I am involved in a legal dispute with the NAACP and Jaffrey, New Hampshire Police Chief Dunn. The nature of the dispute is pretty much irrelevant: The NAACP's lawyers and the NAACP have tried repeatedly to shut down my blawg through "Stalking" hearings and have lobbied to keep my media out of open courtrooms, in direct contravention of
current trends in law. What
is relevant, then, is this:
When is the last time anyone on this board has heard of any Civil Rights Organization lobbying in favor of less camera access to a courtroom, or in favor of shutting down a First Amendment-based website?
If anyone has any knowledge or experience in that, please advise; I would love to read all about it.
Meanwhile, dig this:
Something is just not quite right when you have a Civil Rights Organization actively trying to restrict the marketplace of ideas, restrict camera access to the courtroom and to shut down a First Amendment website -- particularly when the general counsel of its legal defense fund -- Victor Bolden, Esq. -- sits on the board of directors of the National Coalition against Censorship, NCAC. Have we reached the height (nadir?) of hypocrisy yet, or what?
The NAACP has engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct squarely antithetical to that of vigorous Civil Rights advocacy and the ideals and constructs espoused by scholars like Francis Bacon, with the help of a police Chief that the town of Jaffrey has twice tried to pay to go away. Wow.
You bet I'm going to tell James McBride and Lucys Hurston (yes, that Hurston) and Hedrick all about this fiasco; give them a copy of this very post and some other materials on Saturday at the Norwalk Festival of Words. I've already told U.V.A. Law School's Robert O'Neill, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. Coincidentally -- or perhaps not -- Professor Ted Mearns, again for whom I worked at Case Western Law School, taught at U.V.A. himself. He was an advisor on my first non-profit, the Education Coalition (click on high-schoolers).
For those of you who support me, I'm not going to bother quoting right now. I appreciate it.
And for those who don't, that's cool, too. Whether you like me or not isn't really germane. But instead of trying to malign me, or engaging in needless sniping, go back and focus on the very question that brings me here as posed in paragraph two, supra. I trust you'll have a tough time finding any examples.