunction prohibiting him from using the federal building as his home and from engaging in certain expressive activities in and around the building. The ground level of the federal building included an interior lobby and, outside the lobby doors, a covered portico leading to an uncovered plaza. Id. at 880–81. Because demonstrations had occurred frequently on the uncovered plaza, the Eleventh Circuit held the uncovered plaza had been designated as a public forum. In contrast, it determined the covered portico area was not a public forum. In reaching that conclusion, the court relied in part on the district court’s finding that the Government Services Agency (GSA) had an unwritten policy of excluding demonstrators from the covered portico. Although there was evidence demonstrators had occasionally used the portico during protest activities, the Eleventh Circuit relied on the district court’s finding that these were “isolated instances of undiscovered violations” of the GSA policy and not the intentional “opening of a nontraditional forum for public discourse.” 12 Id. at 884–85.

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12 After the Eleventh Circuit issued this decision, an unrelated security issue caused the GSA to place a row of planters across the uncovered plaza and to issue a statement limiting the public forum to the area between the planters and the public street. Mr. Gilbert again sued and the circuit court upheld the district court’s ruling that the GSA had effectively withdrawn the area between the planters and the building previously designated as a public forum. See United States v. Gilbert (Gilbert III), 130 F.3d 1458, 1461 (11th Cir. 1997) (“The government is not required to retain indefinitely the open character of a facility.”). Between Gilbert I and Gilbert III, the Eleventh Circuit upheld Mr. Gilbert’s conviction for obstructing the entrance to the federal building. United States v. Gilbert (Gilbert II), 47 F.3d 1116, 1117 (11th Cir. 1995).
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As the decision in Gilbert I demonstrates, the issue of whether an area associated with a courthouse has been designated as a public or nonpublic forum is highly dependent on the evidence of the government’s intent to open the area to public speech. That intent can be established by the government’s policy statements, 13 affirmative actions by the government to designate the area as a public forum, 14 stipulation, 15 the compatibility of expressive activity with the principal function of the property, 16 and whether and the frequency with which public speech has been permitted in the forum. 17 To avoid post hoc justification for a desire to suppress a particular message, courts have considered the government’s statement of policy in light of the government’s actual practice. Air Line Pilots Ass’n, Int’l v. Dep’t of Aviation of City of Chi., 45 F.3d 1144, 1153–54 (7th Cir. 1995) (“[A] court must examine the actual policy —as gleaned from the consistent practice with regard to various speakers— to determine whether a state intended to create a designated public forum.”); Hays Cty. Guardian v. Supple, 969 F.2d 111, 117–18 (5th Cir. 1992) (“[T]he government’s policy is indicated by its consistent practice, not each exceptional regulation that departs from the consistent practice.”). Accordingly, forum status is an inherently factual inquiry about the government’s intent and the surrounding circumstances that requires the district court to make detailed factual findings. See Stewart v. D. C. Armory Bd., 863 F.2d 1013, 1018 (D.C. Cir. 1988) (holding that “identifying the government’s intent . . . raises inherently factual issues that cannot be resolved on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion”); Air Line Pilots, 45 F.3d at 1154 (same). And the ultimate question is whether the facts indicate the government intended to open a nontraditional forum to expressive activity. See Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 802 (“The government does not create a public forum by inaction or by permitting limited discourse, but only by intentionally opening a nontraditional forum for public discourse.”).

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13 Church on the Rock v. City of Albuquerque, 84 F.3d 1273, 1276-77 (10th Cir. 1996) (relying on senior citizen center policies to determine forum status of senior centers); Paulsen v. County of Nassau, 925 F.2d 65, 69 (2d Cir. 1991) (relying on county charter and local law as indicia of county’s intent to dedicate coliseum to a broad array of public and expressive purposes); Gilbert I, 920 F.2d at 884 (relying on unwritten GSA policy banning demonstrations from the covered portico).

14 Church on the Rock, 84 F.3d at 1278 (holding that senior centers were designated as public fora because the city had “permitted lectures and classes on a broad range of subjects by both members and non-members”); Huminski, 396 F.3d at 91 (holding courthouse parking lot is not a public forum because there was no evidence the government did anything to designate it as such).

15 Grider v. Abramson, 180 F.3d 739, 748 n.11 (6th Cir. 1999) (relying on stipulation of the parties that courthouse steps are a public forum).

16 Paulsen, 925 F.3d at 70 (holding that coliseum grounds are a public forum, in part, because the property can accommodate a wide variety of expressive activity without threatening the government function of the facility); Greer v. Spock, 424 U.S. 828, 835– 37 (1976) (holding military reservation is not a public forum); Adderley v. Florida, 385 U.S. 39, 47 (1966) (same as to jailhouse).

17 Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U.S. 263, 267-68 (1981) (holding university’s policy of accommodating student meetings created a forum generally open for student use); Paulsen, 925 F.3d at 70 (“The grounds of the Coliseum have been used for parades, political rallies and speeches, religious weddings and circuses. . . . Routinely, banners have been displayed by patrons . . . . Significantly, . . . many groups, including war veterans, the Christian Joy Fellowship and the Salvation Army, were regularly permitted to solicit contributions or distribute literature.”); Gilbert I, 920 F.2d at 884 (holding that unenclosed plaza of a federal building that houses courtrooms has been opened by the government as a public forum because “[d]emonstrations occur there on a frequent basis,” but holding covered portico was not opened as a public forum because occasional demonstrations there were undetected violations of GSA policy).
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3. Disagreement Over Opening the Restricted Areas as Public Fora

Here, the issue of the government’s intent is complicated by the disagreement between Denver and the Judicial District about the forum status of the Restricted Areas.

According to Denver, it intended to and did open all areas of the Plaza, including those within the Restricted Areas, to the public for expressive activity. In fact, Denver (one of the Defendants) entered into a Stipulation to this effect with Plaintiffs. Cf. Grider v. Abramson, 180 F.3d 739, 748 n.11 (6th Cir. 1999) (noting that parties had stipulated that courthouse steps are a public forum). In contrast, the Judicial District argues Denver’s Stipulation that the entire Plaza is a public forum cannot control the status of the Restricted Areas because Colorado law vests the judicial branch with inherent authority to regulate state courthouses. As such, the Judicial District asserts that its intent —not Denver’s— should control the forum status of the Restricted Areas.

This argument between Defendants raises difficult and novel questions about the intersection between a government property owner’s power to designate its property as a public forum and the rights of the occupant of the government property —in this case another governmental entity— to use that property without interference. The parties have not directed us to any authority addressing the question of whose intent controls when two governmental entities disagree about the status of the same forum, and our own research has not revealed any decision precisely on point. But a review of the evolution of the Supreme Court’s doctrine on speech forums reveals some fundamental principles that may guide resolution of this difficult question.

The Supreme Court has not always recognized a First Amendment right of the public to use publicly owned property for expressive purposes. Indeed, the Court’s early jurisprudence recognized the absolute right of the government to exclude the public from using its property. See Davis v. Massachusetts, 167 U.S. 43, 46–47 (1897); see also Geoffrey R. Stone, Fora Americana: Speech in Public Places, 1974 Sup. Ct. Rev. 233, 236–37 (discussing the Supreme Court’s early forum jurisprudence). In Davis, the Court considered a First Amendment challenge to a Boston city ordinance forbidding “any public address” on public property “except in accordance with a permit from the mayor.” 167 U.S. at 44. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had affirmed a preacher’s conviction for violating the ordinance by preaching on Boston Common without first obtaining a permit from the mayor, stating “[f]or the Legislature absolutely or conditionally to forbid public speaking in a highway or public park is no more an infringement of the rights of a member of the public than for the owner of a private house to forbid it in his house.” Id. at 47 (quoting Commonwealth v. Davis, 39 N.E. 113, 113 (Mass. 1895) (Holmes, J.)). The Supreme Court unanimously affirmed, concluding that “[t]he right to absolutely exclude all right to use necessarily includes the authority to determine under what circumstances such use may be availed of, as the greater power contains the lesser.” Id. at 48. Under the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence at the time, the government —as the owner of public property— retained an absolute right to exclude the public from that property, just as any private property owner would have the right to exclude others. See Stone, supra, at 237 (“[T]he state possessed the power absolutely to prohibit the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech on public property simply by asserting the prerogatives traditionally associated with the private ownership of land. The complex and difficult problem of the public forum had been ‘solved’ by resort to common law concepts of private property.”).

Later, the Supreme Court revisited the question of the public’s use of government property for expressive purposes and again relied on traditional notions of private property ownership. See Hague v. Comm. for Indus. Org., 307 U.S. 496 (1939). In Hague, the Court considered the constitutionality of city ordinances prohibiting all public meetings and leafletting in streets and other public places without a permit. Id. at 501–03. Departing from its analysis in Davis, Justice Roberts, writing for a plurality of the Court, stated:

Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions. Such use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and liberties of citizens. The privilege of a citizen of the United States to use the streets and parks for communication of views on national questions may be regulated in the interest of all; it is not absolute, but relative, and must be exercised in subordination to the general comfort and convenience, and in consonance with peace and good order; but it must not, in the guise of regulation, be abridged or denied.

Id. at 515–16. Justice Roberts’s position accepted the underlying premise of Davis —that the owner of government property enjoyed the same prerogatives as any private property owner— but then extended that premise to predicate a “public forum right upon established common law notions of adverse possession and public trust.” Stone, supra, at 238. See also Harry Kalven, Jr., The Concept of the Public Forum: Cox v. Louisiana, 1965 Sup. Ct. Rev. 1, 13 (describing Justice Roberts’s analysis in Hague as establishing “a kind of First-Amendment easement” in which the public, through long use and tradition, has acquired a right to use certain types of public property for First Amendment purposes).

Although Justice Roberts spoke only for a plurality of the Hague Court, his formulation has since been accepted by the Supreme Court as the prevailing rationale underlying the concept of traditional public fora. See, e.g., Perry Educ., 460 U.S. at 45 (defining traditional public fora by adopting Justice Roberts’s “time out of mind” description). Even in the context of a traditional public forum in which the government property owner’s power to exclude and curtail use is sharply circumscribed, the underlying rationale is premised on traditional notions of private property ownership. Indeed, the government’s power to control speech in a traditional public forum is circumscribed precisely because the public has, through the extent and nature of its use of these types of government property, acquired, in effect, a “speech easement” that the government property owner must now honor.

The Supreme Court has continued to rely on traditional notions of property ownership to describe the government’s ability to control the use of its property. For example, the Supreme Court has recognized that the government, “no less than a private owner of property, has power to preserve the property under its control for the use to which it is lawfully dedicated.” Greer, 424 U.S. at 836 (emphasis added). This includes the ability to designate portions of government property for expressive purposes. See Perry Educ., 460 U.S. at 45. But the underlying rationale of a designated public forum is that the governmental entity with control over the property can decide whether and to what extent to open nontraditional fora to public speech. See Christian Legal Soc’y Chapter of the Univ. of Cal., Hastings Coll. of Law v. Martinez, 561 U.S. 661, 679 (2010) (“[I]n a progression of cases, this Court has employed forum analysis to determine when a governmental entity, in regulating property in its charge, may place limitations on speech.”) (emphasis added)).

In this case, the record before the district court at the preliminary injunction hearing indicated that Denver is the owner of the Courthouse and its surrounding grounds. It was also undisputed that there is no lease agreement between Denver and the Judicial District that could have transferred some of Denver’s property interests to the Judicial District. And the Judicial District is not the only occupant of the building; the county also has courtrooms in the building. As a result, Denver’s intent will be particularly relevant to a determination of whether the Restricted Areas were designated as a public forum.

Nevertheless, the Judicial District argues Denver may not unilaterally designate the Restricted Areas as public fora because, under Colorado law, the state judicial branch is endowed with inherent authority as an independent and co-equal branch of government to regulate state courthouses. The first problem with this argument is that it ignores the limits of that inherent authority. Although Colorado permits its courts to do all that is “reasonably required to enable a court to perform efficiently its judicial functions, to protect its dignity, independence, and integrity, and to make its lawful actions effective,” the Colorado Supreme Court has recognized that this inherent authority is not without its limitations. Bd. of Cty. Comm’rs of Weld Cty. v. Nineteenth Judicial Dist., 895 P.2d 545, 547–48 (Colo. 1995) (quoting Pena v. District Ct., 681 P.2d 953, 956 (Colo.1984)). Specifically, the “court’s inherent authority terminates when its ability to carry out its constitutional duty to administer justice is no longer threatened.” Id. at 549.

On the existing record, the Judicial District has not demonstrated that Plaintiffs’ First Amendment activities interfered with the ability of the Judicial District to carry out its essential functions. Mr. Steadman testified that Plaintiffs’ pamphleteering presented no security risk to the Courthouse. And the Judicial District presented no evidence indicating that the narrow preliminary injunction issued by the district court would interfere with its judicial functions. On the record before us, therefore, the Judicial District has not demonstrated that the preliminary injunction issued by the district court implicates the court’s inherent authority.

But it is also true that Denver’s statement of its intent is only one factor to be considered by the district court in determining whether a permanent injunction should issue. Recall that the government’s statement of policy should be weighed against the evidence of its actual practice to avoid post hoc justifications. See Air Line Pilots, 45 F.3d at 1153; Hays Cty. Guardian, 969 F.2d at 117–18. Denver’s concession in the Stipulation and its expressions of past intent could be motivated by fiscal or other considerations that are inconsistent with its actual practice.

