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'F*** TRUMP' truck sticker photo goes viral; driver speaks with KPRC 2

Abojt the sign on that truck

  • First Amendment here, let it stay

    Votes: 49 86.0%

  • Arrest that woman and her husband

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Don't arrest but get them to agree to change the words

    Votes: 7 12.3%

  • I don't care

    Votes: 1 1.8%
  • Total voters
    57
ecofarm said:
But it seems "prurient" kills that angle anyway.
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No. It doesn't seem that at all.




I feel like a heart surgeon being instructed on how to place a stent by a plumber.
 
ecofarm said:
Prurient does seem to disqualify the sticker.

So my argument is the repeated and intended exposure of the public, including children, to the word ****.

Walking around with a sign that says ****, or saying **** to every passer-by is disorderly by incitement through numbers.
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You keep saying that, but it hasn't gotten any more persuasive.
 
pillars said:
No. To be honest, I don't give a **** what other people yell. If I don't want to hear it, I leave the area or ignore it.

That's called #adulting.
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A child waiting for a parent can't leave the area. A child, or anyone else, cannot avoid seeing it.

It's incitement by numbers.

Does anyone believe walking around town all day with a sign that says "****" and refusing to desist will not result in arrest? Of course that's a disorderly arrest.
 
ecofarm said:
**** means sex. That word is the problem with the sticker.

Prurient, you might have something there.
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**** means so many more things than ****ing in 2017.
 
ecofarm said:
A child waiting for a parent can't leave the area. A child, or anyone else, cannot avoid seeing it.

It's incitement by numbers.

Does anyone believe walking around town all day with a sign that says "****" and refusing to desist will not result in arrest?
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Do you think that if you continue to type this, it will magically become true?
 
Mr Person said:
No. It doesn't seem that at all.




I feel like a heart surgeon being instructed on how to place a stent by a plumber.
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You're the confused one. I conceded that point multiple times.
 
pillars said:
Do you think that if you continue to type this, it will magically become true?
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Go carry around a sign that reads "****" and see what happens.
 
Chomsky said:
Exactly.

But even if the F word was found to meet the "prurient" and "sexual" tests of prongs 1 & 2, how do you get a judge to find political speech has no social or other redeeming value?

Not going to happen.
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Exactly, but you also won't meet the first two prongs because the sticker doesn't depict any sexual activity or anything like it. It's not like she's driving around with some kind of explicit porn story involving Trump.....

(I shuddered after typing that)

.....and the sticker quite obviously isn't instructing people to have sex with Trump and the people who voted for him. "****" has multiple uses, after all, as someone helpfully pointed out with the Carlin bit.
 
Mr Person said:
You cannot simply grab this snippet of language you like from a case and start applying it to all sort of other things that have completely different factual patterns than the case. You cannot just play word games and say "well, see, this covers that and this covers that." That is not how legal analysis works, yet it's just about always how people try to use it on DP.

You have to do hours and hours and hours of legal research. You have to analyze how each case fits together. You have to make judgements about how the fact pattern you are presently interested in related to those other cases.




Wikipedia is incomplete. For one thing, it fails to mention that this immediately precedes the test in Miller:

This much has been categorically settled by the Court, that obscene material is unprotected by the First Amendment. "The First and Fourteenth Amendments have never been treated as absolutes [footnote omitted]." We acknowledge, however, the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression. State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited. As a result, we now confine the permissible scope of such regulation to works which depict or describe sexual conduct. That conduct must be specifically defined by the applicable state law, as written or authoritatively construed. A state offense must also be limited to works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

413 U.S. at 23-24 (citations omitted) (emphasis added). It is only after making that clear that they lay out the test that wiki quoted.
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Yes, the exception is limited to sexually descriptive and arousing material.

The F word alone will not suffice, no differently than the word "intercourse". It needs to be used in further context to become a constitutional right's exception.
 
ecofarm said:
A child waiting for a parent can't leave the area. A child, or anyone else, cannot avoid seeing it.

It's incitement by numbers.

Does anyone believe walking around town all day with a sign that says "****" and refusing to desist will not result in arrest? Of course that's a disorderly arrest.
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Again, this is not how legal analysis works. You're just making **** up and asking what people "believe". Find a case that is still good law and is actually applicable that backs up your position that this sticker is obviously unprotected speech.



You also need to keep other cases in mind. It would be quite odd if the child angle meant anything since any number of people or children could have seen the jacket addressed in Cohen. Hey wait a minute:


On April 26, 1968, the defendant was observed in the Los Angeles County Courthouse in the corridor outside of division 20 of the municipal court wearing a jacket bearing the words '**** the Draft' which were plainly visible. There were women and children present in the corridor. The defendant was arrested. The defendant testified that he wore the jacket knowing that the words were on the jacket as a means of informing the public of the depth of his feelings against the Vietnam War and the draft.

Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 16 (1971) (emphasis added).



