Thursday, April 01, 2010

Protest Double standards

In this video a leader of the Code Pink movement defends her protest at a Karl Rove book signing event. She says she waited until the end of the event to stage her "citizen's event", giving Rove a chance to have his say before she made her protest. As a result, I think what she did was a legitimate protest. She didn't silence Rove, as the Fox interviewer charges. However, it's striking that the Code Pink protest was far more disruptive than anything I've heard the Tea Partiers do. Liberals are up in arms because of Tea Party protesters allegedly shouting epithets at Congressmen as they entered the Congress. What they were doing was exercising their Constitutional right to assemble and petition the Congress for a redress of their grievances. The US Capitol is absolutely a legitimate place to stage such as protest. Maxine Waters calls their behavior outlandish but in fact they were better behaved then the Code Pink protesters. As Americans, both group have a perfect right to stage their protesters and make their opinions known. Neither seems to me to be very disruptive. In the past other protest groups have blocked traffic or disrupted private religious ceremonies. Both the Code Pink and Tea Party protesters don't go that far and seem to be within their rights.