The creepy new Right Wing mayor of Colorado, Steve Bach, has gotten HIS anti-panhandling ordinance passed this week and it’s set to become an expensive big flop that city tax payers will have to pay out with our monies, as the city attorneys try to defend municipal enforcement for a clearly illegal measure that will fail all the basic tests in the courtroom. Why is that? Short answer is simply that the new law violates all OUR remaining rights to hear free speech voiced in this country and this city of Colorado Springs. See Amid debate, Colorado Springs may join cities banning panhandling where the LA Times shows us how this form of anti free speech legislation has been faring in other spots across the US?
These anti- panhandling ordinances not only violate the free speech rights of the panhandler, but they also violate the free speech rights of those being panhandled, too. If somebody (a panhandler) says they are hungry or without medical care or a place to sleep at night, then I and you and all of us have the right to hear what our neighbor has to say and to respond to him/ her personally, since the elected authorities are clearly not doing any decent job of protecting the public from destitution these days.
Sure, there are plenty enough non charitable people in Colorado Springs who want to be ‘protected’ from the free speech of the panhandler and the rest of us in the general public and are willing to have Mayor Bach pay police to jail people for that, but many of us out there want to be able to hear these panhandlers out and it is our right to hear free speech be expressed that is really what Right Wing Mayor Bach wants mainly to stop from happening. I have been to many a city council meeting and these self congratulators mainly want only to pat themselves on their backs rather than hear what other citizens have to say about the many real problems that many of us are really facing. These city council clowns want boosterism for the corporations and military and want the rest of us to just shut up and bow down to Big Money interests which they want to represent instead of Common Folk that live here. They want to suppress ALL our Free Speech rights and not help Free Speech of dissenting Americans who might be residents of here and not members of the favored castes.
The ACLU should have an easy job of busting up Mitt Romney loving Republican Mayor Bach’s anti Free Speech ordinance. How many of hundreds of thousands of dollars will the city of Colorado Springs eventually come to spend in trying to deny people their right to hear if somebody is in need? After all, that is what panhandling is all about, Bach. How much are you willing to spend of public tax monies in order to prop up YOUR beloved Military-Police-Prison-Surveillance State that you are such a partisan for?