For example, although the evidence indicated that some expressive activity has occurred in the Restricted Areas, those occasions may have been “isolated incidents of undiscovered violations,” rather than evidence of affirmative acts to open the Restricted Areas as public fora. Gilbert I, 920 F.2d at 885. And a contrary intent might be gleaned from the design of the Restricted Areas and the extent to which public and private areas are clearly separated. See Grace, 461 U.S. at 179–80. Also of importance in assessing whether the Restricted Areas have been designated as public fora is the extent to which doing so is incompatible with the primary use of the Courthouse. See Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 803. That is, it would be strong evidence that Denver did not intend to designate all of the Restricted Areas as public fora if to do so would destroy the primary function of the Courthouse. Or in different terms, the district court must assess whether it is credible that a governmental owner would construct a courthouse and install state and county judicial operations within it, only to designate public fora so intrusively that the essential function of the courthouse is thwarted. Thus, although the Stipulation provides some evidence on the question of whether the Restricted Areas have been designated as public fora, it is not alone determinative of that question.

III. CONCLUSION

Based on the record before it, the district court did not abuse its discretion in granting Plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction. We therefore AFFIRM the order entering a limited preliminary injunction in favor of Plaintiffs, and REMAND for further proceedings consistent with this decision.

Virginia Dare was an “Anchor Baby”

Not meaning to poke fun at young Ms Dare who disappeared along with the rest of the Roanoke Colony more than 400 years ago. More like mocking and reproving redneck bigots who make a big stink about other people having the same immigration privileges as THEIR ancestors did. Especially as it’s an election issue.

Along with the Religious Refugees. See, the first English immigrants were notably religious extremists fleeing from other religious extremists. Virginia the colony was named not for the Virgin Mary, but for Queen Elizabeth. The one who bullied Parliament into passing the Conformity doctrines. Which led to some hugely large massive horrifying monstrous big “civil” wars in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland. Then exported to America along with the ongoing British v Spain and France wars.  The plan was then as now (think Israel) put a large amount of people who are just too contentious to allow them to stay in the Motherland, give them discount passage and sell them limited supplies and weapons. And do a lot of it on credit. The French term for it was pioneers. A support system for military adventures.  Make sure they’re likely to piss off the natives, but not likely to survive without some “emergency” backup from Momma England.

Others did the same thing, the English just were the ones who got away with it. Davy Crockett was part of two such maneuvers. Born in Tennessee when the Revolution hadn’t been worked out, Tennessee having been treaty land which the Crown was refusing to allow English expansion. One of the sore spots that the sorehead revolutionaries used as an excuse for the revolution. It’s referenced in the Declaration of Independence. The British government honoring some of their treaty obligations by selling weapons to Natives. And blankets (ahem!) and other goods. The Treaties in question being the peace agreements after the 7 Years War which was fought mostly in Europe but in American History class we’re taught to call it the French and Indian War. And since he was born in 1786 which was just barely almost 20 years before the Louisiana purchase, where the kings of  France and Spain took turns financing each others wars by selling land in The New World which had never been visited by any European king. They sold land back and forth that they had never seen. Along with the people of the region. Subject of Spain one morning and France the next. The English and their bastard child The United States did the same thing.

to tie it all together….

Definitely Davy Crockett was born of illegal immigrants on Cherokee land. The Roanoke colony was located in what’s now the Carolinas, named for one of the Kings Charles of England. The Conformity Acts caused such frictions between English Christians that Protestant groups like the Pilgrim Church, Puritans, Presbyterians and of course Catholics were slaughtered and persecuted whenever their factions weren’t persecuting every other faction. And a whole bunch of Christians who just could not conform to other Christian doctrines fled to America to set up shop. And put up shot. There was for instance a running feud which often broke into gunfire between South Carolina and North Carolina about the difference between Presbyterian and Episcopalian and another cross-Potomac same thing because Virginia was mostly Protestant and Maryland was predominately Catholic.  You didn’t have to be across the Catholic Protestant line to piss off the authorities. Just being a Non Conformist protestant would do the trick. I got that from the Oxford World Almanac which interestingly enough is sponsored by the Episcopal Church.

Whatever happened to Ms Dare and the rest of the Roanoke settlers is pure speculation but there sure is a lot of that too. Some have said in my hearing that the Roanoke people assimilated into the Cherokee or other nearby tribes. No documentation of that, all the documentation is on the lines that they Never Were Found Again.   Some of the speculation seems, to me, very cult like.

And a lot of the ones who promote that kind of conspiracy theories are also heavily into the Birther and Minuteman militias. And with ties to the Klan.

But with all these centuries of Christian v Christian slaughter, it’s somehow the fault of Jewish merchants (who say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas)and Muslims. There have already been calls for the opening of internment camps for American Muslims.

Although the Hate Groups keep telling us that Muslims can’t be Americans. Or Native American Church. Or Jews. Or anybody who doesn’t attend Their Church. Ask any of those who proposing a Church State which one is to be the State Church and he’ll probably (eventually) say his own church of course.

Before any of all that comes around, maybe Christians better stop hating each other first. And your fellow Americans regardless of whether you think we’re actually Americans.

Denver pro-war rally gets Code Pinked!


DENVER, COLORADO- The No-Peace-For-Iran rally hosted by Zionist front group Americans Against Terrorism (AAT) on the capitol steps on Sunday was outnumbered by pro-Palestinian activists shouting from below. While one racist warmonger told the crowd “pay no attention to the kebabs on the sidewalk”, a Code Pink activist was able to hold up a banner right in front of the podium.

Her banner read: “STOP THE NEXT WAR NOW! WARMONGERS BEGET TERRORISTS!” but it took the audience a minute to register that her message clashed with theirs. Then she was grabbed and pulled forcibly away.

The AAT rally was much smaller than the year previous. Enthusiasm for Christian Zionist end-time-ism, Islamophobia, anti-Iran sentiment, and Standing-with-Israel, appears to be expiring.

Another measure of the success of the counterprotest was AAT deciding to take down a large Israeli flag which they’d draped on the capitol as a backdrop when antiwar activists arrived with a similarly blue-striped banner reading “Israel is a terrorist state”. Along with Code Pink and Occupy Denver, counterprotest included many Jewish peace activists, even a couple who were Israeli.

David Anderson, who took the photograph above and who insisted the pro-war goons unhand their unwelcome guest, described the scene thus:

It should be noted that when Republicans and Israel call their group “Americans Against Terrorism”. They mean the opposite, They want to bomb and terrorize Iran just as they have done in Palestine for years. This is a tired old trick that the citizens are catching on to.

The AAT would not exist, were it not for the funds from Israel. Another smoke screen by Israel is to call their group “Americans”. This is called; whip your friends into a frenzy, then get them to fight your battle for you.

And there you have the reason this one small woman with a message of truth strikes fear into the hearts of liars and hypocrites.

Osama bin Laden’s books. They could do you more good than they did him.

Last week the CIA decided
Crossing the Rubicon, The New Pearl Harbor, Imperial Hubris, Obama's Wars, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy... to declassify the list of books found in Osama bin Laden’s last hideout when Seal Team Six made their raid. There were 39 titles, which the press has categorized as heavy on conspiracy theory. That’s true, untrue, and unsurprising if you consider the official White House line is that the US does not support illegal coups. These authors beg to differ, including the unimpeachable Noam Chomski. Other investigative standouts include William Blum, Greg Palast, John Perkins. The list did not include publication dates or editions, just author and title. A closer inspection of the list is revealing.
 
(This is part one of a continuing series.)

It would be more accurate to describe Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf as history, mostly contemporary with notable exceptions. For example, bin Laden’s reference on Christianity and Islam in Spain 756-1031 was published in 1889 with the full title “The Relations and Mutual Influences of Christianity and Mohammedanism During the Khalifate of Cordova.” In 1889 European perspectives on the Moorish occupation appear dramatically antisemitic.

The history of The US and Vietnam 1787-1941 begins with Thomas Jefferson’s first interests in trading for rice with “Cochinchina”. Written by a former ambassador, it was published in 1990 by the National Defense University Press. The Best Enemy Money Can Buy is about the symbiotic relationship between the US military industrial complex and Russia’s.

Some of bin Laden’s “books” such as Michael O’Hanlon’s Unfinished Business were staple-bound publications from US policy think tanks. I’ll review those and the various intelligence agency exposés in subsequent posts.

Here are the 39 titles listed alphabetically:
The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason; A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim; America’s Strategic Blunders by Willard Matthias; America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ by Michel Chossudovsky; Al-Qaeda’s Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007 by Hanna Rogan; The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast; The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Anthony Sutton; Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris; Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier; Bounding the Global War on Terror by Jeffrey Record; Checking Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions by Henry Sokolski and Patrick Clawson; Christianity and Islam in Spain 756-1031 A.D. by C. R. Haines; Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies by Cheryl Benard; Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins; Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Committee of 300 by John Coleman; Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert; Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance (only the book’s introduction) by C. Christine Fair and Peter Chalk; Guerrilla Air Defense: Antiaircraft Weapons and Techniques for Guerrilla Forces by James Crabtree; Handbook of International Law by Anthony Aust; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky; Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer; In Pursuit of Allah’s Pleasure by Asim Abdul Maajid, Esaam-ud-Deen and Dr. Naahah Ibrahim; International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific by John Ikenberry and Michael Mastandano; Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II by William Blum; Military Intelligence Blunders by John Hughes-Wilson; Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s program of research in behavioral modification. Joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session, August 3, 1977. United States Congress Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky; New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin; New Political Religions, or Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper; Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward; Oxford History of Modern War by Charles Townsend; The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy; Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum; The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Hall (1928); Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins; The Taking of America 1-2-3 by Richard Sprague; Unfinished Business: U.S. Overseas Military Presence in the 21stCentury by Michael O’Hanlon; The U.S. and Vietnam 1787-1941 by Robert Hopkins Miller; “Website Claims Steve Jackson Games Foretold 9/11,” article posted on ICV2.com.

Deadliest motorcycle “gang” in Waco shoot-out was not Bandidos, Cossacks, Scimitars, or Vaqueros. It was police.

Bandidos, Cossacks, Scimitars, Vaqueros Motorcycle Clubs
Was the Waco Shoot-out a gunfight between rival gangs or an ambush laid by law enforcement? Police are monopolizing the testimony but the evidence suggests a barroom brawl became a pretext to kill or arrest club officers, essentially grassroots organizers, now charged with “organized crime”. Investigators can litter the crime scene with brass-knuckles, knives and wallet chains, but the shell casings are going to be police issue. Motorcycle headlights were on, indicating club members were trying to leave. Police claim that the brawlers redirected their fire toward officers, but did that happen while the bikers were trying to ride off? Because riding requires both hands. This gangland “shoot-out” was a St Valentine’s Day Massacre executed by cops.
 
[5/20 Update: HA! The nine casualties died of gunshot wounds, sustained outside the restaurant. No shell casings were found around the bodies. Eight of the nine were Cossacks. The eighteen wounded are not expected to be charged. So much for the narrative that gangs were fighting each other, or that Bandidos were the aggressors.]

It’s described as being a gang shoot-out, but what happened in Waco is still shrouded in the fog of the official POV. Did motorcycle club members shoot at each other? They’re unavailable for interviews, locked up on million dollar bonds. The Twin Peaks restaurant claims the shooting started outside. The only witnesses reaching reporters are the sergeant giving the press briefing and undercover cops purporting to describe the tensions between the “gangs”. By my reading, informant provocateurs incited trouble by “rocking” patches which claimed the territory of “Texas” for the Cossacks Motorcycle Club.

Something like three dozen undercover officers were monitoring the usually uneventful bi-monthly meeting of the Confederation of Clubs and Independents, in anticipation that the “Texas” patch would offend the Bandidos MC. They were able to respond within 45 seconds of the alleged altercation. What might have been an unremarkable barroom brawl, if even that was not contrived, turned into an ambush that killed nine and wounded eighteen. Zero officers were hit and I will bet every bullet was theirs.

Let’s say the melee happened as the police and media describe. Why the blackout on the club affiliations? Why are the 170 arrestees being detained on a million dollar bond each? Why aren’t reporters challenging the police narrative? Witnesses assert that at least four of the dead were killed by police. How long before we learn how many undercover officers had fired their guns?

The media is making much of the anticipation that fellow gang members are converging on Texas to avenge their comrades. I think the police know that it’s themselves who are the targets of the bikers’ vengeance.

No doubt one can say the bikers were not boy scouts, but have you seen the photos? These “gangs” wore their colors, in this case patches, like boy scout badges. And everyone in uniform creased jeans and leather vests as tidy as bowling shirts. Did you see the mugshots? If you look past the long hair and tattoos you’ll note everyone is clean shaven. This was a Sunday outing. These are family men and women, not gang members. The Cossacks are a “Harleys Only” motorcycle club for God’s sake!

Police aren’t naming the “gangs” involved in what’s being called the “Waco Shoot-out”. Because they are motorcycle clubs, for one, and because the only gang deserving of the notoriety is really the police.

NOTES 5/20:
Names of 9 dead. All killed by gunshot wounds, all outside the restaurant: COSSACKS MC ROAD CAPTAIN Daniel Raymond Boyett, 44, of Waco TX; COSSACKS MC ROAD CAPTAIN Wayne Lee Campbell, 43, of Arlington TX; COSSACKS MC SERGEANT AT ARMS Richard Vincent Kirschner Jr., 47, of Kylie TX; COSSACKS MC Matthew Mark Smith, 27, of Keller TX, formerly of Scimitars; COSSACKS MC Charles Wayne Russell, 46, of Tyler TX; COSSACKS MC Jacob Lee Rhyne, 39, of Ranger TX; Jesus Delgado Rodriguez, 65, of New Braunfels TX; Richard Matthew Jordan II, 31, of Pasadena, TX; and BANDIDOS MC Manuel Isaac Rodriguez, 40, of Allen TX.

