Dodger Stadium vaccination site shut down amid protest
latimes.com
latimes.com
Arrest them if they will not disperse, and charge them with reckless endangerment.
The US’ legal framework isn’t really big on Positive rights like that, though. Unless one is a ward of the state or in their custody, no-one has a “right” to healthcare in the US.
I’d love to be wrong about this though.
You're right, and there's good reason for it. Negative rights are generally non-interventionist, which tends to be more in line with classical liberalism. However, the fact that the stadium had to shut down, indicates that the protestors were actually infringing on the rights of those that wanted to get vaccinated.
So calling this "protesting" is a bit of a misnomer. They were not protesting, just how the folks that breached the Capitol on Jan 6th weren't protesting. This can be complicated, because the Boston Tea Party (for example) is often called a protest in history books, but it was pretty clearly an act of vandalism. Not that the two are mutually exclusive (after all, we can certainly have violent protests), but we mostly think of protests in terms of what the Constitution defines as the "freedom of assembly."
They should add this comment in the dictionary under the definition of "cognitive dissonance".
Not really. All I'm saying is that in everyday parlance, "protesting" implies that you're not infringing on someone else's rights. The gold standard of protesting is something like MLK's Selma to Montgomery March or Gandhi's hunger strike. Nevertheless, figures like Malcolm X or Che Guevara would vehemently disagree.
This definition applies to all spectrums of political discourse. Last summer, a bunch of BLM "protests" weren't protests in this (in my opinion, more correct) sense of the word, either -- people were looting and setting fires.
It's been said[1] that looting and property destruction should be seen through the eyes of an individual who decries society as illegitimate. If an individual feels that they have been violated or destroyed by the social system, what obligation does that individual have to maintain and uphold the social structure that they feel wronged them?
A more direct interpretation of _sticking it to the man_, for sure: the argument being that outside of a riot, one's personal outrage at _the man_ would be swiftly, albeit unjustifiably, punished - but in the middle of a riot, one can wreck... hundreds of dollars of damage to major corporate conglomerates: theirs is a modest penalty for perceived violations of the social contract, but a thousand times more satisfying to the perpetrator.
...or something.
[1] Yes, I'm aware this is a weasel word.
They were not protesting
Nobody missed getting their vaccine. The Times' summary fundamentally misrepresented the actual event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
Pruneyard and subsequent cases established that as long as private shopping centers encourage the public to freely congregate in a common area at their leisure, that area is treated as a public square and people can engage in speech protected by the state constitution. This activity is limited to the common area of the property, it doesn't apply to areas which may be open for the movement of people. Strip malls and free standing stores are exempt because they don't meet the standard.
Let's be fair, as long as they were peaceful, they were perfectly within their first amendment rights whether you agree with their message or not (i.e. the entire point of the first amendment).
Sloppy reporting; it's really easy to read that and picture protesters blocking the driveway.
Their rights here should be pretty easy to sort out; they just have to follow the same rules as abortion clinic protesters.
So if the summer BLM a protests are the standard, let’s have the cops pepper spray these people with riot gear, best them up, and arrest them as well.
But actually doing it a vaccination site is just indefensible. The people who, like you said, are trying to get essential healthcare have just as much a right to safely do their thing.
I'm not even trying to be passive aggressive here (I'm aware it sounded that way initially), it's the literal truth. Give it a re-read. (I should make that into a bumper sticker)
"The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable.
Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows.
To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable... that’s the point."
There were no problems shutting down freeways this summer. I wonder why?
Is it not possible for the police to kind of guide them to protest in areas where they don’t block the others?
I suppose one could argue that their message requires them to block the people. I guess it’s tricky.
Normally I’d be all for the civil disobedience but Covid is a uniquely time sensitive issue in that the longer we wait more people die.
If their message requires blocking people from getting healthcare, maybe they need to find a new message?
I have to assume malice rather than negligence when it comes to "journalism" nowadays.