Clayton Cramer quotes this Christian Times story:
Three pastors conducting street preaching during a PrideFest event last year earned mixed court verdicts April for trespass and disorderly conduct.
Jim Grove, pastor of Heritage Baptist Church in Loganville, Pa. was acquitted of defiant trespass and disorderly conduct charges. However, Steven Garisto, an inner-city minister in Harrisburg, and Michael Marcavage, a preacher with the Philadelphia-based Repent America were found innocent of defiant trespass, but guilty of disorderly conduct, the group reported this week. These verdicts follow the acquittal of Jim Lymon, an evangelist from New York, during the Jan. 8 trial.
The ministers were arrested July 26 while evangelizing outside of a public park where the annual gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender PrideFest event was taking place. The daylong event featured various activities, including the sale of pornographic materials, public nudity, men dressed like women and obscene language over a public address system.
The ministers were not permitted inside the public park, so they remained on public property outside the main entrance. They were arrested while they were preaching in this public area.
The arresting officer, Stephanie Barrelet, who was filmed on video hugging other lesbian women entering the pride event, jailed Grove, Garisto, and Marcavage for several hours until the PrideFest event was over. Lymon, the first to be arrested, was cited and released.
Other news accounts (Hanover Evening Sun, Jan. 10, 2004; see also York Dispatch, Apr. 5, 2004) seem consistent with this, but add more details:
Harrisburg police say the pastors refused to obey their orders to stay more than 50 feet from the park. By lingering in the 50-foot zone and handing out literature, the preachers allegedly blocked traffic on an adjacent street and harassed some of the more than 5,000 people who attended the event.
Grove denies blocking traffic or pedestrians and testified police never warned him about lingering in the street.
It’s hard to tell what exactly the protesters were doing, so perhaps some of their conduct was indeed punishable; the stories unfortunately don’t give many details.
But I think that even given the abortion clinic buffer zone cases, there’s no justification for imposing such a 100-foot-diameter buffer zone around a political event, with little evidence of past court orders that had been flouted (as in Madsen) or of a serious threat of more than just possible fisticuffs (as was the case in the Second Circuit case a year or two ago that involved an intended protest outside the United Nations).
Some of the protesters’ speech was repulsive (“Besides distributing literature, protestors carried signs such as ‘GotAIDS yet?'”), and I’m sure there was other stuff in that same vein. But the speech was nonetheless constitutionally protected.
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