Names of the 170 booked and charged with organized criminal activity: Martin Lewis, 62, retired San Antonio PD detective; Marcus Pilkington, 37; Michael Kenes, 57; Michael Woods, 49; Julie Perkins, 52; Nate Farish, 30; Ronald Warren (wounded), 55; Morgan English, 30; Ryan Craft, 22; Rolando Reyes, 40; Jonathan Lopez, 27; Richard Benavides, 60; Michael Baxley, 57; Aaron Carpenter, 33; Jarrod Lehman, 30; Ricky Wycough, 56; Royce Vanvleck, 25; Ester Weaver, 46; Ryan Harper, 28; Timothy Bayless, 53; Michael Chaney, 53; Mitchell Bradford, 29; Nathan Champeau, 34; Noe Adame, 34; Owen Bartlett, 34; Rene Cavazos, 46; Berton Bergman, 47; Greg Corrales, 47; John Wiley, 32; Jeff Battey, 50; Kenneth Carlisle, 36; John Craft, 47; Lindell Copeland, 63; Matthew Clendennen, 30; Michael Thomas, 59; Narciso Luna, 54; Owen Reeves, 43; Richard Donias, 46; Robert Robertson, 36; Reginald Weathers, 43; Richard Dauley, 47; Rudy Mercado, 49; Seth Smith, 25; Steven Walker, 50; Thomas Landers, 58; Valdemar Guajardo, 37; Walter Weaver, 54; William English, 33; Marco Dejong, 37; Melvin Pattenaude, 51; Jarron Hernandez, 21; Jason Moreno, 30; Jeremy King, 32; John Martinez, 30; Jeremy Ojeda, 37; John Guerrero, 44; John Moya, 26; Jose Valle, 43; Joseph Ortiz, 34; John Vensel, 62; John Wilson, 52; Jorge Salinas, 24; Justin Garcia, 23; Justin Waddington, 37; Lance Geneva, 37; Lawrence Kemp, 40; Lawrence Garcia, 51; Josh Martin, 25; Eliodoro Munguia, 49; Lawrence Yager, 65; James Rosas, 47; James Stalling, 56; James Venable, 47; Gage Yarborough, 22; Gilbert Zamora, 60; Gregory Salazar, 42; George Wingo, 51; James Eney, 43; Edward Keller, 47; Christopher Eaton, 46; Christopher Stainton, 42; Daniel Johnson, 44; Daniel Pesina, 21; Don Fowler, 51; Doss Murphy, 44; Drew King, 31; Brian Eickenhorst, 28; Edgar Kelleher, 50; Andrew Sandoval, 30; Andrew Stroer, 49; Arley Harris, 32; Bobby Samford, 35; George Rogers, 52; Jacob Reese, 29; Joseph Matthews, 41; Juventino Montellano, 46; Mark White, 41; Bradley Terwilliger, 27; Ares Phoinix, 36; Benjamin Matcek, 27; Craig Rodahl, 29; Daryle Walker, 39; David Martinez, 45; David Rasor, 37; Christopher Rogers, 33; Andres Ramirez, 41; Robert Nichols, 32; Seth Smith, 28; Theron Rhoten, 35; Timothy Satterwhite, 47; Anthony Palmer, 40; Terry Martin, 48; Wesley McAlister, 32; William Redding, 35; Matthew Yocum, 25; Phillip Sampson, 43; Phillip Smith, 37; Jason Dillard, 39; Jacob Wilson, 28; Dustin McCann, 22; Billy Mcree, 38; Kevin Rash, 42; John Arnold, 43; Kristoffer Rhyne, 26; Raymond Hawes, 29; Richard Kreder, 33; Robert Bucy, 36; Ronald Atterbury, 45; William Aikin, 24; Trey Short, 27; Christian Valencia, 26; Michael Moore, 42; Jason Cavazos, 40; Roy Covey, 27; Brian Logan, 38; Colter Bajovich, 28; Ronnie Bishop, 28; Nathan Grindstaff, 37; James Gray, 61; Jimmy Pond, 43; Clayton Reed, 29; Tommy Jennings, 56; Ray Allen, 45; James Devoll, 33; Blake Taylor, 24; Matthew Folse, 31; Sandra Lynch, 54; Marshall Mitchell, 61; Mario Gonzalez, 36; Larry Pina, 50; Richard Luther, 58; Salvador Campos, 27; Michael Lynch, 31; Michael Herring, 36; Richard Cantu, 30; Tom Mendez, 40; Sergio Reyes, 44; Bohar Crump, 46; Jerry Pollard, 27; Eleazar Martinez, 41; Jim Harris, 27; Christopher Carrizal, 33; Diego Obledo, 40; David Cepeda, 43; Brian Brincks, 23; Dusty O’Ehlert, 33; Juan Garcia, 40, engineer for Austin water dept; Kyle Smith, 48; and Jimmy Spencer, 23.

Was the Jesus statue blowjob teen penalized too harshly? Maybe not.

A Pennsylvania 14-year-old is facing two years in juvenile detention for mounting a statue of a Christian mortal-diety and simulating receiving oral sex. The teen is charged with defacing public property, if merely symbolically. Critics assert authorities are punishing an act of blasphemy, not vandalism, which is probably correct, but I see a teaching moment here beyond a so-called religious offense. I ask: was the teen GAY? I would have chosen to urinate on the prophet-creature if I was going to desecrate it but since this teen invoked an unsolicited blowjob, I’d be more comfortable if I could infer that both participants were homosexual. Involuntary or not, the pose of two males of equal weight suggests they are probably engaged in something consentual. As a scene of heterosexual sex however, I think the posture smacks of male-dominant rape-culture, and doesn’t win any points for humor. For me, the longer this macho emulator can be detained from opportunities to clasp real heads into forced acts with his groin, the better. Especially with his predeliction for casual sidewalk encounters, however long he may have had his eyes on this particular object of his lust. The aspiring blasphemer rapist can be thankful he wasn’t African American or he’d be tried as an adult.

Colo. Springs peaceniks, Unitarians and NAACP fall for latest Africom campaign

They fell for Darfur and Kony (and Obama!) and now the Colorado Springs social justice community confirms that the city’s national repution for dim-bulbedness doesn’t reflect just its conservatives. Even the dissenting voice in this belly of the US military-judeo-christian-racist beast, is pro-imperial, toe-the-line, neoliberal dumbass. They’re against war and injustice, they even understand illegal war, but cloak it in terms of “intervention” and they stand beside their warmonger neighbors cheerleading for US aggression in Sudan, Libya, Syria, and wherever Pax Americana dictates we bomb in Africa. Where the local armed-forces community might be slow on the uptake regarding a Democratic president’s pandering to transnational corporate needs, the Springs peacekeeping Left will lead the way. On Monday, the usual shepherds of non-confrontational conformity held a vigil for the Lost Girls of Sudan -pardon- Nigeria, echoing the White House call to #bringbackourgirls. Unlike authentic antiwar vigils, this action got press, quelle surprise, from the media war machine! Congratulations AFRICOM-dupes! Nevermind non-American girls lost to US collateral malfeasance, no official hashtag for them, ergo no Springs peacenik campaign that would give a conscience indigestion.
 
Would we care more if the 267 kidnapped schoolgirls were not black? (!) If they were white they wouldn’t be from a country we’re trying to destabilize.

While Denver activists hold six rallies in solidarity with Gaza, Colorado Springs is content to mourn the dead

cos-gaza-vigil-nmt
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.- A passing motorist can be excused for mistaking that gathering for a prayer vigil, and it’s typical of Colorado Springs, nothing escapes the Christian crutch. Notice how no one’s banners faced outward. This is what preaching to the choir looks like for the hearing impaired.

Occupy Denver: not as badass as they pretend to be

DPD interrupt Occupy Denver protest at the Tattered Cover Bookstore
DENVER, COLORADO- Occupy activists were making their usual cacophony on Friday night when Denver police cruisers began converging into a familiar disproportionate show of force. Experienced skirmishers though Occupiers are, we couldn’t help whispering to each other as we watched more DPD officers accumulate on foot from vehicles yet unseen. The unintended effect of course was that our chanting diminished as the tension rose and Denver onlookers were treated to a literal illustration of the chilling effect of police intimidation. To make matters more embarassing, Occupy was shouting that we would not be silenced! By the time police were trooping upon us there was no sound but DPD boot steps and our “cameras on, everybody, cameras on.”

Our Friday night boycott of the Tattered Cover Bookstore is part of an OD operation to pressure downtown businesses to withdraw their support for the city’s urban camping ban, an ordinance which in effect criminalizes the homeless. The Tattered Cover claims to have asserted neutrality on the city’s decision to forbid sleeping and sheltering in public, but OD stands with Howard Zinn when he claimed “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Silence is consent. Injustice prevails when good people say nothing, yada yada. So it’s the Tattered Cover’s turn to step up to what is everyone’s responsibility. OD invited the Tattered Cover to sign a letter rescinding their support for the inhumane ordinance, but the Tattered Cover’s owner held to her obstinence. She was confident that her customers would have sympathy for her business’s precarious balancing act with the community’s unchristian conservatives. If the Tattered Cover wants to put business over doing the right thing, OD concluded that a boycott could provide the commensurate incentive.

A boycott strategy has worked twice before on this campaign. Actually, boycotts and pickets seldom fail. The global have-nots owe everything to street protest. Grown prosperous, middle America has been shorn of this wisdom. Most Americans do not know what protest is about, thus Friday nights in downtown Denver are also a teaching moment for Occupy. Pardon the inconvenience people of Denver, you’re welcome.

To be fair, for the uninitiated, protests are a messy, noisy thing.

As this Friday evening progressed, occupiers suspected the police were going to make an issue of the serenading, it was self-evidently less melodious than the previous weeks. Earlier we noticed officers dispatched in pairs into multiple directions seeking interviewees from among our audience. But we did not expect a DPD delegation to descend upon us at troop strengh. We began shouting down the DPD as their commander shouted “Can everybody hear me?” What authority had officers to interrupt our constitutional right to assemble? It is amply documented that when activists attempt to interrupt the meetings of others, with Occupy’s “mic check” for example, we are escorted from the room with rough haste.

In Occupy’s defense Friday night, we didn’t submit ourselves to being lectured about “what you are free to do etc, etc.” We knew our rights. We also suspected a noise complaint before the hour of 10pm was of dubious legitimacy. We did however accept an abridgement of our free speech, for the sake of, let’s call it, detente. Because it was dark and we were outnumbered.

A few Occupiers were not happy about being made to relinquish megaphones and drums on the trumped-up premise of signed noise complaints. The officers had obviously solicited the complaints; they had not been dispatched in response to any. Some Occupy wild cannons threatened to upset our disarmament truce. Our hushed reproaches become the next inadvertent impediment to regaining a chant momentum.

In debriefing it was agreed that the more impertinent among us are precious resources Occupy should not make a habit of quashing. When demonstrator numbers are enough to effect unarrests, we’ll have occasion to reject civil liberty infringing ultimatums and encourage the pushing of limits beyond the habitual collective consensus comfort level. This security culture indiscretion about protest strategy is tendered here as an encoded call to action.

BUT SERIOUSLY, what do you make of the Denver Police Department’s exagerated show of numbers at the Friday night action? It was the usual DPD MO in the heydays of Occupy, and it’s what they are throwing now at the Anonymous “Every 5th” resurgence, but what about OD’s campaign -to repeal the Urban Camping Ban- could have provoked a law enforcement surge aimed at its decisive truncation?

WHO KNEW a picket of such limited scope could draw such ire. We aren’t threatening Capitalism or banks or energy infrastructure, or DPD’s favorite, FTP.

However hypocritical and exceptionalist the Tattered Cover is behaving, I don’t believe they requested DPD’s move. But I don’t doubt the Downtown Business Partnership is fearful that the famed independent bookstore might cave to protester demands at which point the DBP’s mandate will lose its liberal cover. They know the inevitability of boycott victories, they’re business people.

Ditching schools to make American Taliban enclaves in Colorado Springs

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.- While secularist crusader Richard Dawkins was delighting evangelical atheists at a nearby college campus, addressing how the charter school movement is subverting public education with religious indoctrination, the local District 11 school board was selling off another two primary schools –to charter school privateers! Flipping moribund neighborhoods to the Christian Soldiers.

Is privatizing schools better than selling the properties to real estate developers? Communities need their schools. But yesterday’s decision means the neighborhoods of Jefferson Elementary and Irving Middle School will encircle Christian madrases, centers not of learning but militant god-on-our-side imperialism. The schools were closed in 2009 due to alleged declines in enrollment. If charter entrepreneurs succeed with their revival tent schools for dummies, they’ll turn more Springs neighborhoods into klan xenophobe enclaves.

Who wants to raise their kids around Xbox/drone suicide bombers in training, beside American Idiot parents? They recoil at the Taliban, its madrasa schools and suicide bombers, extremist misrepresentations of Islam. But in the West, Christian zealots are the norm, technology perhaps obscuring their imbecility, fighting for Our God and disposing themselves into the trash heap of war. Now Colorado Springs has two more soldier fodder incubators.

Senate hopeful, Missouri fool Todd Akin takes wide stance on legitimate rape

Representative Todd Akin revealed his “legitimate rape” standard was no misunderstanding — now he’s courting America’s vast army of Christian idiots who already share his belief in rape-modulated immaculate contraception, a convenient pretext for a complete abortion ban. Meanwhile his Larry Craig Wide Stance against abandoning his campaign bid in disgrace allows the GOP to earn points distancing themselves from Akin’s crass misogyny, even though their party platform is steeped in it. When I hear American conservatives seem to compete with each other over who can bring the ugliest inanity to the party, I can’t help be reminded of internet trolls –which constructive discourse requires we not feed. Except we are powerless to prevent the damn corporate media from feeding their GOP squeezebox monkey trolls and stoking the firestorm of ignorant, beyond the pale, political twists and u-turns.

Now pundits are mouthing suggested mea culpa for the recalcitrant unpenitent: What Akin should have said. I’ll have a go: I’m sorry, I’m a moron, a morally bankrupt, crap-regurgitating degenerate. Yes I’m a reflection of my constituents, but people, you can’t give no-ideologues like me the responsibilities of government. I know that much.

Should the London Olympics remember the 1972 Munich Holocaust? Do you?

