October 7, 1989 Tens of thousands (estimates ranged from 40,000 to 150,000) from all over the country marched on Washington, lobbied Congress and Housing Secretary Jack Kemp to provide affordable housing for the homeless. Some of the signs read, “Build Houses, Not Bombs.” Kemp signed a letter committing the George H.W. Bush administration to several steps to help the homeless, including setting aside about 5000 government-owned single-family houses for them.
=============== October 7, 1998 Matthew Shepard Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, was beaten, robbed and left tied to a wooden fence post outside Laramie, Wyoming; he died five days later. His death helped awaken the nation to the persecution of homosexuals and their victimization as objects of hate crimes. A play about the incident, and later an HBO movie, “The Laramie Project,” has been performed all over the country. Watch a preview MatthewShepard.org Matthew’s Place
In a world increasingly illuminated by artificial light, the beautiful night skies of a small coastal town in South Australia have attracted international recognition. Carrickalinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula is Australia’s first official Dark Sky Community. The title rewards a dedicated community effort to combat light pollution and preserve the natural environment at night.
The journey began three years ago when I was a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, working on the value of night skies. I was a regular visitor to Carrickalinga, but this time conversations at a picnic one evening turned to the clarity and brilliance of the stars. I was inspired to work with the locals to nominate Carrickalinga as a “Dark Sky Place”.
My recent research suggests restoring dark skies would be worth US$3.4 trillion (A$5.16 trillion) to the world, annually. That’s largely because light pollution is disrupting nocturnal pollinators, altering predator-prey interactions, and changing the behaviours of nocturnal species.
Light pollution has detrimental effects on wildlife, human health, and ecosystem functions and services. But there are simple solutions. By embracing responsible lighting practices, everyone can contribute to a healthier future in which the wonders of the night sky are accessible to all.
Understanding light pollution
Light pollution refers to human alteration of outdoor light levels. Excessive or misdirected artificial light brightens the night sky, diminishing our ability to see stars.
Research shows the problem is getting worse. Light pollution increased by 7–10% a year from 2011 to 2022. More than a third of people on Earth cannot see the Milky Way.
Light pollution not only affects our view of the cosmos, but also wastes energy and money, contributes to climate change and has significant repercussions for both ecological and human health.
Nocturnal animals such as bats and certain birds rely on darkness to navigate and find food. Insects, crucial for pollination and as a food source for other wildlife, are also affected. Artificial light at night is contributing to their decline.
In humans, studies have shown artificial light interferes with circadian rhythms, leading to sleep disorders and other health issues.
The global Dark Sky movement
DarkSky International, formerly known as the International Dark Sky Association, is a global network of volunteers combating light pollution. The non-profit organisation established in 1988 is based in Tuscon, Arizona in the United States. But more than 193,000 people across more than 70 countries are involved, including astronomers, environmental scientists and the public.
The International Dark Sky Places Program was born in 2001 when Flagstaff, Arizona was named the first International Dark Sky City. Now the program certifies five types of Dark Sky Places: sanctuaries, reserves, parks, communities, and urban night sky.
DarkSky says the aim is to “preserve and protect the nighttime environment and our heritage of dark skies through environmentally responsible outdoor lighting”. It recognises places that demonstrate a commitment to reducing light pollution through public education, policy, and promoting responsible lighting practices.
There are now well over 200 Dark Sky Places across the globe. This covers more than 160,000 square kilometres in 22 countries on six continents.
Australia’s Dark Sky Places
Australia is home to several Dark Sky Places, each recognised for their exceptional night skies and dedication to reducing light pollution. These include:
Since 2021, the Carrickalinga community has worked tirelessly towards achieving International Dark Sky Community certification. The journey involved several key initiatives:
Sky Quality Metering Program: regular measurements of sky brightness to monitor light pollution levels
Community engagement: presentations to community groups and the district council to raise awareness about light pollution, information stalls at local markets, community consultation process (led by the District Council of Yankalilla)
Educational materials: printed flyers, video, and a “Star Party” including a presentation on First Nations cosmology
Policy development: collaboration with the district council to create a lighting policy including public lighting design that complies with both Australian standards and DarkSky requirements.
Carrickalinga is currently upgrading existing public lighting to reduce light pollution. This will involve a new lighting design plan that reduces correlated colour temperature, ensuring shielded downward-facing lights minimise skyglow, glare and light trespass.
