This article was originally published on GrasstopsUSA.com.

          During this Thanksgiving weekend, police officers in Gwinnett County, Georgia, arrested and imprisoned Bob Roethlisberger, alleging “vulgar and obscene” behavior as the justification. What prompted such charges? Roethlisberger, a driver of one of Operation Rescue’s Truth Trucks, refused to take down graphic images of aborted babies, which urged onlookers to “stop abortion NOW!” Gwinnett County police proceeded to inflict severe damage on the truck, removing the signs by force; Operation Rescue estimates the value of the destroyed property “to be in the thousands of dollars.”  Major Thomas Bardugon of the Gwinnett County Police Department unambiguously supports the officers who perpetrated the act and even threatened to arrest Troy Newman, the President of Operation Rescue, if Newman drove the Truth Truck through Gwinnett County.

          Such a response by police and by the local government to civil political and ethical expression is unconstitutional and intolerable. Expressing opposition to abortion and its legality – or to any other political or social trend – is fully within an individual’s First Amendment right of free speech. Obscenity allegations cannot possibly apply to the case of Roethlisberger and the Truth Truck – as upheld by the Supreme Court itself, which ruled in Roth v. United States (1957) that “All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion - have the full protection of the guaranties” of the First Amendment. This means that the First Amendment explicitly protects graphic, shocking forms of expression – even forms that most people consider repulsive and inappropriate – if this expression is used to make a social statement – even one that greatly departs from majority opinion.

 The Roth decision goes on to state that “implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.” Surely, calling attention to the gruesome, grotesque, bloody nature of abortion is of tremendous social importance. It is no different from the manner in which many abolitionists approached the issue of slavery in the 19^th century. Visual and graphic descriptions of the abuse and violence experienced by slaves were used to inform the public in Great Britain and the United States regarding the true extent of slavery’s horrors; such strategies galvanized public opinion to support abolition to an extent that might not have been possible otherwise. Should public exhibitions of drawings and photographs of beaten, scarred, chained, or dead slaves have been prohibited as “vulgar and obscene”? Some legislators in the antebellum American South would surely have liked this idea.

Adding further significance to Operation Rescue’s activities in Gwinnett County is the fact that Georgia’s State Legislature is due to consider a Human Life Amendment to the state’s constitution in January. The presence of the Truth Truck in Gwinnett County was clearly an act of political expression, aimed at gathering support for the amendment by informing the public that the unborn fetus is indeed a human being and that abortion amounts to the horrific mangling and mutilation of a human life. Freedom of political expression is one of the most sacred human liberties and one of the most fundamental to the integrity of the American Republic.

Accordingly, courts throughout the United States have repeatedly upheld the use of images from abortions to call attention to the horrors of the practice. Operation Rescue has sent its Truth Trucks throughout the country for the past seven years; it is fully protected by both principle and precedent. It is the Gwinnett County police officers who are out of line here.

Let there be no doubt as to the motivations for Gwinnett County’s foul treatment of Roethlisberger. Either the officers themselves or many of the county’s prominent officials simply dislike—or, more correctly, violently despise—the anti-abortion position and are using their positions of authority to suppress views contrary to theirs.

Especially telling is the proximity of the vote on the Human Life Amendment; this incident seems to be an attempt by Gwinnett County officials to weaken public support for the amendment by simply leaving the public in the dark about what abortion truly consists of. They are free to oppose the amendment using their own arguments and reasons, but they are not free to use coercion to suppress the arguments of the amendment’s supporters. It is time for concerned friends of liberty to tell Gwinnett County’s policemen and policymakers just how illegitimate the county’s arrest of Roethlisberger was. If this heinous plan to suppress free speech backfires on those who perpetrated it, we will have won a tremendous victory for liberty.

Note: On December 4, 2007, Gwinnett County agreed to drop all charges against Mr. Roethlisberger. Pressure from concerned friends of liberty seems to be the reason for this change – testimony to the effectiveness of opposing violations of inalienable individual rights wherever they may be found. Read more about this development in Operation Rescue’s press release on the subject.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre,  Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, weekly columnist for GrasstopsUSA.com, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov also publishes his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

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Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here..

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new four-act play, Implied Consent, a futuristic intellectual drama on the sanctity of human life, here.