America can’t memorialize the 1972 Munich hostage killings, because that act of terrorism was not unlike our own airstrikes or special ops raids, against purported enemy combatants, off the field of combat, except we don’t even try to kidnap them alive.
 
Of course the Israeli Olympic wrestlers and weightlifters killed in Munich in 1972 should be memorialized. But to call the deaths a massacre pretends the German police meant their ambush to kill everyone.* What happened at the 1972 Olympics is being recalled as the “Munich Massacre” but even the propagandists tweaking the Wikipedia entry don’t have the temerity to doff the disclaimer that “massacre” is the informal name. Shall we recall what happened? On September 5, 1972, PLO terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village and tried to kidnap Israeli hostages to exchange for 234 Palestinians held by Israel. Two Israelis fought back and were killed. Next the eight gunman and their nine captives were led into an ambush at a military airfield. After a 1 & 1/2 hour gun battle on the tarmac, trapped under the helicopters by police snipers, the PLO killed four of their captives. A police investigation revealed the remaining five captives may have died in sniper crossfire. This detail is disputed, but a secret financial settlement was sought and reached with German authorities. So, was Munich a massacre or a botched hostage rescue? Do words matter? The Mossad’s retaliatory murder of an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaken for the Munich mastermind, is trivialized as the Lillehammer Affair.

Proponents want an Olympic tribute to the Munich Massacre “so that it never happens again.” Boy does that ever have a familiar ring to it. Look out for an Elie Wieselish re-tailoring of the original narrative, Steven Spielberg’s Munich being only a recent example of a myth-makeover remembrance.

To begin with, the PLO kidnappers were a faction of the PLO called the Black September Brigade, named after the Black September purge of the PLO from Jordan. This ouster, aided by the US and fought by Syria, was initiated by Israel’s attack on the village of Karameh, in which the PLO suffered 200 killed, to the IDF’s 28. Not a massacre because 150 PLO fighters were taken captive. Wikistorians taking liberties with translation are calling the PLO group “Black September”, with the effect of obfuscating the event which preceded the Munich operation.

The Munich raid to seize hostages was actually named “Operation Iqrit and Kafr Bir’im” after the Christian villages of Kafr Bir’im and Iqrit, ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948. Villagers were granted right of return by Israel’s supreme court, but overruled by the military. An attempt to return had been repulsed by police as recently as August 1972, as the Olympics began.

Next, the identity of the Israeli athletes is always left incomplete. With the exception of the 18 year old Russian immigrant, all the Israeli hostages were IDF soldiers who’d participated in military acts against Palestine, Egypt, lebanon, Jordan, or Syria, and so are not exactly the innocent civilians of current retellings.

Who killed the Israeli captives during the gun battle with German police? An immediate investigation found that sniper fire may have hit the captives, as it had also severely wounded a fellow policeman. A cover-up long obscured the official reports. While this could be pretended to protect the German participants, it also kept the blame on the PLO gunmen, which would have been critical to justify Israel’s “eye for an eye” revenge killings.

Did the gunman strafe their hostages with bullets upon seeing the arrival of the police armored reinforcements? The only witness accounts come from the German authorities. We might accept that the lead PLO gunman lobbed a grenade into the first helicopter with the intention of killing the four hostages it contained, if they were still alive. An autopsy revealing that one of the Israelis died from the flames is used the emphasize that the grenade, and thus a PLO terrorist, certainly killed him.

Though the German police admitted potential culpability for the deaths of the five hostages in the second helicopter, a later analysis put convenient blame on a particular gunman, one of them ones captured and who eventually escaped justice by being released. Certainly this narrative would be critical if Israel hoped for popular support for their effort to hunt the gunman down.

Many of Israel’s revenge killings involved car bombs which risked collateral deaths and injuries. Assassinating the “mastermind” killed eight others, including a nun, and injured 18 more.

Whether the PLO gunmen killed the Israelis or not, even the operation’s planners can’t be said to have intended it. No one masterminded a massacre.

Of the PLO participants in Munich, five gunman were killed, and three were captured. Those three were released weeks later to meet the demands of a subsequent hijacking. Israel’s Mossad boasted of having tracked them down and assassinated them shortly thereafter. But accounts vary, and one of them was interviewed decades later for a documentary. What’s known is that Israel implemented an “eye for an eye” operation that over 20 years hunted and killed 20-35 Palestinian targets. They weren’t sought out to take hostage but to murder, and most of them were unconnected to the Black September Brigade. The Mossad long-arm-of-the-law theme was less about revenge than deterrence, because anyone who might have masterminded or abetted the Munich plot was planning a kidnapping not a murder.

If a massacre is measured by an imbalance of casualties, let’s look at the numbers. After 11 Israelis were murdered, Israel retaliatory airstrikes killed 200 in Syria and Lebanon, an IDF raid killed up to 100 in Lebanon, and the Mossad targeted up to 35 in subsequent assassinations. Here’s an accounting:

Sept 5-6, 1972
11 Israeli athletes, coaches former IDF
(2 killed by BSB in initial break-in, 9 killed during the ambush rescue attempt, possibly by crossfire)
1 German police
5 PLO gunmen

Sept 8, 1972
IAF retaliatory airstrikes on PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon.
200 Palestinians killed, including women and children

IDF Operation “SPRING OF YOUTH” raid on Lebanon, April 1973
3 PLO suspected planners
12-100 PLO members
1 PLO wife
1 Italian woman
2 Lebanese policemen
Unknown number of Lebanese civilians

Mossad Operation “WRATH OF GOD”, (20-35 targets over 20 years)
PLO translator of disputed BSB involvement, Oct 1972
PLO senior official, December 1972
Palestinian activist “expertly” pushed under bus, London, 1972
Jordanian Fatah rep, January 1973
Law professor at Am Univ of Beirut, April, 1973
Replacement for Fatah rep, Athens, April 1973
(2 BSB minor members injured, Rome, April 1973)
PLO director of operations for BSB, June 1973
Moroccan waiter, mistaken identity, Norway, July 1973
3 Arab-looking men, Switzerland, January 1974
Arab security guard, Spain, August 1974
PLO rep, blamed on the Abu Nidal Org, London, January 1978
2 PLO reps, Paris, August 1978 (3 injured)
PLO suspected “mastermind”, car-bomb, January 1979, also killed:
4 Bodyguards
1 British student
1 German nun
2 Lebanese passersby (also 18 injured)
PLO military head, Cannes, July 1979
2 Palestinians, December, 1979
PLO rep, Brussels, June 1981
2 PLO senior figures, car bomb, Rome, June 1982
PLO senior official, car bomb, Paris, July 1982
PLO senior official, drive-by, Athens, August 1983
PLO Secretary-General, drive-by, Athens, June 1986
PLO official, car bomb, Athens, October 1986
2 Palestinians, car bomb, Cyprus, February 1988 (1 other wounded)
PLO suspected head of intelligence, June 1992

What’s that? The ratio is 11 to 335 and the Israelis want to call it a massacre? If you count the Palestinians killed in the initial Black September attack on the PLO in Jordan, the comparison becomes irrelevant.

But the Munich ratio is nothing compared to the 1,500 Gazans killed in Operation Cast Lead. Now there’s a massacre.

*ON THE OTHER HAND. The botched hostage rescue in Munich might very well have been a massacre. Do we really want to go there? The German snipers who initiated the gun battle at Furstenfeldbruck Airbase may really have behaved with a total disregard to the fate of the Israeli hostages. With the antisemitism that prevailed in Europe, and still prevails there among the working classes, it’s very likely the policemen looked at the gunmen and their captives with equal scorn. If the bound Israelis weren’t hit in the crossfire, it could certainly be held that the sniper attack provoked their killing. The coverup and subsequent private financial settlement reached between Germany and the Israeli survivors suggests a culpability of the like. In that respect, if European Jews look back at Munich 1972 and say it was a massacre, I believe them.

Were Qurans the only books burned? Where’s the outrage from US churches?

Were Qurans the only books burned? Where’s the outrage from US churches?

If the Qurans recently burned at NATO bases in Afghanistan were disposed of accidentally in the incineration pits, aren’t American Fundamentalist Talibans concerned about where the excess bibles go? By now we all know the M.O. at US camps in our occupied territories is to incinerate any and all unused inventory. They’re even ordered to burn leftover bottled water. Can there be any doubt if the US forces found themselves with too many Qurans to go around, that they had fewer takers for Christian bibles? When you raise the subject in these parts, even yokels profess their indignation at the prospect of burning a bible, so wouldn’t they want to scrutinize what’s being burned at our military bases? Or is it the same with American flags? When hippies do it, it’s a national sacrilege, when the Army does it, it’s ordained cremation.

Tea Partying with the Freak Brothers

Whew! These Occupy posts are far more difficult to pry from myself than their predecessors; the hands-on mechanics of putting the earlier stuff into practice in the present world, amongst the isolated pools of individuated consciousness we humans represent, each with his or her own vision of the whole, has been at the very least disorienting. I’ve lately revived an old motto i swiped from the good people at Oat Willie’s down in Austin, Texas: Onward Through the Fog! How odd is it that i’ve recently connected with some folks that hark back to that place in ways that are deeply surreal. Oat Willie’s and Fat Freddie will seem to be completely out of place in this bit, in which i mean to address the notion of cooperation amongst disparate factions, but not permanently i hope. By the end of this post, i hope to connect Occupy, The Tea Party, disparate passions, and yes, Hippies. It will be necessary to engage in some relatively surreal thinking.

Last night on a new Facebook page, “UNITE: OCCUPY,” (cap lock and all), i got into a conversation about this stuff started by a guy that asked whether anyone thought a joint event between Occupiers and Tea Partiers might be possible. Sure, i said, our Colorado Springs group had lots of Tea Partiers among its earliest enthusiasts, and although many have pulled away, there still exists a close association with many that veer sharply toward the Te Party camp, especially among Ron Paul supporters. The common ground Occupy shares with the Tea Party, at least t a grass root level, is substantial. There can be no doubt of the equally substantial differences. I suspect that it would take some pretty serious ideological barnstorming to bring the two camps together, but nothing prevents the groups from at least tentative discussion to find commonalities.

Tonight our Occupy group staged a talk by Tea Party stalwart, Constitutionalist Mike Holler. Mike seemed for all appearances to be an earnest and well-versed supporter of Constitutional “fundamentalism,” if you will. He peppered his talk with lots of my favorite quotes from my favorite founding fathers. He got a little testy about the revisionist history his kids bring home from college early on–perhaps indicative of one point of separation between Occupiers and Tea Partiers. Some of those are important. Occupy is international, where the Tea Party can display degrees of jingoism. I, personally, respect the earnest efforts of our Enlightenment founders, but recognize that they were flawed, and aver that their document was dated by racist, sexist, and elitist provisions and thinking that they might be excused from by noting their temporal milieu. We don’t have the same luxury. Occupy is legitimately grass root, supported by sweat and blood more than funded, where TP is, or at least became very quickly corporately funded “astroturf,” disingenuously proffering libertarian ideals as a smoke screen for corporate license to plunder. Occupiers are in my experience far more diverse than Tea Partiers. Socialist and Anarchist Occupiers are common, as are assorted races, genders, orientations, and religious persuasions, where Tea Partiers seem to my limited observation to be relatively homogeneously white Christian capitalist patriots. Mike interjected that both groups had been misrepresented by the media, and that seems likely to be so given that mainstream media seems content to misrepresent ’bout anything they report in this country, but Fox news and the rabid right like the Tea Party so much i have to wonder if he’s fallen victim to a personal soft spot.

Mike spoke eloquently enough in his effort to simplify the Constitution, focusing on issues of freedom, and state’s rights. He said very little with which i could find disagreement. He pointed out two major points of confluence between Occupy and the Tea Party–personal liberty, and a rally-cry, “No more Bailouts!” I suspect he fastidiously avoided some points he knew or at least feared might be contentious, like for example the ludicrous assertions i’ve heard often that environmental warnings from the scientific community stem from some kind of Satanic control scheme from the–well just whom is never too clear. The Vatican or something. Commies, i guess. That just maybe the best way for Tea Partiers and Occupiers to interact, though, for now, concentrating on the common aversion to what amounts to Fascism. Interacting from that perspective could exclude much conversation. It could put the Tea Party in the same position as the Occupy movement, after their Fascist sponsors withdraw in horror. Whatever. We Occupiers got on just fine with Tea Party Mike–“Mr. Constitution.”

Mike largely expressed notions we Occupiers could embrace. I suppose he could have done a bit of research and tailored his speech toward that end, but i think we just agree; he seemed a grassroot kind of guy, to me. He briefly alluded to schisms within the Tea Party, and there’s no sensible reason to avoid acknowledging the same within Occupy. Last night’s event was attended by Occupy people that have had such extreme altercations in their attempts to wrestle a semblance of ideological unity from a stubbornly liquid platform that it could easily enough have disintegrated into bedlam. I attended with my dear friend Thomas, with whom i often disagree. In fact, he and i often disagree so strongly that sometimes i feel like smacking him in back of the head. I expect he feels the same way about me at times. Maybe much of the time. Take note, war-mongers of the world: Thomas is a great guy, and even though we disagree with one another, sometimes strongly, neither of us has smacked the other in back of the head. Get it?

So here we were last night, disparate Occupiers engaging a Tea Party mouthpiece in a room full of people that have all experienced the vagaries of human interaction under a fairly pressurized circumstance over the past few months. No butterflies fluttered around the room, but no one worked up a bickering session, either. We worked together. All of us. One could recall the old adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but that would be devolution. I prefer to imagine that those with arguments present recognized the futility of scrapping amongst friends, if only below the radar of their Egos. Whether my nobler hopes for those pained souls in the room last night are valid or not, the assertions i made in these non-pages well before Occupy began remain true. The system we wrestle against is collapsing around our heads. And the solution is spiritual, to a far greater extent than it is temporal.

