David Murray

dmurray@greatfallstribune.com

On Aug. 16, dozens of Havre residents woke to find a flier from The United Klans of America on their doorstep.

“You can sleep well tonight knowing the UKA is awake!” the flier reads.

Similar fliers from a range of Ku Klux Klan-affiliated groups have appeared on doorsteps across the United States over the past two years. All include a contact phone number, a website address and purport to announce the existence of a Klan supported “Neighborhood Watch” program.

“Are there troubles in your neighborhood?” reads a similar flier distributed to homes in Fairview Township, Penn., last April. “Contact the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan today!”

That flier included the image of a KKK member in a white robe and hood.

One week after the KKK fliers hit Havre, the fundamentalist Christian group “Gods10” hosted a “God and Country Conference” near Kalispell. Among the conference’s featured speakers was Ruben Israel, a Los Angeles street preacher who practices “confrontational evangelism.”

In June 2012, Israel and a small group of his supporters confronted a crowd of young people at the Arab International Festival in Dearborn, Mich. Israel’s group members, who call themselves “Bible Believers,” carried with them Christian religious banners and a severed pig’s head impaled on a pole.

Using a megaphone, Israel began shouting phrases such as, “Your prophet is nothing but an unclean swine. Your religion will send you to hell. You believe in a prophet who is a pervert.”

Many people found these actions offensive, bigoted and indefensible. Others find them as bold assertions of belief and support for a specific religious or world view.

Regardless of individual perspective, both events are examples of protected speech. Neither the United Klans of America nor Bible Believers violated anything more than perhaps a few minor city ordinances. Both groups were exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, no matter how hateful or provocative.

At first glance, the language of the First Amendment seems clear cut. Yet American’s have been arguing about the meaning of this 45-word sentence almost since its drafting.

In 1798, President John Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Written in response to political unrest following the French Revolution, the Alien and Sedition Acts authorized fines or imprisonment for individuals who criticized the government, Congress or president in speech or in print.

More than 20 editors of Republican newspapers were arrested under the acts. There were widespread public protests and threats of secession from the newly formed United States.

The Alien and Sedition Acts expired following the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. However, more than a century later Montana passed its own law restricting free speech.

Drafted after the U.S. entry into World War I and amid growing anti-German sentiment, the Montana Sedition Act made it a criminal offense to publish or say just about anything critical of the United States government or the war effort.

It also was illegal to speak German, and books written in it were banned. Local groups called “third-degree committees” were formed in many Montana towns and cities to ferret out people not supportive of the war effort. One-hundred-and-fifty people were charged under the sedition act between 1918 and 1919, 51 of them served time in state prison.

“This is the dangerous area we get into when we allow the government or someone else to make the decision about what is acceptable speech and what is not acceptable speech,” said Amy Cannata, communications director for the Montana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Who is going to be the arbiter of what is acceptable speech? Who do you trust to make that determination? When you start to ask those questions, you start to realize the dangerous position you’re putting our society in, because who’s to say the next person to be silenced is not going to be you?”

The ACLU has been a staunch defender of freedom of speech, even when the message is antithetical to commonly held American values.

In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America, the Nazis, announced plans to march through Skokie, Ill., wearing Nazi uniforms and displaying the Swastika. Nearly 60 percent of the residents in Skokie were Jewish. Of those, 5,000 were Holocaust survivors.

The village of Skokie obtained an injunction to halt the march on the grounds it would incite or promote hatred against persons of Jewish faith, that it was a deliberate attempt to inflict severe emotional harm on the town’s Jewish residents, and that if the Nazis were permitted to march, it would lead to uncontrollable violence.

On behalf of the Nazis, the ACLU challenged the injunction and the case eventually wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled in favor of the National Socialist Party.

Writing more than 30 years later, Geoffrey Stone, a former ACLU attorney who assisted with the case, noted, “If the village of Skokie had won … then southern communities who wanted to prosecute civil rights marchers in Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham could equally do so. Moreover, once government gives in to such threats of violence, it effectively invites a ‘hecklers veto,’ empowering any group of people who want to silence others to do so simply by threatening to violate the law.”

