Re: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/dont-heckle-people-in-their-private-lives-not-even-ch
Here's my rules, and they haven't changed over the decades. Protest public figures when they are in the business of doing their public work. Don't heckle in a restaurant, or a baseball game or on their way to visit their dying aunt, or at their dentist or in front of their home. This goes for Mitch McConnell, or Cuomo, or Sarah Huckibee Sanders, or Dan Cathey, or Colin Kaepernick. Protest in front of their office, in front of their business ( ceo), or when they are making a public appearance themselves in an official capacity. We need good competent people to serve in politically sensitive and controversial posts, and we need them to be willing to take lower pay than they might otherwise and we need them to be able to sell the idea to their wives, parents and kids! Its not supposed to be hell 24/7 for everyone they come near for 4 years!
Never try to impede their ability to communicate with their audience with repetitious and obnoxious heckling because their audience came to hear their ideas not yours, they took their time, drove to the destination and bought tickets , and they deserve access to what and who they did all that work to listen to, just like any consumer who deserves to get the product advertised and promoted, not your substitute! I want to hear my speaker express his ideas, so I intend to respect other speakers as they express theirs.
If the idea behind what you are doing is to harass them to force them out of their jobs, its a bad idea. That is what you mean to do if you don't respect personal boundaries. If your idea is to express opposition to a stance of theirs in an official capacity, then target their official conduct.
I think it pretty much depends.
Being a public figure comes with certain baggage and responsibility.
Literal heckling of, say, a musician or actors in a play is generally unacceptable.
But if a punk show, or a one-man show mounted by a rapist extolling the virtues thereof?
I say heckle away.
Throw stuff even.
As to politicians, they need WAY more heckled.
WAY more.
But the primary image connoted by heckling is comedians, AKA G*d's lowest creation. (Though jugglers, poets and mimes certainly give them a run for their money.)
I'd rather hear a >good comedian< heckled by a drunken idiot than be subjected to the torture of them doing a 20 minute bit about airline peanuts uninterrupted.
Remember Daniel Tosh?
He was heckled during a rape-joke routine, and responded by suggesting the heckler - a woman - should be gang-raped; that this would be funny.
There was value in this, because anyone who didn't know what a disgusting sociopath Tosh was before he was heckled sure as Hell knew afterward.
Louis CK rushed to Tosh's defense. (Then later lied and said he didn't.)
That raised some red flags with me, so when we learned what old Louis had been up to himself, no surprise.
So heckling can be cool.
But again, it pretty much depends.
When Bush II passes away, would I be upset if his funeral were heckled with cries of "War criminal!" or some such?
I would not.
It depends.