Government Still Insists on Persecuting War Protesters.
Posted in H.L. News, Main Blog (All Posts) on February 2nd, 2007 10:22 am by HL
Texas Grandmother Sweeps Streets of Washington as Punishment for Protest
Common Dreams
Excerpt
Four months ago, Diane Baker was one of 71 people arrested during a protest in Washington for crossing a police line to sit on the steps of a Senate office building.
As punishment, the 60-year-old was sentenced to sweep the streets of the nation’s capital for eight cold, blustery hours Tuesday.
“I’m a rather fragile, small woman,” said Baker, a hospice chaplain at United Church of Christ in Dallas. “Being a minister, I offered to do counseling, but this is what they gave me.”
Baker, a mother of four and grandmother of two, suffers from myoclonic epilepsy, a degenerative muscle condition that causes her voice to quiver and hands to shake. As she signed in to begin her community service, she struggled to write her name.
She has shared a jail cell with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and received a phone call on New Year’s Eve from anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan. Baker once walked 120 miles from Irving, near Dallas, to meet Sheehan for a war protest outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford.
Her community service came three days after tens of thousands protesters, including Baker, gathered in Washington to demand a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. No arrests were made, according to police.
But as growing skepticism in Congress energizes the anti-war movement, Baker served as a stark reminder Tuesday of the limitations to freedom of speech.
H.L.s Take
Why does our government always want to take away our constitutionally protected right to freedom of assembly, and to protest what we don’t believe in. Maybe it’s because they are afraid of the people who they know are against them. They also don’t want people digging into what they are doing over there because they don’t want anyone to get information like in this next story….