Fat Freddy is a comic book character that lives in Denver. Seriously. I met him a little while ago. (This only seems out of place, i promise.) Mr. Constitution Mike Holler expressed the opinion last night that our American republic, our constitutional federation of states, is in its final throes; that we are in a position where, ” it’s too late to save the country, but too early to start shooting.” Mike seemed tentative in expressing his hope that God might pull some kind of supernatural rabbit from his celestial hat to resolve our monumental national woes. I expect he feared perturbing the often non-Christian sensibilities of the Occupiers. He needn’t have worried quite so much–we may be largely skeptical of literal interpretations, but we’re pretty tolerant of that sort of thing. When i met Fat Freddy–an icon of counter-cultural activism important to me since childhood, an old-school Hippie with connection to the most famous and infamous of that crowd–he singled me out and pulled me aside to explain in some detail his expectation for a spiritual upheaval in coming days. Freddy’s taken up with the Urantia Book, a tome i’ve heard Christians disparage as devilish. I couldn’t see anything devilish about what he showed me. He earnestly explained his expectation for resolution. Soon.

We had come to Denver to talk about foreclosures and bank jiggery-pokery with another guy, and pulled up at Freddy’s house without knowing it. It just happened that way. These old Hippies like Tea Party fave, Ron Paul. (Follow along, now, i know it’s weird, and yeah, i know a lot of Occupiers don’t like Paul; i’m not sure about him myself). Also in attendance at that meeting was a woman i had been conversing with on line for quite a while in the context of Occupy. It took me nearly through the whole meeting to recognize her, because i knew her to live down in the Four Corners neighborhood of Colorado. She lives at Freddy’s now. This juxtaposition is so weird that now i’m expecting the Mad Hatter, or Lewis Carroll himself to pop up at some meeting quoting from Jabberwocky. Mike Holler holds out for resolution to the country’s woes in a traditional Christian context. My own suspicion, shared with J.B.S. Haldane, is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. But somewhere in the mix i am convinced that some divine Thing many of us think of as God is deeply interested in the little proceedings here on our little blue marble and that our interactions are subsequently and necessarily thus influenced.

We live right here. We have no choice but to manage things on a coarse, physical level; but we also live, i think, on an overlapping and less tangible plane, where we have more influence than we might ordinarily imagine. At the same time, things seem to occur herethere without our conscious direction. We’ll need to keep plugging away at things like grasping the Constitution, and taking on massive, quixotic quests like fighting banks and a world full of renegade, intransigent governments and power brokers, not to mention our own internal battles, as finely defined as within our own Souls. We’ll need to recognize the Truth in one another, even when it’s obscured by a bunch of worldly disagreement and fog. And so far as i can tell, were learning. Whatever that means.

Reprinted from hipgnosis.

If you don’t see Merry Christmas in the window, no, you don’t go in that store! The Star of David used to do that trick.

This season’s War-On-Christmas email is pushing a holiday ditty whose refrain goes “If you don’t see Merry Christmas in the window, then you don’t go in that store.” Seems like it might be easier to mark those stores with a Star of David on the window, or would that be too obviously Nazi?
On the other hand, it is refreshing to see even Dumbfox recognize the imperative of targeting commerce to make your point heard. So, boycotts do work?

You can see the Christmas-lovers’ point of course. They’d prefer that merchants exploiting the Christmas purchasing season at least be paying lip service to Christmas and not the ever-looming Godless “Holiday” eclipse, supposed.

This song reminds us “it’s all about the little baby Jesus” and goes on to list all the things Christmas wouldn’t be without him. Of course, half the list traces back to pagan tradition, but what to Christian Holiday-goers know of that?

And the latter half goes back as far as they remember, as their grandmother and her grandmother before might remember, but no more. The commercial Christmas charts its provenance to the industrial revolution, the birth of consumer goods and marketing. Santa Claus as we recognize him stepped right off Coca-cola calendars of the last mid-century.

Christmas was the religious Trojan Horse to pitch the shopping holiday to reluctant hedonists. Now the same parishioners who don’t have an needle’s-eye chance to get to Heaven, feel like the can pay their tithes in Christmas presents.

Yes, I do think it’s funny that people who abhor the prospect of disruptive economic boycotts are willing to consider it at the drop of Santa’s cap. Unless of course they’re satisfied that making this video viral is a shot across the bow enough. I doubt their Christmas Spirit has any room for Lenten restraint.

Oddly enough, one of their potential boycott targets, and mine, has hung banners in its outlets to announce they will be open for Christmas, introducing a delectable dilemma. Starbucks says Merry Christmas in the window, so it’s exempt from this singing email picket, yet it disrespects Christmas by working through it. What do you do?

I answer that one unequivocally. Yes, boycott Starbucks. They fund Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. That may be somewhat directly related to their celebrating Hanukkah not Christmas, but that’s NO KIND OF REASON to boycott a business. If you want to boycott a store because it’s not Christian, take it up with the Anti-Defamation League. Leave bigotry to the Zionists.

City Hall of Mirrors

As cities around the US bully Occupy groups around on park verges and college campuses, we here in Colorado Springs have not remained unscathed. Monday morning saw our friendly neighborhood “Homeless Outreach Team,” (HOT), and a much less friendly contingent from the city’s code enforcement office dismantle the previously permitted Occupy site at Acacia Park in downtown Colorado Springs. A surprisingly good-sized group materialized after midnight to vocally express displeasure at the actions of the city as rendered by the police and what appeared to be a rather callous batch of contracted laborers hired to accomplish the actual dismantling. No one got beat up or gassed. The permit surrounding which had developed controversy in our little microcosm is gone and we will now be required to redefine, restructure, and proceed without it. Personally, i feel it to be a good riddance even though we here in Colorado Springs seem to be experiencing a bit of disorientation as a result.

Dan and M.J. of the HOT team, (a redundancy, i know, but common parlance), were present for the dismantling of the tents that had been a fixture at our protest site. Some 50 or so protesters managed to flood the scene, even at the late hour of the event. Despite the relative peace between authorities and Occupiers here, the police present were fully prepared to inflict harm if we protesters had engaged in any form other than the sometimes obnoxious yelling. The whole scene, not unlike other aspects of our unusual local manifestation of the Movement, produced and continues to produce a sense of extreme ambiguity in my own psyche. I like to think of Dan and M.J. as friends, at least in a provisional sense, but i have no choice but to acknowledge that none of my closest friends would ever even think of putting me in jail or beating me up, even if i piss them off.

Tuesday a fairly large group of Occupiers attended a City Council meeting with a previously established agenda, none of which was to address Occupy directly, though it would be difficult to conjure a government meeting with an agenda that pertained to no issue encompassed by Occupy at this juncture. My own experience at the council meeting felt very much like an exercise in futility. A gentleman preceded us Occupiers with a request to restore city funding to his non-profit that helps supply transportation to disabled city residents. As the council and mayor did with our objections next, they seemed to tolerate the man’s speech and then perfunctorily ignore it. No indication of interest or intention to act was in evidence. Aimee Cox, serving as some sort of city liaison, distributed a few sheets describing the city’s appeal process in a few sentences. The remainder of the council meeting involved investment strategy and plans to extract additional money from residents in the form of utility rate hikes.

The minutiae to all this wrangling is just about as pointless to describe as anything i can picture. The clearest vision afforded by the whole scene is still one of a struggle to get things from those that control them on the one hand, while struggling to keep people from getting things on the other. There remains a sense of entitlement held both by those with little, and by those generally smug players with much. I remain convinced that the current state of affairs is fully unsustainable. The global takeover of industry and commerce by factions that appear fully unconcerned by any consideration other than personal enrichment has led to a scenario in which those at the winning end of that paradigm are in as much trouble as anyone else. Sure, if our supply of food, energy, shelter, and so on becomes insufficient those with more clout in hand may well be able to hold out rather longer than those otherwise equipped. A few survivalists will likely outlast inner city dope fiends; but what’s the point? Is the object of human interaction to feel smugger than the next guy? Who gets to feel the smuggest?

Directly attacking the intractable problems of human interaction seems as futile as ever. No amount of negotiation seems effective enough to overcome the entrenched cultural aversion to cooperation and insistence on coming out on top that has produced such a three ring circus of a society. Observe that Colorado Springs’s Mayor Bach is in office after a campaign financed largely by real estate and development interests. Really, now, do we need more buildings around here, or aren’t these activities really just the outcome of individual efforts to scrabble up money? Think about that a moment. How much human activity is nothing more than bullshit make-work designed not to be productive, but to shift money around? How much useless crap does Madison Avenue convince us we need for no better reason than to supply income to its players. I’m suggesting that most of the stupid jobs we Occupiers hear we should get so often are self-destructive bullshit. That the great majority of laws and regulations we have allowed to overwhelm our hard-won liberty, spawning the parasitic legal industry, the real estate industry, the huge regulatory bureaucracies of governments all around, and in fact most of the “work” we humans do is utterly pointless. I’m suggesting that we humans will, in fact, need to rethink our entire interaction with one another if we are to survive our own more ridiculous tendencies.

I’m hardly the first person to posit this notion. Jeremy Rifkin, for one, discussed the ideas i merely hint at above in rather more depth in his 1995 book, The End of Work. Of course, suspicious religious folk have raised an uproar at the mere mention of Rifkin for decades now, claiming him to be a Devil-worshiper, among other things. The sad truth seems to be that fundamentalists in this country and others, of Christian orientation and others, seem content to allow their Creator’s handiwork to burn to ash rather than to work together with anyone else to resolve the problems we humans have cobbled together to our own collective detriment. As little as i relish the sort of fight that generally ensues from arguing about spiritual matters, i’ll be finding it necessary to head in that direction in upcoming posts. Hold on tight, and please feel free to engage….

Ye Aulde Memoir

Another old piece. These stories are distorted by romanticized memory, at times, and others likely remember them differently. I by no means intend to insult any of the real persons that lived through this stuff with a cavalier treatment of tender recollections, or harsh description of personalities or actions. Each of us always did exactly what seemed to be exactly the right things to do at the time. And there survives much, much love, which has grown and developed like it always does, in ways we never see coming.

I’m not putting these old ones up because i’m too lazy to write new. I’ll have one of those next–but some of this old stuff fits. Hope you like it.

11 May 2009

One day during the summer of 1980 my brother David was in the hospital at Case Western Reserve University for yet another open-heart surgery. The scene that day was dramatic I suppose, but for our family at the time, it was in many ways just another day. The state of the relationships between us had come to the condition that existed then because each and every incident that had occurred in the history of the Universe had added to that cumulative point. The way it came together then could have been viewed as tragic, I suppose, but we never noticed.

I don’t even remember how I got the news that this particular episode was approaching. David’s surgery that year was one of many—so many, in fact, that by now surgeons and academics had written papers on his congenital condition, and even given it a polysyllabic title. His lead surgeon, a Dr. Ankeny as I recall, had once claimed that he had “learned more from David Bass than fourteen years of medical school.” We four siblings had in effect grown up in the hospital, with the constant potential for death in attendance on a daily basis. Many years would pass between that summer and the moment I decided any of this was applicable to self-reflection, and the sweltering summer afternoon was as present and imminently experiential as any other I lived through during that period.
Our family seemed done that year. I had been out of the picture for over a year. Dad had left soon after, leaving a sour tinge in the air with those remaining, though I never blamed him. When David queued up for one more death-defying, experimental, split-chest open-heart surgery, Dad came back to Cleveland from Florida to put in an obligatory appearance.

Here was a meeting that defied conventional description. Dave, the least guilty of all our immediate family, had been deeply affected by Dad’s exit from the filial stage earlier that year. I hadn’t seen, or even spoken to Dad for well over a year, nor could our interactions prior to then be described as warm and supportive. Outnumbered by angry or indifferent family members, and perhaps less acclimated to hospitals as the rest of us, Dad was way out of his simpler, down-to-earth element.

I showed up unannounced, with glorious southern tart Candy Stone from Mobile, Alabama in tow, she in dirty bare feet, nearly illegal shorts, one of those dangerous eighties tube-tops, and very red eyes. I don’t think Dad spoke more than a half dozen words to me. His eyes told the whole story of uncertainty, pain, and failure. Dave, fresh from surgery, quite literally green, with a repulsive grey crust around his lips and appending to the tubes and what not projecting from several of his orifices, refused to see Dad. Refused to allow him in the room. Dad left unrequited to return to his exile in Florida. I didn’t see him again for many years.

Once, David, following the Dead tour in our Mom’s old family van showing all the effects of the Rust Belt, with his underage Russian girlfriend, his fiddle, and a patchouli oil manufacturing operation, got pulled over in Alabama, for sport. By this time, David was unkempt, smelly, and obviously committing some crime or another. The cops shook him down pretty good, but of course he had no contraband. He has a vice or two, but the heart thing keeps him from excess. He had that young Russian girlfriend, though, and Alabama’s finest figured they could really hang him out to dry, (dang hippie). But she and Dave convince the alpha cop to let them call her mom in New York to confirm that permission had been granted for the road trip and no heinous kidnapping was going on. The mother spoke zero English, but somehow the girlfriend convinced the cop to allow her to translate for her mother. Mother and daughter held a five minute conversation about the mental acuity of Alabama cops, duly translated as an expression of permission, and the travelers were on their way. David drawls this story on stage in his hillbilly persona, fiddle in hand. It’s hilarious.

It seemed to me for a long time that David was the only one of us to escape that little bubble of anti-reality that made up our family life while we siblings were young. Maybe he somehow managed to avoid being trapped in it in the first place, residing only temporarily, with some sort of metaphysical pass associated with potential imminent death. I don’t know, but years later, during one of the high points of my own endeavor, Renaissance Paint and Remodeling, I remember feeling jealous of David. This was a recurring sentiment, and all the more abberant for the fact that my strongest memory of it falls during a visit to Dave’s place in North Carolina that amounted to a just-in-case kind of deal before a heart transplant. Whatever the rationality or fairness of my little envy, (not real envy, mind you, but one of those little personality spikes that one notes and passes through), David is the one of us that got away the least damaged, and has lived his idiosyncratic dream out in full, down to the fine print, with joy.

