The city of Augusta, Ga., is deeply invested in the annual Masters golf tournament - to the point that it is willing to shut down the First Amendment to see the event comes off without a hitch.
In direct response to threatened demonstrations against the Augusta National Golf Club for its policy of excluding women as members, the Augusta Richmond County Commission passed an ordinance recently placing new restrictions on protesters. The new measure requires that groups wishing to engage in protests must first obtain a permit, and the request must be made at least 20 days before the scheduled event. It also gives Sheriff Ronnie Strength the authority to reject a permit for vague public safety reasons.
Regardless of how one feels about the controversy over whether women should be admitted to the elite golf mecca, the reaction of local officials to the threatened protests has bordered on the hysterical. As with other aspects of the poorly written ordinance, a 20-day notice is an absurd overreach and should not withstand court challenge.
In approving the measure, the commission split sharply along racial lines. On the all-male commission, all five white members - joined by the mayor, who is white - supported it. The five black members were opposed.
The African-American commissioners, some of whom were active in the civil rights movement, must have found it a bitter irony that their white fellow commissioners were blithely willing to give the local sheriff authority over who can speak and where. The white commissioners may not know what it feels like to worry about being sent to jail for the act of speaking out against official injustice.
Sheriff Strength has already denied Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations, permission to demonstrate at a prime location by the club's entrance. Burk is seeking to organize a one-day demonstration against the club's restrictive membership policies during the third round of the Masters on April 12. She wants to be where the club's members will see her protests.
But Strength wants to put all protesters, including Burk, the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, a group that has also applied for a protest permit near the club's entrance, and two groups of counterprotesters, one being an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan and another an anti-Burk group from Tampa, on a five-acre tract about 2,000 feet from the front gates of Augusta National. Strength claims the spot where Burk and others want to be would interfere with traffic flow and cause a public safety problem.
In response to Strength's order, Burk has filed suit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, claiming the county ordinance is unconstitutional by vesting "virtually unbridled discretion in the sheriff." It is a case she should win.
Every person has the constitutional right to stand on a public sidewalk - as close to the target location as he or she can get - and criticize what is taking place. Sheriffs should not have the power to prevent people with a grievance from standing where the rest of the public is invited. All of America is a free-speech zone.
[Last modified April 7, 2003, 02:17:44]
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