The First Amendment

[brianwspencer]

Originally Posted by Danzig

i know brian, i just think there's a fine line....hard to say really if it should be allowed or not. i just don't know that people should freely be able to come up and say things like that. put yourself in the customers shoes, should someone be able to say something like that to you with no worry at all? hey, it's free speech, but as holmes said, that doesn't allow shouting fire in a crowded theatre. i wonder what he'd say about this. is it free speech, or something more akin to verbal assault? is there such a thing? if there is, is this it? if a guy walked up to a lady and said i hear there's whores here, are you one, would that be harassment? if so, why wasn't this harassment? imo, this isn't similar to a protest, which isn't on a personal level. this was very much personal.

I don't think that a one-off comment could be, or should be, considered harassment. I think it's considered being an a$shole, which people do every day. In a one-on-one conversation where there's no public slander/libel issues to deal with, just being rude, or just being mean, or just being tasteless should hardly be grounds for fining people or taking legal action against them. It's entirely different than the "fire in a movie theater" comparison, because nobody is put in danger by the owner of a freaking sandwich shop being mean to someone once.

I've had worse things said to my face on dozens of occasions in my life and never once thought about calling the cops, nor do I think it's reasonable that I should be able to.

I think this story is positively ridiculous, and the idea that being mean to someone once with no recurring harassment issues is grounds for legal action of any kind is absurd.

If this is the case, the City of Chicago could pay all of their bills every year just by sending cops in on "mean patrol" into bars by Wrigley Field all season long. At $75 a pop, they'd be rich, if being mean is now against the law.

Unbelievable.