- April 19, 2024
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Read our original story on the protest ban here.
Moments before a vote that would ban protesting in Winter Park neighborhoods, Jennifer Anderson stood at the podium in the City Commission Chambers and painted a picture in words.
“They were yelling, and they were chanting, and they were saying that this victim was a baby killer,” she said on Monday, describing an anti-abortion protest scene in front of the Winter Park home of Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando CEO Jenna Tosh on Aug. 18.
That incident was at the center of a controversial fight over an emergency ordinance that banned protesting within 50 feet of single-family residential neighborhoods in the city. Monday night the City Commission voted 4-1 to make that ordinance permanent, with Mayor Ken Bradley dissenting.
Residents and some visitors who’d driven from both coasts of the state packed the chamber to weigh in on a battle fought between free speech and personal safety.
Of the incident that clogged the sidewalk along Aloma Avenue, none of the basic facts were in dispute. Tosh arrived home from a walk with her family to find a group of anti-abortion protestors at her home. They continued to hold signs depicting aborted fetuses along the busy street after Tosh arrived home. Police were called for a disturbance and arrived to survey the scene.
But the details of the protest were broadly disputed.
Allura Lightfoot, who spoke at the meeting and was part of the protest, said the group was causing no disturbance that led to the police call.
“This was a peaceful protest,” Lightfoot said. “We were singing, praying, and holding pictures….”
She said that police were angry that the person who had called them about a disturbance had lied to them.
“They stated that they were called under false pretenses,” Lightfoot said.
But resident Madeline Pots, whose house also had protestors in front of it, described a more contentious scene along the busy thoroughfare.
“They had huge banners and posters, very graphic posters,” Pots said. “They were shouting scripture. They were yelling and waving to cars. My husband appealed to them to quiet down, which they didn’t do until there was a police presence. They positioned their young children along Aloma Avenue, literally inches from the curb.”
Read the anti-picketing ordinance at http://bit.ly/OnSQD7
That incident, and the ensuing outcry, led to the emergency anti-protest ordinance that the city voted to make permanent on Monday. The city attorney said that it would stand up in court but others in attendance disagreed.
“If you pass this you might as well call it the lawyer employment act, because this is going to create a lot of jobs,” resident Mark Schmidter said. “This is just going to cost a bunch of people a whole lot of money to defend the Constitution.”
University of Central Florida law professor David Slaughter said that though the ordinance seemingly infringed upon free speech rights, free speech is not universal.
“This ordinance is unquestionably constitutional,” he said. “No right is absolute. Not the First Amendment, not the Second Amendment. Protected speech is not equally permissible in all places at all times.”
In the end the vote would be decided on the merits of safety trumping speech. Though the law would apply to any kind of protest, the anti-abortion incident in specific shaped the rationales used by the four commissioners who voted in favor of the ordinance.
Bradley, the lone dissenter, described the oppression faced by relatives he visited in the communist former Czechoslovakia and said that he learned what restricting freedoms could lead to.
“You can’t have safety in your homes if you don’t have rights around it,” Bradley said. “For me the freedoms trump that.”
Commissioner Steven Leary said that he didn’t want the city to have to pass the ordinance, but that safety concerns were too dire.
“There are [protestors] that are trying to use the First Amendment to shield hatred and harassment,” Leary said. “This crude form of harassment has no place in this community.”