Reducing light pollution by upgrading lighting fixtures does not compromise safety. Dark sky does not mean dark ground.
Light pollution has become such a problem because our lights are unnecessarily bright and poorly designed. Fixing the problem simply involves changing the colour from white to amber, shielding and targeting lights so they do not shine upwards and outwards, and reducing wattage where it is surplus to requirements for people’s safety.
Carrickalinga became Australia’s first International Dark Sky Community in May, 2024. Credit: The Backyard Universe
How you can help
Achieving and maintaining dark sky status is not difficult but it does require ongoing community effort. Here are the five principles for responsible outdoor lighting, which apply equally to domestic as well as public lighting:
Useful – use light only if it is needed and has a clear purpose
Targeted – direct light so it falls only where it is needed
Low light levels – light should be no brighter than necessary
Controlled – use light only when it is needed
Warm colours – use warm coloured lights wherever possible and avoid short-wavelength (blue–violet) light.
An inspirational journey
Achieving International Dark Sky Community status was a significant achievement in preserving the natural night environment and educating the local community about light pollution. This accomplishment demonstrates the power of community action and serves as a model for others.
By protecting our night skies, we safeguard a vital part of our natural and cultural heritage and also promote healthier ecosystems and communities. Carrickalinga’s journey serves as an inspiring example of what can be achieved through collective effort and dedication to preserving our planet’s natural beauty.
I would like to acknowledge the enormous contribution of Carrickalinga Dark Sky Community volunteer Sheryn Pitman, who works for Green Adelaide in the South Australian Department for Environment and Water, and helped write this article.
The Smithsonian National Museum of American History houses thousands upon thousands of artifacts. Here are some of the more unusual items from their collection.
Soap babies of Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan from the 1896 election (The Smithsonian National Museum of American History)
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. was formally established on August 10, 1845, and over the years has amassed more than 157 million items across 21 museums and galleries. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History houses artifacts related to national elections and the presidency. We offer a look at some of the most unusual.
All images courtesy of The Smithsonian Institution unless otherwise noted
1. Bandana Featuring Excerpts from George Washington’s Farewell Address
In which Washington encouraged all Americans to put aside regional and party divisions in support of the newly formed republic. Observed Washington, “Your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, the love of the one ought to endear you to the preservation of the other.”
2. Presidential Hair Cabinet
John Varden, keeper of collections for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science at the U.S. Patent Office, began collecting locks of hair from prominent individuals in 1850 and quickly amassed a collection that included presidents, senators, artists, and other luminaries. Varden’s presidential hair collection includes strands from George Washington and Franklin Pierce.
Brain drain could undermine the country’s hi-tech economy as liberal families conclude social contract has been broken
This summer, the Nobel laureate Prof Aaron Ciechanover joined a group of prominent Israelis gathered in the ruins of the Nir Oz kibbutz to demand a hostage release and ceasefire deal.
Nir Oz was the worst hit of all the communities targeted by Hamas on 7 October, with a quarter of its residents kidnapped or killed. Twenty-nine are still in Gaza.
If the hostages were not brought back, the basic social contract that underpinned Israeli society would unravel, the 77-year-old professor of medicine warned – with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
He cited an accelerating “brain drain” of doctors and other professionals as a worrying sign that some of Israel’s elite already feel they no longer have a future in the country. And without them, Israel itself might struggle to have a future.
Ciechanover is a long-term critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and joined protests against his government before the war. But concern about this trend is not limited to political opponents of the Israeli leader. Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s former chair of the National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel, joined forces with the administrative expert Ron Tzur to warn that Israel faces an existential threat.
In a paper calling for a new political settlement, they warned that under a business-as-usual scenario “there is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades”. (snip)
The problem precedes the 7 Octoberattacks and the war that followed, as demographic and political shifts have prompted some secular, liberal Israelis to question their future in a state increasingly dominated by religious traditionalists.
Noam is a father of three with businesses that include a PR consultancy and a cannabis pharmacy. He expected that his 40s would be a time of “less doing, more enjoying”, after decades of hard work.
Instead, he and his wife spend evenings poring over school options in European countries as they weigh up where to start a new life. The war increased the urgency of the search, but it has been a decision born out of longstanding concerns.
