See the man.
See the man irritated by something. (That it was relatively trivial is not meaningful, but makes the whole story even more mind-boggling.)
See the man decide to protest said thing on his lunch hour.
See the man go eat his lunch, as usual, on a bench in the Independence National Historical Park, just outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
See his protest, comprised of one large piece of corrugated cardboard with a three-word inoffensive message scrawled on it, propped against the bench as he eats, on the day after Independence Day. See the man not shout, not march, not talk or interfere with anyone in the park.
See the park rangers not only tell him he can’t do that, not only that the park is a “First-Amendment-Free Zone,” but that if he doesn’t keep the cardboard sign turned around, they’ll arrest him.
Yeesh.
And never mind that the park, as a whole, is under a decades-old federal judge’s injunction against suppressing free assembly and protest.
The rangers, we are told, were “new to the park,” and didn’t understand its history — in particular, the 1988 injunction, but, clearly, the whole history the site commemorates.
Again, yeesh.
(via Ipse Dixit)