Mom tells a story about my first day at school. Or maybe the second. I had asked some question that Miss Gardner couldn’t answer, and after day two, came home grousing about how those people were ignorant, and furthermore lazy, since no one had even bothered to look up a response. Mom likes to carry on about how smart her offspring are. She doesn’t usually bring up in public how warped we can be.

Mom, we brothers agree, bequeathed us a legacy of somewhat dubious mental processes. She’s nuts. We all know it. She knows it. Dad knows it. The rest of her family knows it well, and most of them recognize a common bond of familial, brand-name insanity that we all seem to share. I expect this is a more or less common thing among families, but I remain convinced that we are a bit stranger than most, at least in part because of the unique circumstances we lived through.

Back in the day, Mom’s thing was what they call control issues. The dynamic of her issues was so complex I can’t imagine I’ll ever figure it out. Some of her personality came to her by heredity from her mother, whom we call Mo. Much of it developed in that crucible of stress Dave kept heated by his repeated, continuous flirtation with death. Mom, responding to my over-the-top reaction to a pubescent hormonal tsunami, became madly obsessive with minutiae, dividing her time among us brothers and badgering us constantly in a fashion no one can really get unless they have their own experience to compare. I think she and I trapped ourselves in a sort of feedback loop that could have ended no other way.

I was out of the house for good, by the age of fifteen, for all purposes off to lead a life of crime, I suppose. For some years, I lived out my interpretation of the old Kerouac/Kesey/Abbie Hoffman mythos, on the road, in the street, an utterly directionless rebel. A good five or six years passed without more that a word or two passing between Mom and me.

I was nineteen when I came to Colorado Springs. The vague and unformulated manifesto for global revolution I had worked out in my head was on hold, kept in place by a twelve-pack of cheap beer. I had a job as an electrician, and didn’t see any reason to change that, but we actually didn’t do much of anything but work and drink beer that year.

One day Mom called to say Mike, another brother, got himself in trouble again and she expected him to “run away.” I told her to give him my number and I’d let her know when he called. He did just a few days later, and can I come pick him up over on south Circle.

Mike and I spent a couple years engaging in the sort of insanity to which we had become habituated in Cleveland. The reader will require imagination to add flesh to the story here. The statute of limitations may prevent backlash, but I don’t mean to poke at a bees’ nest, and it seems unlikely you might imagine anything more extreme than what actually took place. We weren’t stupid, though, and the business of working for wages, or relying on illicit behavior for advancement just wasn’t good enough, so we formed a construction company and went to work. That proved to be a trap. Maybe an extension of the weird, family trap that all of us have discussed so deeply, without resolution.

Mike and I had it in our minds that the working man’s habit of grousing over how management acts is crap and that if we were going to grouse, we ought to just take the reins ourselves. It turned out we were pretty good, too, in a lot of ways. We worked together for the best part of twenty years, and reached moments of national prominence in our little niche. The whole period was characterized by more bone-crushing stress and absurd, super-human feats. We had little breaks from the madness when we’d crash the business, which we did three times. We were great at getting shit done, but lousy at administration in the final analysis.

Hiring employees in the construction business kept me exposed to the street element to which I had become accustomed. I involved myself in various efforts to assist folks in their low-budget struggles, imagining still that I could somehow change the world. In fact, contrary to Mike’s primary obsession with business success, I figured the whole pursuit as a means to some vague end involving social revolution. For a while a religious experience had me involved with a church effort to “reach out” to the hoodlums that used to cruise Nevada Avenue on Friday and Saturday nights. I even managed to glean an ordination from the Baptists, though now I suspect they’d regret bequeathing me with it. My identification with street folks and the urge to help them rise above conditions has never left me. Actually I’ve worked up the notion that we could all stand to rise above conditions.

Dad. I went even longer without speaking with him than I did with Mom. He dealt with our family’s teen-aged fulguration by folding his hand and striking out on his own. Offered a transfer by his employer, the story goes, he told Mom, “I’d like you to come to Florida with me, but I don’t think I can love you anymore.” No woman in her right mind would go for that deal, and Mom didn’t fall for it either. Dad packed his company car and struck out, leaving his all-important nest egg, and everything else, behind. When David was in the hospital again that summer, that’s where Dad came from to visit him.

I had been away, and I don’t recall blaming Dad for his poor dealings with the family. He had been raised in a very old-school, European style, and he simply couldn’t handle our ways. To this day, in spite of Dad’s expression of a taste for “philosophy,” our conversations are often guarded, pregnant with unspoken truths. I still don’t know his philosophy.

Last summer Dad, my youngest brother, and I went to Montana to camp and fish, riding an outfitter’s horses into some of the most pristine wilderness left in the lower forty-eight. I had genuinely hoped to break the communication barrier that stands between us, but we had to settle for hugs and meaningful silences, for the most part. Dad still plays with his cards pressed tightly to his chest, flashing a look of panic if the conversational waters begin to threaten him with submersion. I guess he can’t swim.

Dad’s experience, it seems to me has also been different from the norm, though I’m uncertain that any human being matches that mythical standard. His family, unlike Mom’s, which fought in the Revolution, was barely American. They were proud American citizens, but their traditions came from old Europe, and they still lived communally on the old Bass farm as they had done for a thousand years.

During my childhood, whenever David was out of the hospital, we’d spend weekends at the farm with the scene looking very much like something from an era that had long since passed in this country, all Dad’s siblings and extended family eating together, playing cards, children roaming the grounds like Huck Finn. It was all rather idyllic, truly, and the moment Grandma Bass died and the farm disappeared under a layer of vulgar office towers marked the shift from one childhood to another.

Dad’s life since then became an effort to recreate those years. His brother and sister had never left the farm. Even when his brother Paul married and had a child, he stayed there on Rockside, as the place was known. I think that scene served as an anchor for my Dad, and when he retired, impressively early despite having suffered huge financial setbacks, he bought his own farm, secluded and sylvan, and moved his socially inept brother and sister in with him.

Paul was a very strange dude. Throughout his lifetime he suffered from some sort of condition that caused him to wobble quite a bit and to mumble when he spoke, like a cartoon character. I still have no idea what the actual condition was–it was never discussed in medical terms, and Paul worked, loved, laughed, and lived in a fashion perfectly suited to him. He represented another unusual facet of our lives that never seemed unusual to us, simply because it just had always been what it was. During his declining years, Paul became more and more difficult to live with, his condition developing into a matter that caused him to actually require care, rather than merely one engendering bemusement. He became cantankerous, incontinent, and dangerous to himself, given his refusal to use a cane. Dad actively cared for him, there on the new farm, forty-five minutes from a paved road, until he died a few years ago.

I couldn’t make the funeral, but I spoke to Dad on the phone as he was back in the city making arrangements. I told him I thought his dealings with Paul were among the most impressive and moving things I had ever seen. I still see it that way. The conversation, which lasted no more than ten minutes I guess, may have been the deepest we’ve ever shared.

For the past eight or nine years every Sunday, so long as I’m in town, I give away food we cook up to whomever we can get to come up to the Colorado College campus and sample our fare. Often our guests are homeless or dirt poor, but we’re not so much stipulating low economic clout as a qualifier. We’ll feed anyone. Dick Celeste, the former governor of my home state, Ohio, and once ambassador to India, comes now and then. He’s a friend, and I visit him at his home, during party season at CC. Arlo Guthrie came down to our basement kitchen once–I put him to work washing dishes. Many of the crowd I see every week are chronic though, plagued by demons I surmise to have been born in conditions similar to mine as a youth. I’ve occasionally contemplated the accusation of “enabling” bad behavior that people toss my way once in a while, but many of our regulars, some of whom I’ve known for twenty-five years, are simply never going to approach any sort of productivity. They are simply too extraordinarily damaged, and as the proverb goes, there, but for the grace of God, go I.

The Christian experience I mentioned earlier was a reflection, or maybe an extension, of spiritual drives I always apprehended. I pursued it heartily for a time, beginning my adult involvement with the sort of hands-on charity our Sunday kitchen represents in a Christian context. The Church always felt skewed to me though, and a couple years’ studying of the questions involved convinced me to adopt thinking anathema to most of my Christian friends. The exclusionary thinking shared by many church folk, in turn, began to seem anathema to me.

Something about my family and its ability to weather long, rending forces, becoming over time a stronger entity for all its roiling turbulence, seems to me akin to the aspect of the human condition that produces the wrecked lives that bring folks to visit me on Sunday afternoons. Further spiritual thinking–some would say metaphysical thinking–concerning Chaos and Oneness has encouraged me to feel like the separation between me and the crowd I serve is illusory in some indefinable fashion. When members of our family passed through periods during which we found it necessary to step back from one another, the bonds that hold us together never broke, and the etheric bonds between my soup kitchen crowd and me, and ambassadors or presidents, don’t seem breakable either. We all seem to share certain common struggles, differences arising simply from disparate approaches, variant perspectives. Our family, it turns out was never what we imagined it ought to be, but perhaps something greater, and more viable, after all.

Part of my mission in ditching the construction business for more cerebral and perhaps less lucrative pursuits at an age when many of my peers in the building industry are thinking of golf courses and retirement comes from a belief that the differences in individuals are reconcilable. Feeding people is necessary, but falls short of bridging the apparent expanse between souls. I still want to change the world, even though I understand the futility of such a grandiose notion. Utopians always fail. But I expect that each time some failure becomes apparent, we can learn a little something, and maybe the next day we can fail a little better.

No account of self-examination is ever going to be complete. I won’t be asserting anything about how I’ve come full circle. Our family will never return to the conditions of my childhood. Nor is the new generation my brothers and cousins and I have brought into the world a retread of old lives. I haven’t even touched on my own experiences as head of a new family, but my children live lives vastly different from their forbears, and even though I rather hope they can avoid some of my mistakes, I suspect they’ll be making many of their own. It seems to be in their genes to require hard lessons. But, like my tortured friends in line at CC on Sunday mornings, or those in my circle equally tortured but accustomed to fine linens, whatever they may suffer holds its own value.

We all learn what we must learn. Life is perfectly safe. Its lessons are self-taught, but deep. I genuinely plan to write a real memoir and a family history, for my kids’ sake, but by the time we come full circle, it’s too late to write about it.

George Who?

This is a paper from some time ago, well prior to the advent of Occupy events. Henry George wrote from a sensibility one rarely finds expressed so explicitly today. The modern reader should note that Christian underpinnings in no way disrupt either the reasoned logic or the passionate humanity behind George’s arguments. Follow the links! Many Occupiers have promoted education, the deeper aspects of which are rarely available in 3 page tracts….

For Eric Stephenson
16 February 2009

George Who?

It seems peculiar that in 2009 no one has heard of Henry George, if only for the fact that during his prime a hundred years past his was easily one of the most recognizable names on Earth. Just a journalist really, George’s hardscrabble upbringing, his early experience in the business world, and maybe just a little OCD inspired him to craft an entirely new approach to economic theory. Its publication very quickly garnered him international acclaim, respect, and supportive friendship from many of the greatest figures of his day. Many, encountering his work for the first time today, would no doubt label him a Commie, particularly given that George’s work followed Marx and Engels’ by three decades. This misinterprets George. His thinking split the difference between Adam Smith and the Communist theorists in many ways, sharing common ground with both camps but firmly establishing his own territory. His work deserves a second reading.

George was born in Philadelphia, September, 1839, to a family headed by a hardworking but low-budget printer. By providing the Church cut-rate printing services, George’s devout father enabled Henry to garner a relatively high-standard primary education from the Episcopal Academy. He left home after high-school seeking his own way, and after a brief period of adventuring, found himself in San Francisco where he joined the Printer’s Union, following in his father’s footsteps after all.

George lived a poor man’s life–same as any tradesman at the height of the Robber Barons’ power–until an editor at the San Francisco Times came across a piece he had written and left lying around. He accepted an offered staff writing position at $50 a week, which seemed a princely amount compared with his father’s $800 a year. He traveled quite a bit for the Times, and in 1868 on assignment in New York City first encountered the squalid conditions surrounding and adjoining vaunted islands of luxury and power that would inform and undergird his writing for the rest of his life.

Having gained considerable respect as a newsman and a fair amount of seed-money, George and a partner, William Hinton, established the San Francisco Evening Post in 1871. George unabashedly used the paper as a human rights platform until 1877, when, some say, powerful railroad interests against whom he had written since his SF Times days shut the Evening Post down. Quickly landing a government post through highly-placed friendships he had developed, he used the leisure time it afforded to produce his magnum opus, Progress and Poverty, and published it in 1879. George moved to New York in 1880 and promptly left for England and Ireland, touring there to support Irish land support. By the time he returned, his life had changed forever. Progress and Poverty had made him a celebrity (de Mille 1-152).

George’s political economy laid out in his roughly 600 page book begins with his assertion that Smith’s approach established private land ownership as the foundation of economic and social structure, referring often to “the sacred rights of private property” (Smith, par. 1.11.79). So far few would argue, but George figured this skewed, and brazenly wrote that, “[t]he great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the intellectual and moral condition of a people….[I]t necessarily follows that the only remedy for the unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property” (295, 391). He argued that as a foundational natural resource there is no basis for sequestering land in private hands. He proposed to hold land in common and allot it to users for as long as they needed, for whatever production they could derive from it, and the holder would pay tax, (rent), on its assessed value until relinquished. The holder and any capital or labor involved would keep whatever profit came from the working of the land, and the public would base taxation only upon the land itself. Note that this negates both income and capital gains taxes. (During George’s prominence, no federal income tax existed in the United States). George insisted the extensive system described philosophically in Progress and Poverty, and rather more technically in The Science of Political Economy, would adequately supply the government’s fiscal needs without additional taxes while simultaneously encouraging entrepreneurship and curtailing development of a landed class.

