Text Box: It is your duty as a citizen to help shape your govern-ment and safeguard our heritage of Freedom. Transgressions against our precious constitution should be challenged by all. Text Box: Eternal Vigilance Text Box: Volume 17 No. 1 Text Box: Page # Text Box: By Thom Foley, President Your Pinellas County chapter of the Florida ACLU continues to serve as a local champion of civil liberties and a defender of the freedoms embedded in the Bill of Rights. This year has witnessed some daunting challenges as well as a few well-earned victories. This year, local assaults to the freedoms we hold dear have included two incidents that were nationally reported. In January, media ranging from the national network news to You-Tube, broadcast fearful images of St. Petersburg police officers rampaging through a camp that had been organized for homeless people, using razor blades to “open” the tents of these unfortunate folks. Two months later Pinellas was again in the national news when a local activist was arrested for “passing out literature,” at a Largo City Council meeting, when she handed a sheet of paper to a friend. Other ongoing challenges include the double-speak issue of “free-speech zones” that seem designed to produce the opposite effect, and an ordinance creating no-solicitation zones around public polling places. On the bright side, three issues that the Pinellas Chapter has long supported and worked for – elections with a verifiable paper trail, the restoration of civil rights to citizens with past felony convictions, and fair and equal treatment for citizen groups to have the same access to public schools that is currently mandated for military recruiters – have achieved some level of victory or at least partial resolution this year. Two of these issues achieved prominence after the election 2000 debacle in Florida. After nearly seven years of consistent “eternally vigilant” effort on the part of individuals and groups throughout the state – including many of your Pinellas ACLU board – the 2008 election will include a verifiable paper trail. Likewise, in April, years of rights-restoration lobbying, workshops, and coalitions with other community groups, culminated in a 3-1 vote of the Florida Board of Executive Clemency to “automatically” restore the rights of ex-felons who committed non-violent offenses and have completed all terms of their sentence. The rules of this “automatic” restoration are ambiguous enough that for now workshops and outreach programs to assist ex-offenders in applying for their civil rights restoration will continue. A third long-term concern of your local board – the efforts of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace to enjoy the same access to public schools that military recruiters are offered – also met with a measure of success when the Pinellas County School Board passed its long anticipated policy in time to be in place for the opening of the schools in the fall. Your Pinellas ACLU will continue to monitor this issue as the school year progresses. Legal Panel chair Bruce Howie, along with Mark Kamleiter, Karen Doering, Adrien Helm, and the other ever-vigilant attorneys of the Pinellas ACLU’s legal panel, guide the chapter in litigation issues and shape our negotiations with government agencies when we determine that their actions have imperiled civil liberties. In addition to litigation and negotiation, educational outreach activities remain the primary focus of the Pinellas ACLU chapter board. Thus we have provided speakers for schools and community groups, and we’ve staffed information tables and carried our ACLU banners high at events and venues related to civil liberties. We filled a table at the annual dinner of the St. Petersburg NAACP in June, and cosponsored this year’s Juneteenth Festival at Campbell Park. We tabled and participated in the parade at the St. Pete Pride Festival, and late October will find us in place at Circus McGurkis and at the St. Petersburg Festival of Reading a week later. The ever-vigilant – and energetic – Jerry Moore coordinates our work at Circus, while Jeff Harper, with other board volunteers, will again delight the crowds at the reading festival this year with our banned-books table and display. Space prohibits listing all of the activities of your chapter board, but in addition to these highlights, upcoming plans include participating in an ACLU regional strategic planning retreat this winter, and hosting a long over-due gathering in appreciation of the ACLU’s valued donors in Pinellas County. And, of course, gathering in December at our annual dinner to honor a local champion of civil rights – Marcia Cohen – with the Gardner W. Beckett, Jr. Civil Liberties Award. Kathy Fountain of Channel 13 will also be recognized with the Irene Miller Journalism award. Hope you can attend. It’s a great time to salute the Pinellas ACLU board for all that they do in their efforts to preserve freedom for us all.

The Pinellas ACLU is an affiliate chapter of:

 

ACLU of Florida
4500 Biscayne Blvd. Suite 340
Miami, FL 33137

(305) 576-2336
General ACLU E-mail: aclufl@aclufl.org

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