You hippies git off my lawn!

This is one of those no-it's-not-from-the-Onion items. Joe Carter at the First Thoughts blog at the Web site for the Christian neoconservative theocratic journal First Things did a post on 01/28/10 entitled The First Amendment Doesn’t Protect Libertarian Hippies Who Dance in the Jefferson Memorial.

Things like this make me wonder if the Republican worldview generally isn't in some basic ways frozen in about 1969. Carter writes:

So you can imagine my dismay when on midnight April 12, 2008, the eve of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, a group of eighteen libertarian hippies donned iPods and danced inside the Jefferson Memorial. The Man - in the form of a National Park Service officer - told them to stop the tomfoolery (he may have also told them to wash their hair and get a real job (i.e., stop interning at Cato) but the news reports don't say). The leader of the hippies, Mary Oberwetter, refused to stop that awkward gyrating they call dancing and was arrested, though the charges were later dropped (The Man is getting squishy).

Instead of being grateful for the leniency, Oberwetter sued the Park Service last year claiming that the very reason the First Amendment was added to the Constitution was to protect libertarian hippies who like to dance a jig in front of statutes at midnight (or something like that).

Carter hangs his post nominally on the fact that the "hippies" lost their case, in what seems to be a pretty trivial matter.

But it sure gave Joe Carter an excuse to spew about "hippies".

I've never been to visit the Cato Institute, which along with the occasional isolationist paper on foreign policy mainly puts out endless justifications for standard Republican articles of faith like deregulation and the desperate need for the wealthiest people to be free of the burden of paying taxes. But knowing what they do, it's hard to imagine what kind of people it may attract that qualify to Joe Carter as "hippies".

This is a screen shot of coverage of the incident itself showing Oberwetter being arrested:


I don't see any flowers-in-her-hair or tie-dyed clothes or pot bongs in that shot, do you?

Tags: hippies

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