Annoying People and Freedom of Speech

Here is some troubling legislation from elsewhere in Michigan (found via Ed Morrissey):

Ticking someone off could get you a ticket in one Michigan city. The Brighton City Council on Thursday approved an ordinance allowing police in the Livingston County community to ticket and fine anyone who is annoying in public “by word of mouth, sign or motions.”

The Livingston County Daily Press & Argus of Howell reports the measure is modeled on a similar ordinance in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak.

A city attorney says there could be situations where the measure would violate freedom of speech, but that those cases will be reviewed by the city.

I wonder how often such enforcement wouldn’t be a violation of freedom of speech. Maybe there is some pertinent information available regarding the use of this ordinance in Royal Oak. Copious Dissent estimates that this would be a violation of freedom of speech pretty much all of the time:

First of all, 99% of the complaints are going to be Unconstitutional. Political speech is almost always “annoying.” If it weren’t annoying to some people, there would be an overall consensus on the issue, and there would be no reason to express one’s political views about the topic.

Second, now financial resources for the police and prosecutors are going to be wasted on malcontents who are hypersensitive to being annoyed. I could think of 1000 other better ways for law enforcement to serve the people.

Unfortunately, as I see far too often in conservative blogs when at first I agree with what they write, they degenerate to the anti-intellectualism which has become prevalent on the right, attributing this bill to the work of people who went to college. There is little doubt that this was written by people who went to college, but do they really think that legislation coming from people who did not go to college would make any more sense, or be any more respectful of civil liberties? The occasional support for civil liberties coming from the right wing blogosphere is certainly a welcome change from what is essentially an authoritarian movement which prefers to engage in such attacks on everyone thinks at all differently from them to consistently defending individual liberty.

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