“The main reason we are leaving is that we are seeking a better future for our children. Even if peace can be brokered tomorrow, we still can’t see a future we want to be a part of,” Noam said. “The demographics speak for themselves.”
Before internet memes, postcards offered a popular, accessible, shareable means to combine image and word. Messages could be as simple as “wish you were here,” but in their “golden age” (circa 1898–1917), postcards provided a powerful way to promote political agendas, writes scholar Kenneth Florey. The golden age neatly coincided with the height of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and Britain. More than a thousand varieties of pro- and anti-suffrage-themed postcards were produced then, 200 of which are included in “Votes and Petticoats,” a Johns Hopkins University digital collection available on JSTOR. Of these, a significant number, curiously, depict cats—both as women’s pets and as women.
Associations between ladies, cats, and cat ladies—childless and otherwise—are rooted in a long, complicated cultural history. In Edwardian times, cats were linked to women as creatures of the domestic domain: woman was Angel of the House, the cat her companion, both of them sweet, warm, helpful, and cute. At the same time, animal lovers, “spinsters,” and suffragists represented overlapping, suspect categories of womanhood. It’s the perennial paradox in which women find themselves: somehow looked down upon while also placed on a pedestal.
I Want My Vote! Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
This postcard captures many of the themes that recur across the collection: it suggests that a woman demanding the vote is as silly as a kitten so doing, their protests as ineffective as the kitten’s mewls. The green, white, and purple stripes behind the kitten were the colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), one of the more militant British suffrage societies. Historian Krista Cowman interprets the sexism in this postcard as infantilizing though not especially cruel. Similarly, Florey describes the use of cats in suffrage postcards as softening a message that might otherwise seem harsh.
We Demand the Vote: An Advocate for Women’s Rights. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
In a similar vein, this cat is draped in the colors of the WSPU and wearing a fashionably magnificent hat. The message is ambiguous: Larissa Schulte Nordholt contends that it’s probably meant to satirize the concept of women participating in politics, the well-groomed, fat feline playing on the perception of suffragists as spoiled. It was published by a company that produced other, more clearly anti-suffrage postcards. But there’s a certain dignity in the cat’s determined forward gaze and assertive paw that perhaps suffragists could have embraced, regardless of the creator’s intention. Then again, that seriousness can also be interpreted as the very thing an anti-suffragist postcard maker was mocking by attaching it to a fluffy house cat.
Less whimsically, other postcards feature cats as pets in human scenes.
Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
Here, the suffragists portrayed are mannish and middle-aged, typical of many negative suffragist depictions, stereotyping them as unsexed spinsters. While the housewife they address isn’t an idealized Angel of the House, she has a traditionally “motherly” figure and wears more feminine clothing. The suffragists, the viewer thus understands, are out of touch with what “real” working women want. If the suffragists had families to occupy them, they wouldn’t worry about the vote. And if lower-class women had the vote, they wouldn’t care to exercise it.
The cat in this postcard is outside the house and thus linked to the suffragists (it sits slightly apart, but arguably that positioning is dictated by compositional rather than symbolic reasons). The suffragists are “outdoor cats,” less benign and more feral—less feminine—than their indoor counterparts. It’s also worth noting that the cat is black, which taints it, and thus the suffragists, with associations of witchcraft and bad luck.
I’m a Purrfect Lady. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
Here too the suffragist is associated with a black cat, to unflattering, ridiculous effect. Although it was considered appropriately feminine for women to care for animals, women and femininity were also considered weaker, sillier, and more frivolous than men and masculinity; caring too much for other creatures came was considered a sign of fragility and triviality.
Tobias Menely has traced the disparagement of animal welfare through the evolution of gender norms in the modern period. As an early example, he cites a 1786 Scottish magazine story about a “Mrs. Sensitive” who dotes on a menagerie of pets yet cares little for “poor Christians.” In Menely’s analysis, Mrs. Sensitive is “immoral and unnatural, an ancestor of our own crazy cat ladies, women whose maternal instincts, we are led to believe, have been attenuated by an affinity for animals.”
By 1909, around the time these postcards were produced, sensitivity to animals was fully pathologized, as Menely relates: one doctor, Charles Dana, called it “zoöphilpsychosis” and published an article about it in the Medical Record. A case study pronounced a “childless woman who transformed her house into a hospital for sick felines” as “beyond medical redemption.” Sufferers of “zoöphilpsychosis” were described as “sentimental,” “weak,” and “hysterical”—terms loaded with sexist connotations.