Marx, whose seminal works came before George, but close enough that both wrote from the surrounding milieu of the Industrial Revolution, addressed similar problems. He and those following took the matter to a deeper extreme, however, allowing for no private ownership of either property or capital. Marx expressed a well known hostility to capital. The familiar Communist adage, “Property is Theft,” represents a drastic condensation from Marx’s arguments that labor always seems to wind up on the short end of dealings with those holding either land or capital (Marx, chap. 6, par.2). Like George, Marx chafed at the inequities this arrangement produced, especially with the exacerbations of capital lording over labor, which industrial development had completely disassociated from the land producing the wealth. “The means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up,” says Marx, “were generated in feudal society,” (Marx, and Engels 1848, chap. 1, par. 21).The Communists implemented a far more radical seizure of all private property, including both land and capital, consolidating it under a central federal power (chap. 2, par. 75). Contrarily, George felt that capital deserved its due, and sought to rectify the problems he saw by implementation of a more enlightened “single tax.”

A few germane observations present themselves for discussion. Smith, George, and Marx all expressed notions we might call idealist—Utopian even. Each sought to solve timeless conundrums with an incredibly optimistic approach. Jaded 21st century readers might consider any one of them painfully naive, in retrospect. None of them had the advantage of the hindsight we enjoy, however, and fruitlessly denying the problems each pointed out in his broader work does not help at all. Smith wrote when, fresh from the collapse of European Feudalism, land served as the key to wealth of any kind, and still viewed as an unlimited resource for the grabbing. The vast inequities the Industrial Revolution had abruptly produced vexed George and the Communists. None of these could have predicted today’s technological, information based economies, with the problems they addressed dispersed over the entire planet. Today, the rate of separation between the “Haves” and the “Have Nots” poises to exceed the conditions affecting either set of writers.
George did not design a perfect system. Neither, as amply demonstrated by both history and current events, did Smith or Marx. Henry George thoughtfully and humanely addressed a terribly intractable matter in human affairs, however, and deliberately allowed for future thinkers to expand his work. His work deserves contemplation as we forge into a new century fraught with uncertainties. Our present crisis may help encourage just that.

Works Cited

De Mille, Anna George. Henry George: Citizen of the World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950.
George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. 1898. New York, New York: The Robert Shalkenbach Foundation, 1979. 17 February 2009

Marx, Karl. Wage-Labor Capital. 1849. 17 February 2009

Marx, K. and Engels, F. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848. 17 February 2009

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Ed. Edwin Cannan. 5th ed. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1904. 17 February 2009

United States Department of the Treasury. Fact Sheets: Taxes. 17 February 2009 (This link is obsolete).

All in

When i first set out to write this blog i had no intention of writing about geopolitics, or anything any bigger than my own little world, or to develop any sort of readership at all, let alone to kick up international interest. Who knew? Since the time i started, Adbuster’s Occupy movement has overtaken the whole world and i’ve become a part of it, along with apparently millions of fellow humans dissatisfied with aspects of the concentric and overlapping political systems that govern and control the minutiae of our daily lives. Occupy has struck a chord that resonates well beyond what seems to have been its original intent as well.

Adbuster asserts in its campaign web-page opener that, “we vow to end the monied corruption of our democracy,” speaking, one assumes of U.S. democracy, even though Adbusters is a Canadian publication founded by Kalle Lasn, an Estonian. Adbusters itself claims to be a, “global network of culture jammers and creatives,” and that their Occupy is, “[i]nspired by the Egyptian Tahrir Square uprising and the Spanish acampadas.” One should note that Adbusters is a non-profit organization with aspirations and effect well beyond the confines of the magazine at its core.

Many of my dear intrepid friends struggle mightily with the unavoidable nature of the movement in which we all participate. Occupy Colorado Springs, (OCS), has garnered a fair amount of attention both because of its early acquisition of a city permit to camp on the sidewalk, and for its fragmentary infighting. Strong personalities have clashed fairly spectacularly for what scale we’re dealing with here, and precisely the same arguments are on display at Occupy web-pages all over the U.S., as well as abroad. Here, many patriotic, nationally oriented players have concentrated on addressing the U.S. Constitution and the influence of corporate interests in Washington, D.C. politics. Others have been caught up in causes of personal concern as the “focus” of the overall movement has grown more and more diffuse. The bickering and difficulty in reaching consensus has been frustrating but, i suggest, not unhealthy or out of place.

Adbusters, following ques from the Middle East and Spain, deliberately set off a “leaderless” movement, and has fastidiously avoided taking hold of any sort of control of what has developed since, refusing even media interviews for fear of exercising undue influence. Occupy remains a leaderless movement. Various groups and individuals have issued lists of demands; the one linked there, “is representative of those participating on this [particular ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Facebook] page.” We Occupiers have much common ground, which has served well to bring us all together, and will continue to serve as we gather to discuss and bicker over issues and particulars. There is plenty to differentiate amongst us as well, on individual and other categorical bases, but we have recognized, more or less, an essential humanity that has us willing to stand in freezing temperatures if we live in the northern hemisphere, and subject ourselves to the slow, often painful process of learning to live together.

Some among us, as we have seen right here in Colorado Springs, are very uncomfortable indeed with the amorphous nature of the Movement. We have seen splintering, censorship wars, general Assemblies that devolve into shouting matches, and the development of personal animosities. These phenomena are repeated on a grander scale throughout the Movement while observers gloat over the imminent dissolution of Occupy unity. Neither we Occupiers nor the Movement’s detractors ought to be misled by these birth pains. Our situation as humans, or for that matter any other creature inhabitant of the Earth has been rendered fully untenable by humans competing for dominance. The upheaval we engage from our Colorado Springs street corner, or from squares in Manchester, Belgrade, Cairo, and etc. is the natural response of rats in a corner. Were it not for the fact that we humans indeed possess reasoning capacity beyond a rat’s we really would be screwed. Fortune, or Divine providence, or evolution, or whatever mechanism or mechanisms turn(s) out to be true has granted us the tools that, utilized with empathy at every turn may–just may–allow us to work our way out of the massive pickle in which we’ve put ourselves. Nothing about this will be easy, quick, or for most, especially comfortable.

The Movement is leaderless. This is an existential fact. No matter how strenuously individuals attempt to grab hold of reigns, or to turn them over to others, there is no authority behind the Movement other than the profound spiritual authority of its essential Idea. The financial disparities that we have focused on here in the U.S. are real, and the supra-national bodies that control our government with full directive power are the same bodies that separate people from power in every nation on Earth. Each issue that has arisen into the Movement’s overall consciousness, from derivative markets, to marijuana law, to camping on public property is part and parcel of the whole thing, which itself amounts to such a gigantic, lumpen juggernaut that we have a hard time gathering our thoughts around the whole thing at once. We must.

Many U.S. citizens, including some prominent in and around OCS, have expressed insistent nationalism. Muslims and Christians around the world have pushed religions agendas. Nationalism is by no means confined to the U.S.A. Our corporate, non-personal enemy and its personal, human operators are Global already, and use these divisions to our detriment! At a Colorado College faculty panel yesterday, much ado was made of income disparities and market finagling by Wall Street financiers. We can isolate our minds all we want, but we can not eliminate the fact that Wall Street, Fleet Street, Singapore, Hong Kong, the House of Saud, whatever, whatever, are already one indivisible entity, operating in opposition to any concern for overall humanity or household priorities for any of us as inhabitants of the planet, including the natural requirements of the controllers. The Idea of competition and profit has acquired an independent life of its own and has prevented even those at the top of the unwieldy pyramid from living lives connected to the most valuable prizes of all, which we humans have recognized throughout our history and recorded in odes, songs, and literature to be transcendent of politics and possessions. The statistics cited by those college economists, and the many Occupiers that mention them in speeches and lists of demands are quite real, and Americans might note that Kurdish, Nepali, and Palestinian Occupiers, for example, skew the stats we’ve been flailing our arms about here even further, and that “First World” exploitation is a very large part of this discussion, indeed.

There can be little doubt that the “Wall Street” entities in control of our various governments have planned for and directed events toward a “New World Order” for decades, if not centuries. Lots of justifiably paranoid conspiracy watchers all over the planet have done their best to alert their fellows to this alarming and unacceptable development for as long as it has been in the mix. The Vatican, a power with negative credibility in its adherence to its own doctrine, has offered itself up as a potential controller of a global banking scheme. Currently entrenched power-brokers will absolutely without question attempt to co-opt and control the current Movement. We humans are not interested in more of the same bullshit, plus the added benefit of still more bullshit! We occupiers are fully Sovereign, each in his or her own right. We are leaderless by design, which is the natural development of the abject failure of our leaders, and in fact of the failure of the very foundation of our interaction amongst ourselves that has developed without much direction for at least the 10,000 year span during which we have written about it. Those who resist this fact will find little more than inversely correlated discomfort in their resistance. One can deny the nature of a rhinoceros till one’s dying day, but the beast remains a rhinoceros, and the denier’s last day may well come on the day he encounters a rhinoceros.

Sovereign consensus building is not democracy. It’s something we humans have never attempted on the scale we Occupiers are attempting now. Broad-scale cooperation as a foundation is against an established competitive approach that we have fallen into by default for a long, long time. Voting one another into submission will not work, simply because we have let the cat out of the bag. We noble individuals are learning a brand-new thing, like it or not, because a rhinoceros has smashed the freakin’ house down. I, for one will not abandon the Liberty of my own Sovereignty, no matter who votes what, nor will i abandon the respect i hold for each other Sovereign in the entire mix. I recognize the differences between whatever groups or persons are in the whole wide world. Categorical observations are real, so far as they go; but i won;t be bound by them. I won’t be forced to fight against the 1% simply because i am a member of the 99%. Rather i will be fighting with every fiber of my being for the 100% of us who will ALL be trampled by the rhinoceros, in pretty danged short order, unless we ALL relinquish our insistence on control, avarice, and irresponsibility of all stripes.

Each of us has a part to play, a purpose to serve. Never abandon what you know. Work hard at open discussion. Don’t be embarrassed by frustrating moments or attempt to hide your own humanity. Withdraw for a moment if you need to to prevent overboiling passions. We’re all in this together. Be patient Brothers and Sisters; this is gonna hurt some….

OWS List of Demands:
www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=157161391040462
Adbusters:
www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet
NPR:
www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141526467/exploring-occupy-wall-streets-adbuster-origins
Middle Eastern origins:
www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/apr/09/libya-egypt-syria-yemen-live-updates
Acampadas:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13466977

The Hail Mary pass still would need an Immaculate Reception.

So, in the spirit of Code Duello, trial by combat, Might Makes Right and all that stupid crap, what happens when Texas Christian U., Southern Methodist University, Brigham Young and Notre Dame square off in a four way winner take all?
Will GOD Almighty choose the leaders of His Creation from a trial by combat amongst colleges representing the seminaries of American Christendom? Would He toss in a “ringer” like the New Orleans Saints? What if He uses the hole in the roof of the Cowboys Stadium to barf on “His” Team?
Sound ridiculous? How much more so the notion that He really cares who wins a football game?
Or that a victory on the battlefield of Real War means that your own country is far more righteous and beloved than The Other Side?

Occupy Denver recognizes Colo. AIM, mixes metaphor to Unoccupy America!

This weekend the General Assembly of Occupy Denver recognized that its intended occupation was actually a re-occupation, of lands to which original inhabitants lay claim. On Sunday the GA consensus voiced its solidarity with the American Indian Movement of Colorado who submitted a statement for ratification. It’s reprinted below via The Sole Reader:

COLORADO AIM’S CHALLENGE TO #OCCUPYDENVER

An Indigenous Platform Proposal for “Occupy Denver”

“Now we put our minds together to see what kind of world we can create for the seventh generation yet to come.”

John Mohawk (1944-2006), Seneca Nation

As indigenous peoples, we welcome the awakening of those who are relatively new to our homeland. We are thankful, and rejoice, for the emergence of a movement that is mindful of its place in the environment, that seeks economic and social justice, that strives for an end to oppression in all its forms, that demands an adequate standard of food, employment, shelter and health care for all, and that calls for envisioning a new, respectful and honorable society. We have been waiting for 519 years for such a movement, ever since that fateful day in October, 1492 when a different worldview arrived – one of greed, hierarchy, destruction and genocide.

In observing the “Occupy Together” expansion, we are reminded that the territories of our indigenous nations have been “under occupation” for decades, if not centuries. We remind the occupants of this encampment in Denver that they are on the territories of the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ute peoples. In the U.S., indigenous nations were the first targets of corporate/government oppression. The landmark case of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), which institutionalized the “doctrine of discovery” in U.S. law, and which justified the theft of 2 billion acres of indigenous territory, established a framework of corrupt political/legal/corporate collusion that continues throughout indigenous America, to the present.

If this movement is serious about confronting the foundational assumptions of the current U.S. system, then it must begin by addressing the original crimes of the U.S. colonizing system against indigenous nations. Without addressing justice for indigenous peoples, there can never be a genuine movement for justice and equality in the United States. Toward that end, we challenge Occupy Denver to take the lead, and to be the first “Occupy” city to integrate into its philosophy, a set of values that respects the rights of indigenous peoples, and that recognizes the importance of employing indigenous visions and models in restoring environmental, social, cultural, economic and political health to our homeland.

We call on Occupy Denver to adopt, as a starting point, the following:

1. To repudiate the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, to endorse the repeal of the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493) to work for the reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court case of Johnson v. M’Intosh 1823), and call for a repeal of the Columbus Day holiday as a Colorado and United States holiday.

2. To endorse the right of all indigenous peoples to the international right of self-determination, by virtue of which they freely determine their political status, and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural futures.

3. To demand the recognition, observance and enforcement of all treaties and agreements freely entered into `between indigenous nations and the United States. Treaties should be recognized as binding international instruments. Disputes should be recognized as a proper concern of international law, and should be arbitrated by impartial international bodies.

