Peaceable Assembly:
Peaceable: not liking or involving fighting or argument. – Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary
“…[nor abridge] The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble,…”
Greetings my fellow Americans! Though I shall not make this article a diatribe on the [mis]treatment of those suspected of “storming the Capitol” on January 6, 2021, I will say that those who have been arrested and detained without being formally charged with a crime, or detained for months for misdemeanor-level offenses, certainly deserve better treatment under constitutional limits to governmental power which deserve further unpacking when we visit the remainder of the Bill of Rights.
In the meantime, let’s remind ourselves that the Founders considered this to be important enough to call out via amendment to our base Constitution, and places no explicit limits on the behavior of anyone except those with the presumed authority to “keep the peace” (i.e., government).
As regards what constitutes “peaceable assembly,” while there will be, as with virtually all matters involving the judgment of behavior, considerable subjectivity as to the situation, the level of actual threat to “the peace,” and the true motives of those involved, there should be little doubt that in a society based on freedom, liberty, and government Of, By and For the People that the right of “the People” to assemble should generally be unrestricted based on either motive or location, and that this clause in the First Amendment plainly states this.
That said, our modern society’s general interpretations of which assemblies are peaceable are likely quite different from those of early America. And, insofar as much of our daily world is now experienced vicariously through media who are enriched through salacious and seductive stories of doom and gloom, our senses of omnipresent threats are greatly heightened, and our collective bar for “peaceable assembly” much lower than those who preceded us in life.
To be clear, I have no delusions that our Constitution, nor any of its duly ratified amendments, were written by the fallen men known as our Founding Fathers in any absolutely perfect manner, and, like anything in language amongst other flawed humans, greatly subject to the interpretations and machinations of those speaking, listening, reading and/or writing it. Benjamin Franklin warned that it would be up to us to “keep it” if it were to survive long past the Constitutional Convention. But it was as perfect a statement of civilization and the necessary, but limited, role of government as any composed by any earthly being theretofore.
I could probably fill a year’s worth of articles completely dissecting everything that’s happened in the past 30 months and how each ran counter to the central notion of this clause of our Constitution that government shall not abridge the right of the people peaceably to assemble, starting with the COVID lockdowns, the Antifa and BLM protests, the founding of Chaz and Chop, the permissibility of orgies while churches and schools were closed, 1/6/21, etc.
There are other writers on this site who have already delved quite proficiently into these, and other, more current manifestations of our detachment from our founding principle of “equal justice under the law,” and abridgment of our constitutional right to peaceably assemble, regardless of the situation. I’ve also written extensively in the past both about how our government has both philosophically and pragmatically fallen way off of the constitutional rails dating back at least 100 years. It’s way past time for us to shift focus away from exclusively blaming those in the government for our ills, and shifting responsibility for preserving the right to peaceably assemble back to where it belongs: in We the People.
We still refer to ourselves as “the land of the free, and the home of the brave” in our national anthem. It’s high time we start acting like the latter lest we completely lose the former.
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