At least go read the whole case. They actually discuss this notion of maybe-people-saw. Look at 21-22 in particular:

Finally, in arguments before this Court much has been made of the claim that Cohen's distasteful mode of expression was thrust upon unwilling or unsuspecting viewers, and that the State might therefore legitimately act as it did in order to protect the sensitive from otherwise unavoidable exposure to appellant's crude form of protest. Of course, the mere presumed presence of unwitting listeners or viewers does not serve automatically to justify curtailing all speech capable of giving offense. See, e. g., Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415 (1971). While this Court has recognized that government may properly act in many situations to prohibit intrusion into the privacy of the home of unwelcome views and ideas which cannot be totally banned from the public dialogue, e. g., Rowan v. Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728 (1970), we have at the same time consistently stressed that "we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech." Id., at 738. The ability of government, consonant with the Constitution, to shut off discourse solely to protect others from hearing it is, in other words, dependent upon a showing that substantial privacy interests are being invaded in an essentially intolerable manner. Any broader view of this authority would effectively empower a majority to silence dissidents simply as a matter of personal predilections. In this regard, persons confronted with Cohen's jacket were in a quite different posture than, say, those subjected to the raucous emissions of sound trucks blaring outside their residences. Those in the Los Angeles courthouse could effectively avoid further bombardment of their sensibilities simply by averting their eyes. And, while it may be that one has a more substantial claim to a recognizable privacy interest when walking through a courthouse corridor than, for example, strolling through Central Park, surely it is nothing like the interest in being free from unwanted expression in the confines of one's own home. Cf. Keefe, supra.Given the subtlety and complexity of the factors involved, if Cohen's "speech" was otherwise entitled to constitutional protection, we do not think the fact that some unwilling "listeners" in a public building may have been briefly exposed to it can serve to justify this breach of the peace conviction where, as here, there was no evidence that persons powerless to avoid appellant's conduct did in fact object to it, and where that portion of the statute upon which Cohen's conviction rests evinces no concern, either on its face or as construed by the California courts, with the special plight of the captive auditor, but, instead, indiscriminately sweeps within its prohibitions all "offensive conduct" that disturbs "any neighborhood or person." Cf. Edwards v. South Carolina, supra.


There's more, but there are also character limits here.
 
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ecofarm said:
It needn't have zero value.



But it seems "prurient" kills that angle anyway.
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Not to beat on this, because you have been magnanimous here. Thank you.

But I would also argue that political speech may indeed have the highest social value. It is a linchpin of the democratic process.

Which is why I think this last prong would be extremely difficult to topple.

However, many of these cases indeed have prevailed using the "fighting words" exception. That would likely be my primary tactic if I wanted to go after her constitutionally.

And of course at the local level there's always the catch-all "disorderly", with perhaps some form of "inciting" as a back-up. I could see a case like this possibly prevailing at some local level, but not at the SCOTUS level.
 
Chomsky said:
Not to beat on this, because you have been magnanimous here. Thank you.

But I would also argue that political speech may indeed have the highest social value. It is a linchpin of the democratic process.

Which is why I think this last prong would be extremely difficult to topple.

However, many of these cases indeed have prevailed using the "fighting words" exception. That would likely be my primary tactic if I wanted to go after her constitutionally.

And of course at the local level there's always the catch-all "disorderly", with perhaps some form of "inciting" as a back-up. I could see a case like this possibly prevailing at some local level, but not at the SCOTUS level.
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Political speech could contain virtually everything. The personal is the political. But the question is the value of the work itself. A '**** Trump' sticker does not have "significant" political value.

Moving away from my lost point...

How many people have been convicted of disorderly for repeated and unrelenting public profanity? I think it's not zero.

Perhaps I should find a list of convictions for similar actions? That seems like too much work but it would prove it's illegal.
 
Mr Person said:
Again, this is not how legal analysis works. You're just making **** up and asking what people "believe". Find a case that is still good law and is actually applicable that backs up your position that this sticker is obviously unprotected speech.



You also need to keep other cases in mind. It would be quite odd if the child angle meant anything since any number of people or children could have seen the jacket addressed in Cohen. Hey wait a minute:


On April 26, 1968, the defendant was observed in the Los Angeles County Courthouse in the corridor outside of division 20 of the municipal court wearing a jacket bearing the words '**** the Draft' which were plainly visible. There were women and children present in the corridor. The defendant was arrested. The defendant testified that he wore the jacket knowing that the words were on the jacket as a means of informing the public of the depth of his feelings against the Vietnam War and the draft.

Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 16 (1971) (emphasis added).



