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FREE SPEECH Protesting on her property: A woman's right to free speech in Michigan is being put to the test 
Original article: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/8/2108825/-A-woman-who-won-t-back-down-The-First-Amendment-is-alive-and-well-in-Michigan Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
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Protesting on her property: A woman's right to free speech in Michigan is being put to the test
Brandi Buchman ... Daily Kos Staff Friday July 08, 2022 · 9:44 PM EDT actpeacefully.JPG After Roe was overturned by the Supreme Court, a church just nearby the high court in Washington, D.C., posted this message to greet visitors. In Michigan, there is a garden with flowers planted neat in their rows. In that garden, there are a few signs hand-painted with care in cheerful, bright colors expressing messages to any who might pass this private oasis, including one in candy-colored script that reads: “Fuck your god.” When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and effectively decided that women and people who can become pregnant have no right to bodily autonomy and that intimate decisions about one’s health and future are to be left to the state, Amanda Carravallah picked up her paintbrush, made a sign, and went downtown to protest. White House surrender monkeys need to let Biden be Biden on abortion public health emergency But when she and her husband returned home, the frustration lingered. Since the leak of the Roe ruling, Carravallah’s frustration was on a simmer. So she expressed her outrage through peaceful assembly, cardboard, and paint after the ruling dropped. And after two days of looking at the signs she made sitting inside her home, she decided to stake them in her front yard. The “Fuck your god” sign was joined by other small posters that blared things like, “Rage with the vagine,” a sign that Carravallah said was directly inspired by a fellow protestor’s own blunt messaging: “Writ off my clit.” “I’m not breaking any laws,” Carravallah told Daily Kos during an interview this week. “No more business as usual. If women and girls in this country are losing their basic right to medical freedom and 10-year-old girls are being shuffled out of Ohio to get abortions after they were raped, as a sexual assault survivor, that’s a hard no for me. Up until this point, I kept my mouth shut about ‘Christian god’ and how he doesn’t understand that he needs to stay out of government—or his followers don’t—and I have a deep, deep problem with that.” Carravallah is many things. She’s a mother, a wife, a friend, a daughter, a sister, and an American who, like anyone else who calls the United States home, enjoys the protection of the First Amendment right to free speech. When she posted signs in her yard, she started documenting it on the social media app TikTok. In her videos, she is seen smiling at her husband, who is filming while she paints and while music is played on a loop from her front porch. The music Carravallah played to accompany her signs after Roe fell was the unapologetic song currently trending for content creators on TikTok by artist Leikeli47. It features the declaration: “It’s my pussy I can do what I want, I’m a big girl now.” The police were called to Carravallah’s home, and a trio of officers warned her that she could be cited for disturbing the peace, though she is legally permitted to play music from her home in her neighborhood from 7 AM to 11 PM. One neighbor on her block called the police on her twice in 24 hours. Another neighbor called once. Police have visited her home multiple times since the signs went up. Carravallah had fewer than 1,000 followers on the app before her post on June 27. She now has 53,000 and counting and her initial post has since racked up over 1 million views. 
Other videos that followed have gone viral too, including one post with over 5 million views where Carravallah is seen skipping whimsically on her sidewalk while holding a protest sign. Text overlaid at the bottom of the video states: “Me on my way to paint a sign that says ‘we’ll see how you really feel about abortion after I f*ck your husband.’” 
