Ohio’s GOP legislature just snuck through a bill on the session’s final day that tries to criminalize protesting near oil, gas, and plastics facilities.
It designates those facilities as “critical infrastructure” and reclassifies minor misdemeanors associated with protests, such as blocking roadways, as serious crimes leading to jail time.
The bill, written by a state senator who sells security services to oil and gas companies, also imposes stiff fines on organizations, such as churches, that help organize such protests; and companies also could sue those organizations, which “could bankrupt congregations like those in the Unitarian Universalist Justice Ohio, a network of churches that opposed the bill,” Huffington Post said (read story here).
The GOP is full of fossil fuel boosters and climate change deniers, and Republicans in general just don’t like protesters, so this isn’t surprising. They’ve tried before to make free speech illegal.
For example, numerous GOP-run states passed so-called “ag-gag” laws that made it a crime to photograph or report abuse of farm animals; these laws were struck down by courts as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech (read about that here), and in one case a federal judge made Idaho to pay the animal rights activists’ legal defense bills (read about that here).
Rightwing cops, too, are often hostile to lawful and peaceful protesters. In Boston, prosecutors are investigating some cops who allegedly pushed, pepper-sprayed, and discussed using police vehicles to assault peaceful protesters (read that story here).
Look, Republicans are against free speech, freedom in general, voting, science, even common-sense health measures. Why does anyone still vote for that party?
Photo: A statue of protester Barbara Johns (1935-1991), who fought against school segregation, will replace the statue of Robert E. Lee, a traitor who waged war against the United States, in the U.S. Capitol’s Statutuary Hall (read story here).