These stereotypes are further repeated in conversations surrounding the anti-vivisection movement, another woman-dominated cause that reached its height in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
The Girls All Vote in This Town. May the Best Man Win. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
This is one of several suffrage postcards that feature photographs of live and presumably taxidermized kittens dressed up and posed. Although this postcard’s message could be interpreted multiple ways, Nordholt points out that the use of taxidermy speaks to the “synchronous oppressions of women and cats.”
Indeed, Susan Hamilton quotes a contemporary critic of anti-vivisection using misogyny to defend animal cruelty:
Is it necessary to repeat that women—or rather, old maids—form the most numerous contingent of [antivivisectionists]? Let my adversaries contradict me, if they can show among the leaders of the agitation one young girl, rich, beautiful, and beloved, or some young wife who has found in her home the full satisfaction of her affections!
Although suffragettes and antivivisectionists didn’t always align, the two movements had much in common, including the consistent stereotyping of their members as spinsters. And as we have seen in “But Surely My Good Woman…,” spinsters were objects of mistrust and derision.
Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
It wasn’t always that way. For a time in the nineteenth century, single women could claim feminine power through the “Single Blessedness” movement. Where women had long been shamed or pitied for not marrying, they began to frame their singleness as reflective of a higher calling: still nurturing, still Christian, but outside of marriage. Harriet Tubman, for example, spent eighteen of her most productive and prominent years without a husband. As a Black woman, Tubman faced extra scrutiny for being unmarried. She leveraged the concept of Single Blessedness for respectability.
As women began to agitate more for equal rights, however, Single Blessedness fell out of favor. Lee Chambers-Schiller provides an overview, writing that
[a]s the century wore on, spinsters were increasingly defined as unacceptable childcare providers, guardians, or even teachers of children. Their spinsterhood took on an ominous cast, their celibacy no longer evidence of pure, Christian love, but now suggestive of physical, emotional, and intellectual degeneracy.
It wasn’t just that spinsters lacked the feminine graces needed to attract a man—their “degeneracy” was a result of their childlessness:
The woman whose reproductive organs went unused would experience their atrophy and derangement, together with a painful menopause and general physical and mental deterioration. A spinster could look forward to a shortened life span and quite possibly insanity.
Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
The suffragist in this postcard is marked as a spinster; her masculine features, hat, and clothing tell us as much. Wild-eyed and staring off the page, she’s so out of touch with reality and with her maternal instincts that she doesn’t even realize her audience of “Citizens” consists only of confused children.
Opponents of women’s suffrage argued that banning women from voting was actually a way of protecting them and preserving their angelic femininity. Politics, they claimed, was a nasty business that would take women away from their divine calling in the home, to the detriment of the race.
The Queen of the Polls. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
This woman represents anti-suffragists’ fears of what society would look like if women gained the vote. In contrast to the depictions of suffragists as dowdy old maids, the woman portrayed in this postcard is conventionally attractive and fashionably dressed. But her decadent New Woman status is given away by her cigarette—proper women didn’t smoke!—and her “District Leaderess” sash. The pole behind her is covered in campaign signs for mostly female candidates, including “Miss Spinster” for justice of the children’s court, which viewers are of course meant to interpret as an outrageous irony.
The role-reversal that women’s suffrage would supposedly bring about is communicated in several postcards, once again, through cat imagery.
The Suffragette Not at Home. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
Here, the man of the house is substituting for the absent woman by staying home, caring for the children, and making tea. The cat suffers the consequences of his ineptitude in the unnatural role.
Suffragette Madonna Crop of 1910. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
Alternately, this man is taking good care of the home and family for his suffragist wife, but he’s thus emasculated. The halo of the golden plate, evoking the Virgin Mary, as well as the cat on the hearth behind him, emphasize his domesticity.
The absurdity of men in the women’s/cats’ sphere is surpassed by the absurdity of women/cats in the men’s sphere.
A Raid on the House. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
This British postcard seems to reference suffragists’ “raids” on the Houses of Parliament, during which women attempted to occupy the legislative chambers to protest their exclusion from them. The symbolism of this image is a striking echo of how the Daily Express described a suffrage raid in 1907: “[T]he sight reminded one very much of the removal of naughty kittens from a room in which they had been disporting themselves freely.” Cowman cites this description as example of voices in the press that often made light of the women’s suffrage movement, thus “making it appear over-feminine and consequently somewhat frivolous.”