Carravallah is aware that her language is strong, but she makes no apologies for it and believes she is speaking out on a matter of public concern, an issue that has now infringed the rights of millions, including the right to religious freedom. “I have a sister-in-law who is Jewish and this ruling now, for Jewish girls in states with trigger laws, means their freedom of religion is being impeded,” she said. Under the Jewish faith feelings on abortion are not a monolith, but overwhelmingly, the right to abortion access is accepted as a value of the religious tradition, especially when there is a threat to the mother’s life. With Roe overturned, some Jewish organizations are pushing back by launching lawsuits challenging the ruling, while others did so before the high court’s decision was issued. The Congregation L'Dor Va-Dor in Boynton Beach, Florida, for example, sued in early June, saying that Florida’s 15-week abortion ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this April 'discriminates against Jews, the mentally ill and those who do not share the views of fundamentalist Christianity.' Carravallah is deeply disturbed by the Christian religious doctrine she believes now fiercely grips the court. “So, I’ll put a sign up that says ‘Fuck your god’ if your god is going to do this to women and girls in my country. Then you can look at my sign. You can all look at my sign. Everybody can look at my sign,” she said. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling last month, Carravallah described her relationship with her neighbors in her middle-class suburban community as amicable and warm. She was just another mom on the block who, on occasion, would receive invites to join her neighbors for friendly gatherings that she happily attended. Her protest changed that. And her decision to document her experience on TikTok has generated a flood of hateful messages towards her online, and other forms harassment like the doxxing of her address. When she first put up the signs, Carravallah told Daily Kos, no one on her block was around or outside. But in short order, she said, neighbors who opposed the language started showing up and standing around to record her. This went on for multiple days and the hate started to flow online, forcing Carravallah to field a deluge of character attacks on her as both a person and a mother. She documented multiple attempts to doxx her personal address. Undeterred, Carravallah kept recording her protest and the accompanying police response as well her neighbors’ responses on TikTok for a few days. Then she received a notice in the mail. A petition for a personal protective order, or, in lay terms, a restraining order—something typically used to prevent stalking. The order was filed by a neighbor in an attempt to have the mother of three remove her signs featuring the risqué language and to stop appearing outside of her own home to protest. Carravallah seeks to terminate that order, arguing she has at least one right not yet overturned by the high court: the First Amendment. And now the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has stepped in to help. ACLU cooperating attorneys Mark and Allison Kriger and ACLU Senior Staff Attorney for ACLU of Michigan Philip Mayor are representing Carravallah. In a phone interview this week, Mark Kriger told Daily Kos he was confident Carravallah is perfectly within her rights and helped her file a motion to dismiss the restraining order. And if they lose that fight, he said, they will appeal. “All of the activity Amanda engaged in was protected under the First Amendment,” Kriger said before noting several precedents established both in the state of Michigan and in the Supreme Court’s 1971 ruling, Cohen v. California. In that case, Paul Robert Cohen, a young person opposed to the Vietnam War, entered a courtroom in Los Angeles in 1968 sporting a T-shirt that proclaimed: “Fuck the Draft! Stop the War!” He was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. Cohen served 30 days in jail after being convicted. He appealed the ruling but lost after a California appellate court found it reasonable to presume that his clothing could spark violence. But when the state’s supreme court refused to hear his appeal, Cohen ran it up another rung to the U.S. Supreme Court. In an opinion led by then-Justice John Marshall Harlan, Cohen’s conviction was overturned in a 5-4 decision. “One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” Harlan famously wrote in the ruling. Harlan added: “Government officials cannot make principled distinctions in this area that the Constitution leaves matters of taste and style so largely to the individual.” Like Cohen’s, Carravallah’s language was provocative. But there is no supporting evidence to suggest her protest poses a threat or something worse, according to Kriger. Kriger said he believes her case is doubly strong against any would-be challengers because all of the perceived vulgarity was confined to the borders of her own property. “She’s speaking on a political issue that has occupied the consciousness of this country for 50 years now and I think the Michigan courts have consistently ruled this is a First Amendment-protected activity,” he said. One of those cases is a 2018 matter decided by the Michigan Court of Appeals known as TM v. MZ. Two politically-minded neighbors with an acrimonious past tangled with each other online after a falling out. One of the defendants, identified only as MZ, posted an onslaught of accusations in public online forums about TM’s family, character, parenting abilities, alleged drug use, criminal past, and more. MZ even went so far as to publicly accuse TM of child abduction and made derogatory comments about TM’s son, who had recently died. TM filed a personal protective order, alleging stalking and threats to life. The protective order was initially granted and it featured a stipulation that MZ be barred from making any further comments targeting TM. But MZ appealed, arguing that the neighbor’s annoyance didn’t rise to the level of defamation as alleged, nor was there any evidence to suggest that real violence was being threatened. “We do not disagree with [TM] or the trial court that [MZ]’s statements often were inappropriate, at times crude, and even sometimes, with respect to the death of [TM’s] son, offensive,” wrote Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Peter Riordan. “Inappropriate, crude and offensive language, however, is not necessarily excepted from constitutional protection. For that reason, we cannot addopt the trial court’s preference to treat a [personal protective order], which in this case is a prior restraint on [MZs speech], as a means to help supplement the rules that we all live in a society by. