Your First Amendment Right to Protest
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects your right to peacefully assemble, express your views and demonstrate in public spaces. Understanding your rights can help you protest safely and effectively.
The Founding Fathers thought that the right was so important that they wrote it into the first 45 words of the Bill of Rights and labeled it the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
As the Supreme Court observed in 1958, “It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the ‘liberty’ assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech.”
Recently people have misinterpreted the right to express themselves however they want to politically as the right to do so without being subjected to anyone who disagrees with them or holds differing opinions. The right to free speech is sacred in this country. But so is the right to protest, one of the significant motivations behind having First Amendment protections in the first place.
There must be an overt act on the part of the government attempting to suppress speech for the Amendment to come into play. One private citizen disagreeing with the views of another private citizen at a political rally does not mean that one of those individuals is stomping out the free speech rights of the other. One of them may simply be louder than the other.
The First Amendment protects private citizens’ free speech rights from any act of Congress, from any law that Congress might impose seeking to curtail the rights of speech, of freedom to practice a chosen religion, the right to free assembly. The free speech rights of political candidates and their supporters who attend rallies for their chosen candidate are not violated or suppressed or diminished when they are confronted with private citizen protestors who disagree with the views and positions of that candidate because there is no act of Congress involved.
The candidates are private citizens, their supporters are private citizens, and the protestors are private citizens. There is generally no government action involvement except for police providing security for the event.
If, in response to some of the things we have all seen occur at political rallies recently, Congress passed a law stating that it was now illegal to protest at a political rally involving a candidate for President of the United States of America, then the First Amendment and its protections would come in to play – because the government took affirmative action to limit or prohibit the speech rights of private citizens.
The immediate counter-argument would be that Congress violated the express meaning of those first five words of the Amendment, “Congress shall make no law…” abridging the free speech rights of a private citizen by making certain kinds of speech illegal. Private citizens protesting the views or words of a political candidate or other private citizens do not fall within this category.
All candidates must be prepared to defend their positions in the face of peaceful protests.
