I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the ACLU considers panhandling free speech – because in a healthy society, free speech should promote dialogue. Whether upsetting or repellant, it should provoke people to think … and eventually answer.
But when I’m asked for spare change in downtown Brattleboro, dialogue is usually limited. People don’t want to justify their choices and I worry that my money won’t help - with little ready information to help me make my choice an informed one.
So I question panhandling as speech, since its power often seems dependant on physical confrontation, even menace.
As a concept, every generation seems to redefine free speech. In 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously commented, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”
Yet that’s just what provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos does when he stages potentially violent campus confrontations incurring millions in security bills. His appearances don’t so much invite discussion as shut it down.
If Holmes were alive today, I bet he’d be shocked at the number of causes crowding under the free speech umbrella. It’s been used to justify everything from internet trolling to revenge porn.
But john a. powell, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School, is trying to clarify the limits of free speech, balancing speech with its potential to harm.
He cites as precedent the legal battles of the 1970s over the then novel idea of sexual harassment in the workplace. As women entered the workforce, some were met with pornographic posters and sexist slurs. At the time, courts upheld the posters as free speech, declaring “Put up your own posters.”
This was hardly a practical solution, and later, sexual harassment emerged as a legal concept in response to that hostility.
Ideas evolve.
In the current debate about panhandling, I’d like to see both sides given a public voice. Perhaps permanent - or at least tamper-resistant - signage downtown would help, advising pedestrians of options that might actually help the homeless and destitute – including information like which shelters are open and when, what can be donated, where to volunteer, how to help and ways to continue the dialogue.