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution demands that we not treat such speech-based injunctions so lightly.” And then there are people like Leo Weber, Carravallah recalled, a onetime mayoral candidate in Livonia, Michigan. In 2020, Weber, a supporter of former President Donald Trump’s, posted anti-LGBTQ signage on his front lawn with full blown slurs. The signs read: “Fags R Sicko” and “Fags R Evil See Gen. 18.20 Sodom & Gomorrah. If I catch you, I will kill you!” Neighbors upset by the signs complained to local police and were informed that Weber could leave them up because they were not targeting a specific person by name and therefore, were protected under the First Amendment. Livonia Mayor Maureen Miller Brosnan publicly condemned Weber’s signs but acknowledged she could not force him to remove them. There was not any city ordinance in place that could stop Weber from writing exactly what he did. Another ordinance that forbade an excess of signage in the front yard could curb some of Weber’s First Amendment activity, but not all of it. An ACLU staff attorney at the time, Jay Kaplan, urged the city to denounce Weber’s signs publicly since they couldn’t be removed and further asked local police to emphasize publicly that violence towards members of the LGBT+ community would not be tolerated. After Carravallah went viral on TikTok, her video was seen by Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat. Dingell shared it with fellow Michigan lawmaker and Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Carravallah’s joy in the video, dancing in her pink bathing suit, was more than palpable, Tlaib told Daily Kos in a phone interview. “The first thing I thought, especially when you take such a courageous position in your community and your neighbors and folks are obviously in disagreement—you know, I’ve been there—I didn’t want her to feel alone,” Tlaib said. Tlaib’s staff did some digging and found Carravallah, who is one of Tlaib’s constituents. “She’s amazing. She very much believes this is her absolute right, especially because this is her home and her property,” Tlaib said. “This is her way of standing up for the right to control her body and say it.” Tlaib is an attorney as well as lawmaker and is well versed with how protest functions. “I know for a fact she has a constitutional right to express herself in this way. What’s disturbing is we know of previous incidents where folks were vulgar, putting up signs that were hateful and full of divisive language and so forth. Here she is just saying, absolutely not, this is my body, I have a right to do this, I’m upset, and it’s still coming from a place of joy,” Tlaib said. On Friday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order instructing the Department of Health and Human Services to protect access to reproductive health care services like abortion. On its face, the order vows to safeguard and expand access to abortion and emergency contraceptives. It called too for privacy rights to be protected for those who use period tracker apps and called for the creation of a task force that would involve multiple agencies, including the Department of Justice. Biden called on Congress to codify Roe, but that is an uphill battle with a bleak future for now. Tlaib said she wants the nation to move with urgency because there are lives, here and now, on the line. “This has already created a crisis where women will die if they don’t have access to abortion care. So I hope we understand that this is about saving lives. Again, I don’t only want, obviously, statements around executive orders but implementation. We’ve got to make sure that whatever the intent here is, and I know its well intended, that we make sure folks on the ground understand that,” she said. In Michigan, one of the state’s largest health care institutions, known as BHSH System, told its employees after Roe was overturned that it would only provide abortions to save the life of the mother per a 1931 state law that solely permitted abortions in this instance. But within 48 hours BHSH backpedaled, saying it would reinstate abortions whenever medically necessary because there were still legal questions floating around about the 1931 law. The law is not in effect and abortion is still legal in Michigan, according to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. County prosecutors opposed to abortion have vowed to see the 1931 ban enforced. But a push to see the right to abortion access locked into the state’s constitution has gained huge traction. An initiative in Michigan known as Reproductive Freedom for All is on track to appear on ballots this November after amassing nearly 800,000 signatures as of July 8. That ballot initiative, if activated, would repeal the 1931 abortion ban and is widely considered to be a record-breaking petition in the state. Tlaib praised Whitmer, who, she said, “did not even hesitate to use the courts to make sure that she’s protecting the women in our country and those who can get pregnant.” As for Carravallah, Tlaib said she is proud of a constituent who has refused to be cowed and has expressed herself peacefully in the process. Carravallah is “part of the movement” to protect the rights of her fellow Americans, and it doesn’t begin or end with what happens at a federal level, but what happens on a local level, the lawmaker said. “What we have access to in our democracy is self-determination,” Tlaib said. “Amanda does not deserve to be bullied or intimidated by those that disagree with her. We are a democracy. We have diverse opinions. People have shared values but they also have different kinds of interpretations of those values. But I’ll tell you this, Amanda doesn’t deserve the kind of treatment she’s been getting in her community. If anything, folks should welcome that kind of engagement in our country because not every country allows this kind of freedom of expression and we have to protect it.”
| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/8/2108825/-A-woman-who-won-t-back-down-The-First-Amendment-is-alive-and-well-in-Michigan and |