At least go read the whole case. They actually discuss this notion of maybe-people-saw. Look at 21-22 in particular:

Finally, in arguments before this Court much has been made of the claim that Cohen's distasteful mode of expression was thrust upon unwilling or unsuspecting viewers, and that the State might therefore legitimately act as it did in order to protect the sensitive from otherwise unavoidable exposure to appellant's crude form of protest. Of course, the mere presumed presence of unwitting listeners or viewers does not serve automatically to justify curtailing all speech capable of giving offense. See, e. g., Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415 (1971). While this Court has recognized that government may properly act in many situations to prohibit intrusion into the privacy of the home of unwelcome views and ideas which cannot be totally banned from the public dialogue, e. g., Rowan v. Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728 (1970), we have at the same time consistently stressed that "we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech." Id., at 738. The ability of government, consonant with the Constitution, to shut off discourse solely to protect others from hearing it is, in other words, dependent upon a showing that substantial privacy interests are being invaded in an essentially intolerable manner. Any broader view of this authority would effectively empower a majority to silence dissidents simply as a matter of personal predilections. In this regard, persons confronted with Cohen's jacket were in a quite different posture than, say, those subjected to the raucous emissions of sound trucks blaring outside their residences. Those in the Los Angeles courthouse could effectively avoid further bombardment of their sensibilities simply by averting their eyes. And, while it may be that one has a more substantial claim to a recognizable privacy interest when walking through a courthouse corridor than, for example, strolling through Central Park, surely it is nothing like the interest in being free from unwanted expression in the confines of one's own home. Cf. Keefe, supra.Given the subtlety and complexity of the factors involved, if Cohen's "speech" was otherwise entitled to constitutional protection, we do not think the fact that some unwilling "listeners" in a public building may have been briefly exposed to it can serve to justify this breach of the peace conviction where, as here, there was no evidence that persons powerless to avoid appellant's conduct did in fact object to it, and where that portion of the statute upon which Cohen's conviction rests evinces no concern, either on its face or as construed by the California courts, with the special plight of the captive auditor, but, instead, indiscriminately sweeps within its prohibitions all "offensive conduct" that disturbs "any neighborhood or person." Cf. Edwards v. South Carolina, supra.


There's more, but there are also character limits here.
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Still an isolated event. Wearing it every day and everywhere could be construed as not having political purpose but being intended to incite.
 
ecofarm said:
Public profanity is not protected speech.
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I'm no expert but according to the article a guy wore **** the draft in a court house and the supreme court overturned the conviction. I thinks its difficult to define profanity. Ever hear Ranger fans at an Islander game?
 
ecofarm said:
Still an isolated event. Wearing it every day and everywhere could be construed as not having political purpose but being intended to incite.
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"Could be construed....."

:doh

The Cohen ruling meant that the guy could wear his "****" jacket every day! That is literally what it meant.






Find controlling precedent that shows that this sticker is somehow different in a way that makes it unconstitutional, or stop telling people that you've got the answer.
 
Hari Seldon said:
I'm no expert but according to the article a guy wore **** the draft in a court house and the supreme court overturned the conviction. I thinks its difficult to define profanity. Ever hear Ranger fans at an Islander game?
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Would walking around downtown with a sign that read '**** <whomever>" slide? Should it?
 
ecofarm said:
Political speech could contain virtually everything. The personal is the political. But the question is the value of the work itself. A '**** Trump' sticker does not have "significant" political value.

Moving away from my lost point...

How many people have been convicted of disorderly for repeated and unrelenting public profanity? I think it's not zero.

Perhaps I should find a list of convictions for similar actions? That seems like too much work but it would prove it's illegal.
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I very much disagree with the bolded.
 
He's excercising his 1st Amendment rights. End of story.
 
ecofarm said:
Would walking around downtown with a sign that read '**** <whomever>" slide? Should it?
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I would have to say yes. A form of protest. That said people are free to disagree and express that disagreement.
 
Chomsky said:
I very much disagree with the bolded.
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You disagree that the personal is political? Or you believe a sticker with two words, one a profanity, has significant political value?
 
ecofarm said:
I know you're capable of understanding context. A jacket worn in protest to charges against oneself or others in a court house is protected speech. They did not rule someone call yell **** all day, around town, everyday. That's incitement.

Disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct is not protected speech.
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You can call it what you want, but the courts will ( and have already )disagree with you... he is still free and driving around in his truck and the police have not stopped him or cited him.

I wonder why that is? Perhaps they are not that concerned about anyone's delicate sensibilities, or more to the point, no police officer wants to get tossed out of court by a "don't waste my time" judge.
 
I think it's rare I'm on the wrong side of the evidence. It appears, in our debate regarding free speech and public profanity, that I find myself in such a position. I'm also very against reactionary positions. It would appear, given superior courts overturning public profanity convictions, the legal trend (despite state law, such as Texas) is that protected speech applies.

I don't like the evidence being against me and I don't like reactionary positions. I'd like to believe this is a unique circumstance in both cases, and I'm sure everyone I've debated would agree :)

Nonetheless, I don't believe public profanity, repeated, wide spread and indiscriminate, should be protected speech. I don't believe profanity, in and of itself, serves political purpose. One could make the same point without profanity. It's unnecessary and it's intended to incite.

And so I stand defiantly, middle finger in the air. Take that.
 
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ecofarm said:
He wore it in a court house as political speech, probably charged with draft dodging. Context. Time and place.

He didn't walk around town with it.
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Are you saying that both a Courthouse and "town" are not both public?

And you are splitting hairs with your argument....You will have a hella high burden of proof to prove incitement.....which is most likely why he has not been cited or prosecuted....no Prosecuter will touch a 1st Amendment hot potato like that.
 
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