IT’S A FREE SPEECH THING

Well, here we go again ("Taking (away) the initiative", 3/13/05, by Lance Tapley). It’s the Maine Legislature’s annual assault on the people’s First Amendment right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Of course that amendment only applies to the US Congress. States need not comply.

There’s one simple solution to argumentative disruptions at polling places, which doesn’t require passing laws that eat away at Maine’s century-long democratic tradition of the citizen initiative — call the cops on the provocateurs.

Senator Gagnon’s claim that "most people don’t like signatures being collected at polling places" doesn’t hold true in my town. In Milford, where approximately 1500 people cast ballots in November and two of us were "H2O for Maine" petitioners, most people actually seemed to enjoy hearing about the issue. After people voted, we invited them to our table, held up a bottle of Poland Spring water, pointed to the tiny fine print on the label where it says "Poland Spring Water Company, Division of Nestle Waters," and politely informed them that Poland Spring is not a Maine company, but a division of the largest food corporation in the world, which is taking water from Maine, paying nothing for it, selling it around the world for profit, and we think the company ought to pay a small fee/tax to the State. We gathered 500 signatures, nearly a third of the electorate.

One guy who didn’t sign surprised the heck out of us when he commented loud enough for others to hear, "I work for Poland Spring," he said, "and I wouldn’t drink that water. They pump it out of a swamp." So not all Poland Spring employees toe the corporate line or interfere with the "temple of democracy" that Gagnon claims he wants to preserve at the election site.

People need to rethink the notion that petitioners can gather signatures at shopping malls or parking lots. During the runup to this last election, campaigners collecting nominating petitions to put Carl Cooley of the Socialist Equity Party on the ballot in Maine’s Second District were refused access at virtually every major retail outlet, including Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Kmart, Borders, Target, Shaw’s, and Hannaford. The security guard at the Bangor Target store told campaigners, "You can’t petition here without permission." When campaigners asked, "How do we get permission?" the guard replied, "We don’t give permission." Petitioners were also asked to leave the Bates College campus and a security guard at UMaine-Orono told Cooley he couldn’t petition in front of the performing arts center. The public sidewalk in front of the Bangor post office and Federal Building complex is also off limits. Security guards there say that due to post-9/11 regulations and the PATRIOT Act they have to take down petitioners’ names and other personal information.

Over the past several decades, US Supreme Court and lower court rulings have seriously eroded the right to free speech, holding that the property rights of shopping-mall owners take precedence over the right to leaflet and solicit signatures. The right to petition is subject to the whim of business owners and private security guards, and the post-9/11 attack on democratic rights has compounded these difficulties. If the Maine Legislature takes polling places away from the people’s initiative, well, I guess that’s another plank in a platform for some revolutionary changes around here.

Pam Bell

Milford