4. To insist that Indigenous people shall never be forcibly relocated from their lands or territories.

5. To acknowledge that Indigenous peoples have the right to practice and teach their spiritual and religious traditions customs and ceremonies, including in institutions of the State, e.g. prisons, jails and hospitals„ and to have access in privacy their religious and cultural sites, and the right to the repatriation of their human remains and funeral objects.

6. To recognize that Indigenous peoples and nations are entitled to the permanent control and enjoyment of their aboriginal-ancestral territories. This includes surface and subsurface rights, inland and coastal waters, renewable and non-renewable resources, and the economies based on these resources. In advancement of this position, to stand in solidarity with the Cree nations, whose territories are located in occupied northern Alberta, Canada, in their opposition to the Tar Sands development, the largest industrial project on earth. Further, to demand that President Barack Obama deny the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, proposed to run from the tar sands in Canada into the United States, and that the United States prohibit the use or transportation of Tar Sands oil in the United States.

7. To assert that Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. They have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. Further, indigenous peoples have the right to the ownership and protection of their human biological and genetic materials, samples, and stewardship of non-human biological and genetic materials found in indigenous territories.

8. To recognize that the settler state boundaries in the Americas are colonial fabrications that should not limit or restrict the ability of indigenous peoples to travel freely, without inhibition or restriction, throughout the Americas. This is especially true for indigenous nations whose people and territories have been separated by the acts of settler states that established international borders without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples affected.

9. To demand that the United States shall take no adverse action regarding the territories, lands, resources or people of indigenous nations without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples affected.

10. To demand the immediate release of American Indian political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, U.S. Prisoner #89637-132, from U.S. federal custody.

Finally, we also remind Occupy Denver that indigenous histories, political, cultural, environmental, medical, spiritual and economic traditions provide rich examples for frameworks that can offer concrete models of alternatives to the current crises facing the United States. We request that Occupy Denver actively utilize and integrate indigenous perspectives, teachers, and voices in its deliberations and decision-making processes.

Submitted 8 October 2011

American Indian Movement of Colorado

P.O. Box 292, Sedalia, CO 80135

Today’s Tom Sawyer

It’s 4am here and this occurred to me strongly enough just now to have me say it just now. For Vic, Ken and the rest of my Christian friends, as well as Michele, Kathryn, and others who get twitchy when I bring up the Bible.
 
I had breakfast with my friend Vic a little while ago and we had some of this conversation–I mean this conversation. The one we’ve been having if you’ve read any of this stuff around here, or if you’ve been to see me at my Facebook, or on the sidewalk or whatever. Vic is a Christian, and about as solid a practitioner as I’ve ever met. He “works” as a prayer director for one of the internationally influential untaxed Christian pseudo-businesses one might easily enough find scattered around town here in Colorado Springs. Years ago I lived in Lindale, Texas and I used to say Lindale was the buckle of the Bible Belt. Now that some of the big organizations down in Lindale have disappeared due to fraud and embezzlement and the like and some of the people I knew down in East Texas have moved to this very town I sometimes say America’s waistline has risen with age and the buckle has found a home in Colorado Springs.

Anyhow, Vic is an affable guy and a good friend and we had a good time over our platesful of arterial lubrication such as we Americans like to do at breakfast. He said he had read some here on these e-pages–I aaalmost cringed because of a certain propensity of mine. Then I remembered one of the axiomatic rules I’ve taught my kids since they started picking up English: “There’s no such thing as a bad word, only bad timing.” It’s time for this.

Vic said he found some of the thoughts he’d come across here, “interesting,” and mused that I had a bone to pick with “organized religion,” which is true, but hasn’t really come up at hipgnosis just yet, I don’t think. I cringed a bit at having utilized terms like “motherfuckah” while discussing a Bible tidbit known as the Beatitudes from a longer passage known as the Sermon on the Mount. It’s one of those axiomatic rules for lots of Christians, and for many who’ve never set foot in a Christian edifice as well. One finds the passage, (from the book of Matthew, chapter 5, in the Bible, if you’re interested), hanging on wooden plaques and the like in people’s living rooms and over their toilets and chapel entrances all over the world, and I suppose in every tongue still in print. I felt a twinge of embarrassment at the time that I get now and then from writing strongly about such grand subject matter knowing well that I’m no saint myself. So I brushed my way by that one at the time, and we went on with breakfast, and with other portions of the Conversation. That’s why this is for Vic at the top of the page, not ’cause I mean to point him out as a prime exemplar or anything.

I have lots of Christian friends, and I often claim that very appellation amongst them, (though not so often amongst the “Romans”); some of them may now think of me as shooting my own foot as I continue. I also have friends that are occultist dope fiends. They’ll find this bit rather more amusing, I expect, but I’ll implicate myself with them too, when I get a round tuit. This is not about organized religion–it’s personal, you see, and directed at people I know, among others including myself where it applies, by which I mean, “where it applies.” Not, “where it applies unless it’s uncomfortable to apply it there like Mercurochrome or something.”

Christians are full of shit as a defining point–the idea of Christian full-of-shitness is all over the New Testament. Many if not most of them have not the merest clue about their own doctrine and those that do spend hours and hours at intricately complex and totally reducible discussions about irreducible complexity and such while ignoring the business of Love so central to their own foundations. (Recall my comments about pseudo-statements now, if you will). One of the so-called Ten Commandments reads, “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain,” in that poetic old Frank Bacon English I love so much, (Exodus 20:7, if you give a damn). I’m not gonna dig out a Hebrew lexicon to make this point, and some translations say “misuse” or something instead of “take…in vain”. Whatever. You Christians quit tapdancing and think about this.

Just about any Christian will get at least a little uncomfortable if you say, “God damn it.” There are injunctions in their doctrine warning them away from curses, as well as oaths, unpiloted tongues, and “coarse language”. They don’t so often know the difference and figure this sort of thing for “taking the LORD’s name in vain.” Think about this: When a woman marries a man in most contemporary societies, she takes his name, though this is no longer so mandatory as it had been given the slow and incremental abandonment of the notion of women as property in vogue these days. If a woman, say, marries some patriarchal dude and then goes to work for some pimp on the side, she’s taken Dude’s name in vain. So when Christians do their little tapdancing around points in their own bedrock supposedly established by Gawd Himself and endorsed by His Only Begotten where they’ve not-quite-deliberately, (that’s a dance move called an NQD in the studios, BTW), failed even to drill for pylons, they join the Golden Calf Party, and according to their own lore will be consumed in the fires as they fall through the very fissure in that bedrock I describe here now.

This is the same sort of thing going on when a guy zips up his fly after reading about turning the other cheek and steps out to shoot his quota of Afghans for the day. Or votes a “hawk” into office at his 8-year-old’s school assembly room. Or works up a smokin’ hot head of steam about the crackhead that broke into his garage to feed a real live demon that lives in any crackhead’s pocket and gets real hungry and cranky, (snicker), when its belly is empty. And practicing the sort of bullshit Christianity that allows for this sort of Gene Kelly move is like sailing down the mighty Mississip’ on a flat Tom Sawyer raft made of the concrete that you ought to have been using to build your foundation instead. You’re already at the bottom of the river and the Water of Life is flowing right by your drowned bones.

I’ll be danged…the Sun is coming up over a fine Colorado Sunday morning and I’ve just come to wrapping up a genuine sermon, complete with brimstone. Who’da thunk it?

Pay attention Christian: The World doesn’t hate you because you bring Jesus up all the time. It hates you because you sully a beautiful thing. It hates you because you’re an abject hypocrite, the worst variety of an asshole! And they can smell it, even if they can’t articulate the thought. And none of this is wrong; the fact that it’s coarse is a separate matter. I may have blown my disguise for some…it’s ok, I’m still pretty clear with my own notion of where I stand, and this is for you at least as much as it’s for my own amusement. To paraphrase Gandhi, “I’d be a Christian if it weren’t for the God damn Christians.” That nor any of the above has nothing at all to do with whether I’m actually a Christian or not, nor does it have to do with “religion”, organized or otherwise. It’s about that personal relationship you guys keep talking about. It’s dysfunctional, Yo, and it’s up to you to straighten yours out while I worry about my own.

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Pseu Pseu Pseudo-Do-Dah-Day

For Rob. Thanks buddy! Say hi to yer Mom.
 
We’ve been toying with some pretty weird bits of thinking here, and it’s already getting hard to follow. Lemme try and tie a few things together. Also, if you’re still with me, now’s a good time to point out that this humble site is best read in conjunction with the discussions on my Facebook, (Steve Bass), and for this bit, especially within the PPCC Philosophy Club page linked from my Wall or wherever it is.

Remember my mention of Pseudo-statements back at Willie’s story? Elsewhere, in Stage Magick and around about, notably at the PPCC Philosopy Club linked off my Facebook, I put up the business of our inability to prove a negative. The assertion that “This statement does not belong in the set of all true statements,” is a nice example. The statement is internally self-defeating, negated by paradox; it’s internally inconsistent, self-contradictory, neither true, nor false– a pseudo-statement. The “set of all true statements” statement is a tidy example in that attempting an answer produces a nonsense response awfully reminiscent, at least to me, of the sort of thing that happens to those hapless physicists when they try to crunch their numbers beyond the event horizon and into the heart of the Singularity. Lots of PHDs get real pissy if you try and take their numbers and drag them into the “real” world here. Like most of us, abstractions are fine for them. Hanging flesh on the ephemeral turns it into a monster for some. I, on the other hand, have no such qualm. If matter isn’t made of matter, as some rather esoteric physics appears to indicate, that most assuredly effects us, sez me.

The problem of proving a negative is stickier than the “True Statements” statement, because we can somehow tell the essence of the genuinely self-defeating pseudo-statement is True. Something about the very idea is akin to the business of the Singularity–we can’t seem to get there, or even define the nature of that There, but we know there has to be Something, OK? And thinking about it produces notions that resonate in our world.

We’ve also talked some about politics, and here’s the clincher. Our whole system, our World, maybe even our very Selves combine to make a big ol’ Pseudo-statement, overburdened by internal paradox and contradiction, and decorated with infinite concentric, overlapping circles and waves of Pseudo-reality.

The “Doctrine of the Many,” claimed by Zoroastrians, Jains, some Gostics, among others, avers that we humans are compound beings. Some scientists at the fringe have claimed this as well, but let me keep this as political as I can for a moment. The concept surfaces in Western thinking when we speak of “talking to ourselves,” which we all know can be quite an argument at times, and in notions like multiple personality. Most U.S. citizens will agree that we are a “Christian” nation in spite of that pesky 1st Amendment. We’ll acknowledge “diversity” in religious matters, but obviously those other guys are wrong and belong in Hell where they won’t fuck up our Christian Zen, see? The foundational Christian documents upon which the edifice of the world’s biggest group of religions includes a whole lot of admonitions about Love. Yet it is hardly necessary to provide examples of the embarrassing fact that a whole lot of Christians are rabid, violence-loving haters dribbling foam from their chins as the rail about how, “God hates fags,” or whatever. Don’t feel so smug if you’re a Buddhist or an Agnostic or < insert your favorite dogmatic crap here> and you still get that rush of glee when you see Saddam dangling from a rope or hear about the supposed demise of Osama. I may argue that a thing can be both A and non-A at the same time, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that killin’ a motherfuckah is the same as turning the other cheek. Where is the Love in this set of systems/politicals/religions/nationalisms? It’s in there, but only in the sense that it sets the whole business up as a sort of cosmic, (and often comic), Pseudo-statement.

I spoke a bit with my homeless friend Rob yesterday and he told me about a guy he knows with some brilliant talent–musical, I think–that lives outside. Rob had burned himself accidentally and the topic brought to light his friend’s plight; the guy is a multiple, and periodically his alter will emerge and industriously destroy his life. The fellow named his alter Jack, I think, and knows of his existence from observing the destruction “Jack” leaves in his wake, but the two never interact. The guy blacks out and has no recollection of moving about in the world while Jack is in control. Once Jack put his feet in a campfire til the shared body required a lengthy hospital stay. One day Jack just may kill the both of him.

I’m saying Christendom is just like Jack and his host, and so is American society. So is the whole freakin’ society of the whole freakin’ world. Only we suffer from a far more advanced stage of the condition and our legs are buried in hot coals. Our hair is on fire. Those homeless dudes don’t worry about a house, but we’ve been building a huge edifice on a foundation of shit for so long we think we can’t backtrack, but backtrack we must. This house is collapsing upon us right now, as we speak, so to speak, and we need to get the fuck out, tear down the M.C. Esher thing we’ve been trying to build, and start the fuck over or we’re all going to be buried. Our society, societies, lives, and now even the solid earth is/are collapsing under the weight of internal contradictions of our own making.

Most who’ve read so far won’t need me to explain the function of a keystone–the stone at the top of an arch that concentrates the force and thereby holds the arch in place. When the capstone at the top of an arch at, say, a Medieval cathedral erodes, the arch collapses. The capstone of the Christian faith is supposed to be Love, right? Isn’t that key to a great many doctrines? It seems hard to find a player in all the world that will openly advocate for a doctrine of Hatred. Even the nastiest Devil-worshiping headbanger seeks Love, if only amongst his own within the particular bit of the Chaotic waveform in which he finds himself. Whatever. Our shit is missing its capstone. And its foundation is shit, too.

Don’t you dare get all dogmatically ideological and ignore the fact that I’ve NOT preached Jesus here, or any other tributary. We–and I mean all of us, including those of us clutching the notions of enmity so close to our hearts, and those addicted to power–need to stand back, tear the whole house down, and rebuild something with a thoughtfully drawn blueprint. We need to build an edifice on a foundation of Love, designed toward the capstone of Love. When we do that–oh, what a mansion we’ll have!

What did that one dude John say? “God is Love.” Right? Can I get a witness?

Right. Thus sayeth the housepainter.

http://samaelgnosis.us/books/html/revolutionary_psychology/chapter_12.htm

http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)