Like “I Want My Vote!”, both this postcard and the Daily Express article infantilize women by portraying them as kittens. Viewers are meant to chuckle at the silly kittens’ attempt to infiltrate the doghouse—the kittens are cute, but they’ll never displace or even disturb the dog, who sleeps through their efforts.
“A Raid on the House” is particularly insulting when contrasted with the reality of the women’s suffrage movement, in which participants faced violent attacks. One march on the House of Commons in 1910 became known as “Black Friday” when suffragists were brutally beaten by police.
I’m A Suffer Yet. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
Bandaged and bruised, this bedraggled cat seems to represent a suffragist who has been beaten but is still dedicated to the cause. Whether the cat’s determination makes it sympathetic or stupid is a matter of interpretation.
Cats, as it turns out, are difficult to pigeonhole. So are women. According to Alleyn Diesel, the association between cats and women goes back at least as far as Ancient Egypt. Goddesses in ancient and contemporary religions have frequently been portrayed as either part-cat or accompanied by cats. And when it comes to goddesses, being catlike doesn’t mean being sweet and domestic. On the contrary, feline-linked deities are known for “self-reliance, elegance, and… willingness to be tamed strictly on their own terms”: powerful qualities that patriarchal societies mistrust in women.
When JD Vance questioned why a childless person would want to be a teacher or a leader, infamously calling Kamala Harris and her ilk “miserable” and “childless cat ladies,” he was invoking old, sexist stereotypes. The Harris campaign responded by selling “childless cat lady” merch. This tactic of reclaiming an insult and turning it into a badge of honor also has rich historical precedent.
The Suffragette Down with the Tom Cats. Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
The intention behind this final postcard may have been, yet again, to paint the fight for suffrage as absurd, to make suffragists seem like willful, unfeminine animals.
But the sender of the postcard wrote on the back, “See the expression: In town for the fight. Have used my night off for training my guns in the new campaign. Ha! Ha! You will see the signs soon.” We can’t be sure, but the writer seems to have been a suffragist, claws out.
Editor’s Note: Harry Whittier Frees, the likely photographer of the image depicting clothed kittens in line to vote, used live animals in his work, not taxidermy. The text has been amended to account for this fact.
Insects called burying beetles haul mouse carcasses down into the dirt and prep them to feed their future offspring. Also known as carrion beetles, they have some stiff competition … and some help from tiny traveling mites.
(I did not find this bit in there, so here it is from my email. It’s a start! There are a few more, all interesting and totally off topic.)
The Times introduces your favorite (?) typeface, Times New Roman.
What font do you write in? People may argue all day on the internet about their favorite typefaces, but it’s a fair wager that the most ubiquitous font of all, whether it’s your personal go-to or not, is Times New Roman.
Whence this towering behemoth, you may wonder? It was invented in the 1930s by type designer Stanley Morison, who, after criticizing the London Times for their dated font, was asked to make them a new one. “Morison enlisted the help of draftsman Victor Lardent and began conceptualizing a new typeface with two goals in mind: efficiency—maximizing the amount of type that would fit on a line and thus on a page—and readability,” writes Meredith Mann, Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library. Morison’s new font was taller and narrower, but the letterforms were weighted in a new way that made them easier to read, despite the cramped spacing. (The weighting meant that the font also required more ink, which meant more money—a main reason that the font wasn’t immediately picked up by other papers.)
Once the new font was approved, The Times published a pamphlet explaining the switch. “It is evident that there must be changes in typography as long as our social habits are open to variation,” the editors explained. “When it was founded, The Times was largely read in coffee-houses; in the nineteenth century it came to be read in trains; today it is largely read in cars and airliners. Reading habits, dependent on social habits, will not remain constant. Neither must newspaper typography remain constant.”
Indeed not, especially when you’ve got such a splashy new font to brag about. “The new [font] will be employed on and after October 3, 1932,” the notice declares. “The Times, for generations the best printed paper, will, by present-day optical standards, be the most comfortably readable journal in the world.”
The paper held onto the exclusive rights to Times New Roman for a year, and after that, other publications—once they’d decided it was worth shelling out for—began to follow suit. By now, it’s trickled down into just about everybody’s personal computers and for many, simply become the default.
“Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason,” writes Matthew Butterick, author of the impressively niche Typography for Lawyers. “Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage.”
Why not? “Fame has a dark side,” Butterick writes. “When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, ‘I submitted to the font of least resistance.’ Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.”
(Or perhaps you are merely a novelist, who knows that if your paragraph looks good in Times New Roman, it will look good in anything. Too often have we been fooled by the slender affections of Garamond!)
By the way, Butterick points out, lawyers should beware: though it’s as much the standard font for them as everyone, the highest court in the land (such as it is) forbids its use. Something to remember for when you get there.
(This is a good thing; read a little farther to see why. The system is working; the prosecutor will make a case where one can be made under law. -A)
Haitian Bridge Alliance seeks charges vs. Republican candidates; judges point toward strong constitutional protections afforded to political speech
A panel of local judges referred the citizen-initiated criminal case against former President Donald Trump and his running mate U.S. Sen. JD Vance to Clark County prosecutor Dan Driscoll for investigation.
The case filed by the Haitian Bridge Alliance requests charges of felony inducing panic, disrupting public services, making false alarms, two counts of complicity, two counts of telecommunications harassment and aggravated menacing.
Those requests reference comments made by Trump and Vance about the Haitian community in Springfield killing and eating residents pets. Shortly after those claims were amplified by Trump, Vance and thousands of others online, the community was hit by a wave of bomb and safety threats.
“The conclusion of whether the evidence and causation necessary for probable cause exists to commence a prosecution of the alleged offenses is best left in the investigatory hands of the prosecution,” the judges wrote in their decision.
The judges said particular consideration should be given to “the strong constitutional protections afforded to speech, and political speech in particular.”
“The presidential election is less than 35 days away. The issue of immigration is contentious,” the ruling states. “Due to the proximity of the election, and the contentiousness concerning the immigration policies of both candidates, the Court cannot automatically presume the good faith nature of the affidavits.”
The court ruling states that this does not mean HBA executive director Guerline Jozef does not believe what she alleges, but brings into question whether her conclusions that Trump and Vance’s “political speech” are criminal are influenced by her personal experiences, “as opposed to an objective analysis of the alleged speech, the constitutional protections afforded to that speech, the alleged conduct occurring within the community, and a claimed nexus between the speech and that conduct.”
Under Ohio law, a private citizen seeking to “cause an arrest or prosecution” can file an affidavit with “a reviewing official” — a judge, prosecuting attorney or magistrate — to have them review the facts and decide if a complaint should be filed.
The Haitian Bridge Alliance asked the court to find probable cause for the charges and issue arrest warrants for Trump and Vance.
According to the document, in a felony case, if the court questions good faith or probable cause, it will refer the case to the prosecutor for further investigation. Unless it issues a warrant for Vance and Trump’s arrests, the court must refer the case to the prosecutor.
The HBA’s updated filing alleges that free speech cannot be used as a defense, as Trump and Vance’s actions disrupted public service.
“Trump and Vance engaged in a purposeful pattern of conduct to impede public services in Springfield. Despite seeing that Springfield was suffering from repeated bomb threats, evacuations, hospital lockdowns, necessity of state-trooper deployment, and closures of government buildings, they continued to double, triple, and quadruple down on their false claims,” the affidavit stated. ” … Trump’s and Vance’s refusals to stop, despite serious chaos they were inflicting and the governor’s and mayor’s pleas, highlights their criminal purpose in spreading these lies. The chaos caused was the purpose, and the First Amendment affords no protection for that campaign of criminal conduct.”
The affidavit alleges that Trump and Vance’s actions “were not just hateful, they were calculated to stir alarm and emotional distress in the community.”
The court ruling also raised the concern of strong constitutional protections of free and political speech.
According to a concurring opinion by Judge Stephen Schumaker, the case does not require a hearing. Schumaker’s opinion went further into the question of proving certain actions.
“The Court acknowledges the difficulties of proving a negative. There is significant difference however, between stating that there are no verifiable reports that a statement is true and proof and/or probable cause that a statement is false,” Schumaker wrote. “This Judge has tremendous respect for the officials making the above and similar statements but if any of the officials voiced the opinion that the statements at issue were false, those statements are in the form of opinion.”