“It’s easy to defend freedom of speech when the message is something people agree with,” Cannatta said, “but it’s most critical to defend the freedom of speech when the message is one that most people reject.”

When neighbors in Havre woke to find fliers from the United Klans of America on their lawns and porches, several contacted their city council and the Havre Police Department asking what could be done about it. The uncomfortable truth was next to nothing.

“There was no threat,” noted Acting Havre Police Chief Gabe Matosich. “The fliers were actually promoting safe neighborhoods. If you really want to get technical, maybe a citation for littering was as far as any law violations went.”

But that’s not to say Montana citizens are powerless to respond to offensive, shocking or hateful speech.

In September 2013, members of the Westboro Baptist Church made a stop at the Montana State University campus in Bozeman.

The small, extremist Christian sect from Topeka (renounced by both the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Churches) is infamous for picketing the funerals of U.S. servicemen carrying banners reading “God hates f**s, Thank God for dead soldiers” and “Thank God for IEDs.”

The Westboro Baptists don’t claim that U.S. soldiers are homosexual, but insist that U.S. military deaths are God’s divine retribution for America’s tolerance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender peoples.

In Bozeman, about five Westboro demonstrators stood on a corner, but their signs were almost invisible behind the sea of hundreds of people who surrounded them in a counter-demonstration in opposition to their message of hate.

According to Rachel Carrol-Rivas, co-director of the Montana Human Rights Network, this marked an example of the best way for people to combat hate speech.

“The Human Rights Network’s philosophy has been to shine a bright light on extremism and offer a counter-message of human rights and inclusion,” Carrol-Rivas said. “The most important thing that we can address in confronting hate speech is for our community and our leaders to stand up and say, ‘No — this isn’t welcome here. This isn’t what most people think. These are not the values of Montanans.”

She emphasized that opposition to extremist viewpoints does not require a grand march down Main Street or a large public demonstration.

Even small gestures of defiance can produce significant results.

“Just a letter to the editor, a post on Facebook, a statement from the city council, every bit of things makes a difference and pushes these ideas of hate farther out of the main stream and out of acceptance,” Carrol-Rivas said. “The important thing is that people who aren’t targeted stand up and make sure they’re giving a voice to people who might be afraid.”

Writing in the 1920s, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “When we are confronted with speech we don’t agree with, the remedy to be applied is more speech … not enforced silence.”

It’s a judicial position the courts have increasingly applied throughout the second half of the 20th century and on into the 21st.

“All there has to be is a bit of analysis and counterpoint; a little bit of conversation about how this impacts people, who it hurts, who stands against it, and that it doesn’t represent the majority of Montanans’ views,” Carroll-Rivas said on combating hate speech. “That is what really adds value to the conversation that communities are having.”

Montana Sedition Act

In 1918, patriotic fervor and anti-German sentiment prompted the Montana state Legislature to pass a law making it a crime during a time of war to “utter, print, write or publish” just about anything critical of the U.S. government, its military, the Constitution, the flag or the war effort.

Penalties for violating Montana’s sedition law could include 20 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.

Over the next two years, 79 people were convicted of sedition in Montana — many of them men of German or Austrian descent. According to Clemens Work, professor of journalism at the University of Montana, virtually all of the convictions were based upon witness accounts of casual statements, often made in saloons.

“Those who criticized or cast doubt on the soundness of Liberty bonds and other means of supporting the war effort such as savings stamps and food rationing risked prison terms,” Work wrote. “A wine and brandy salesman visiting Red Lodge received a 7½- to 20-year sentence for saying that the wartime food regulations were ‘a joke.’ Even a statement such as ‘we have no business being there’ ... led to a number of convictions.”

Montana’s sedition law expired once WWI ended, but several of the 79 people convicted remained in prison into the next decade. In May 2006, Gov. Brian Schweitzer posthumously pardoned 75 men and three women convicted under the Montana law. One man had already been pardoned shortly after WWI.

The First Amendment

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”