Criminalizing Free Speech in Ohio and Elsewhere

By DON ROLLINS

If you’re interested in doing nine months to five years in lockup just for exercising your First Amendment rights, run don’t walk to the Buckeye State, where Republicans are making their second putsch to eliminate nonviolent dissent.

Undeterred by an earlier defeat, Ohio’s Republican House is clamoring for the passage of Senate Bill 33, which passed the GOP Senate in May and would discourage protests at gas and oil “infrastructure” sites by felonizing currently misdemeanor trespassing.

Ohio’s isn’t the only legislature brazenly at work insulating mega-corporations from negative public reaction. The Buckeye State is one of at least 13 dominated by Republicans that have passed, or are considering laws making it a felony to interfere with oil and gas pipelines; Texas legislators in May passed a law making it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison; and lawmakers in eight states have passed similar anti-protest bills over the last two years – in Missouri, Indiana, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Tennessee. States considering making it a felony to organize protests against oil and gas pipelines and other infrastructure projects include Idaho, Kentucky, and Minnesota.

And Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation in June proposed legislation that would make it a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, to protest, impede, and delay oil and gas pipeline construction.

Returning to Ohio’s ongoing saga, SB 33 is being peddled as a crucial means to protect the flow of energy resources from nonexistent, anarchical protestors. But missing in the Republicans’ narrative is the inconvenient truth that Big Oil and Big Gas corner-office executives (with input from Koch Brothers associates) helped craft it.

And equally mystifying about this solution looking for a problem is any reference to existing Ohio codes differentiating between levels of legal consequences: criminal trespass; criminal mischief and; aggravated trespass. It’s a commonly used scale across states, specifically designed to assign penalties according to behavior.

It’s mind boggling, the tacit fallout of life under a boorish, mercurial president-businessman. GOP officeholders at the federal and state levels have been quick to seize upon business models for governing, resulting in an open door for some of the most powerful corporations on the planet.

In the case of Ohio, odds are long that first-term Gov. Mike DeWine will veto a bill so beneficial to industries that fueled his campaign. Passing SB33 should be a slam dunk.

Yet, as with other Republican notions that are popular in session but not the real world, calling on stretched-thin law enforcement agencies and clogged courts to put nonviolent trespassers in jail is an impractical feat. It’s a relief to know no state has thus far been able to fully fund such a major shift.

But progressives should not breathe too easily, for there is a different kind of damage inherent to the GOP’s strategy. Maggie Ellinger-Locke, a staff attorney with Greenpeace, noted in a recent article, “Where these bills are simply introduced, even if they do not move, even if they do not become law, they have potential to chill free speech and curtail activism. We’re hearing from people on the frontlines of activism in these states that these bills frighten them.”

Per Ellinger-Locke. liberal folk living in states where this muzzling of dissention is in process would do well to keep abreast of events and their psychological, not just physical impact. Pool resources, organize and strategize. Every state to date has formed some kind of organized resistance, usually found online.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2019

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