Activist Arrested In Dispute Over Hot-Button Sales At Public Market
By Matt Zapotosky
Washington Post Staff Writer
The 74-year-old retired mathematician who is fighting Kensington officials over his right to sell buttons urging President Bush’s impeachment was arrested yesterday at a farmers market and charged with trespassing.
Alan McConnell, who had been selling his “Impeach Him” buttons at the Howard Avenue market for about a half-hour without a permit, lay down on the pavement after Montgomery County police asked him to come with them. After McConnell failed to respond to a request that he “please stand up,” four officers each grabbed one of his limbs and carried him to the front seat of a squad car.
I’ve read this several times and I still have questions. Why won’t the professor buy a permit? Can he buy a permit?
Meanwhile the fact that the Mayor shut down the whole market because the professor’s supporters “might” get roudy… prior restraint, anyone? And of course, threatening everyone’s livlihood in order to shut down the one guy.
This article raises more questions than it answers…
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As a Kensington resident I supported Alan’s efforts and the demonstration on Saturday. Alan did not need a permit. There are no rules for the Kensington Market. I know this becuase I asked the person in charge of the market at the Town of Kensington who admitted they do not have rules written down. So they make them up as they go. Alan has been selling buttons at the market for over a year!
He is also not in people’s faces, he simply asks passers-by if they would like a button. No more aggrssive then those who man booth at the mall.
eh? don’t hold them so highly, Mikael. i’m pretty sure suexian wanted to piss someone off, and doesn’t actually want those idiots in ’08. on the issue of this guy disrupting the event, I’m not wholly against his actions. I think that he was trying to draw attention and did that, but he makes us all look like nuts. it’s important to get people interested in recording the high crimes and misdemeanors in the legal record (and not just minds of the people), it’s damn important, but you don’t have to resort to this. i heard that some protestors tried to have a symbolic mock trial, but it was really just an insincere mockery. we don’t have time to play games, and we don’t need to.
This appears to me to be a conscious effort to put the issue of impeachment in the press – and was successful in that back-to-back stories appeared in the Washington Post.
This article was posted to further publicize impeachment and to help move it forward. Judging by the amount of attention to it on our site, it appears to be working.
Note to comments #4 and #5… as usual, the lonely 29% who still support Cheney/Bush are revealed to be fascists (round up the dissenters) and politically ignorant (lobbying for a third term for them).
These two are poster children for how this country has allowed itself to get into this crisis in the first place.
I’m totally in favor of impeachment, but this is a manufactured grievance. As an organizer of a long-running (and *very* progressive) event that relies on both city permitting and juried vendor selection, I recognize that what this guy is doing is jumping the line.
If he wants a booth from which to reach the patrons brought in by the market’s organizers, he can go through the same process all the other vendors did. If the event’s organizers choose not to give him a booth (which they won’t, since what he’s selling is not produce) he has every right to reach the same number of potential buyers by standing on the adjacent sidewalk, offering his buttons to people as they come and go from the farmer’s market.
But to insist on his alleged right to do business within the permit area without having gone through the process is simply stealing access to an audience built by someone else for another purpose — and that would be true even if he were not aggressive about it.
It’s not about free speech. If he were giving the buttons away free, he *might* have a case…but maybe not. The Sixth Circuit just decided a case two years ago that gave ballot petitioners the right to circulate in crowds gathered by permit holders in public parks, but AFAIK event permit holders still have the right to ask anyone who is even giving away materials to do so outside the permit area.
And that’s as it should be. Imagine how you would feel if, having spent months or years building an audience and organizing a political or cultural evvent designed to raise money for good folks who cooperated in your process, some corporation decided to bring in a squad of salesmen to disrupt traffic flow and siphon off the interest of your cutomers.
Permitting of public spaces is one of the few areas where public policy actually works for the common good. Please rethink the knee-jerk reaction that assumes this well-intentioned man was wronged. Considering how many times he was asked to take his business outside the area, it should be clear that he was seeking this confrontation. Noisy self-made martyrs do our common cause no real good.
There are plenty of actual free speech violations going unheeded. This isn’t one of them.
cops are morons… each and every one of them
We’ve only just begun.
CHENEY / BUSH ’08 !
You and those like you are misguided and un-American. I support your being watched and, if deemed necessary, rounded up and either imprisoned or deported.
Get a permit dumbass.
“without a permit” — this seems like a non story unless you can show there were other people there, also without permits, that were allowed to continue selling. What if he were selling flowers and got arrested? Would it still be news?
You might want to include these paragraphs from the whole article, as well. I’m thoroughly against the current White House administration, too, but harassing (as opposed to informing) community members is not the way to go.
“A crowd of about 40 McConnell supporters chanted ‘free speech’ and booed the arrest. But others said their objections to McConnell’s activities had nothing to do with granting him his political voice — they simply think that he bothers customers by aggressively selling non-farmers-market products.
“‘They keep trying to make it about their political position, and it’s not about that,’ said Kim Kaplan, who began selling plants at the market in June. ‘It’s about the fact that he wants to sell his buttons and get in people’s faces when he’s doing it.'”