go figure
ny const art 1 sec 3 is of no interest to the aclu
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Howard Simon has been leading chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union longer than anyone else, a career that has spanned 43 years and countless controversies.
He has helped the Ku Klux Klan rally at a state capitol and defended the right of a Florida pastor to burn a Quran, an affront that led to a deadly riot halfway around the world. And in the late 1970s, he recalls appearing in just about “every synagogue in Michigan,” where he was then based, to explain why the A.C.L.U. was defending a planned neo-Nazi march in Skokie, in neighboring Illinois.
But he cannot recall any case that has provoked as much soul-searching within the A.C.L.U. as the organization’s decision in August to sue on behalf of a man organizing a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. That rally ended not in a memorable First Amendment victory, but a violent melee that left one woman dead and dozens injured, provoking horror around the country.
“I just think the emotion and depth of agonizing was deeper than I can remember,” said Mr. Simon late last month, after returning from an A.C.L.U. conference in Denver. Within the A.C.L.U., many people were taken aback by “this rise of the armed alt-right,” Mr. Simon said, referring to the size and aggressiveness of the white supremacist turnout in Charlottesville, as well as the presence of people openly carrying guns.
Since then, a question has hung over the organization: What will it do the next time the alt-right seeks the A.C.L.U.’s help?
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That question that has cut fault lines though the A.C.L.U., with a group of staff members sending an open letter taking issue with the organization’s longstanding work of defending white supremacists in free speech cases. “Our broader mission — which includes advancing the racial justice guarantees in the Constitution and elsewhere, not just the First Amendment — continues to be undermined by our rigid stance,” says the letter, which a former member of the A.C.L.U.’s board, Michael Meyers, provided to The Times. About 200 staff members — the A.C.L.U. has about 1,300 full-time employees — signed onto the letter, according to a spokeswoman.
“This letter has to be seen for what it is — a repudiation of free-speech principles,” Mr. Meyers said.
The A.C.L.U.’s executive director, Anthony Romero, said in an interview that the organization was not, after Charlottesville, retreating from its longstanding defense of free speech, even hate speech — a tradition that goes back to the organization’s earliest years.
It is in the A.C.L.U.’s “DNA to defend speech from government censorship including, and especially, hateful speech in times when it is being shut down,” he said.
Still, after Charlottesville, the organization has been evaluating its criteria for accepting new free speech cases, Mr. Romero said.
One issue is how the A.C.L.U. should evaluate the potential for violence when representing groups seeking to hold demonstrations. “How do we balance a concern for public safety with freedom of speech?” Mr. Romero asked. Another question under consideration, he said, relates to how the A.C.L.U. should evaluate the credibility of organizers pledging a peaceful demonstration.
Mr. Romero also indicated that the organization is not inclined to represent groups seeking to hold armed rallies. This, he said, was not “a change in approach,” but a principle the A.C.L.U. espoused as far back as 1934.
An A.C.L.U. pamphlet issued that year defended the right of Nazis to hold meetings. But the pamphlet laid out the A.C.L.U.’s opposition to permitting Nazis to engage in “drilling with arms” — that is, wielding them in public.
Fascism was then ascendant in Europe. In Germany, the Nazis’ rise to power had started in the streets, with marches, brawls, and mass demonstrations. Still, the A.C.L.U. backed the right of Nazis to march in the United States — an important point of reference, Mr. Romero said, for the A.C.L.U. as it responds to an emboldened white supremacist movement that often calls itself “the alt-right.”
“That’s a better analogue than Skokie,” Mr. Romero said, noting that the A.C.L.U.’s famous defense of the right of neo-Nazis to march, against significant opposition, in that Chicago suburb came at a time when Nazi marchers were sometimes outnumbered 70 to 1 by counter-protesters, and dependent on the police for protection.
“The issue in Skokie was the threat of violence by people who would be so moved by anger they would attack the Nazis,” said Mr. Simon, today the executive director of the A.C.L.U. in Florida. “That’s not Charlottesville.”
Mr. Simon emphasized that after Charlottesville, neither he nor colleagues he has spoken to are any less resolute about defending the First Amendment. But, he said, there was a recognition that “guns have changed a lot in the decades since Skokie.” The phenomenon of people turning up at demonstrations with rifles struck him, he said, as relatively new.
Some local A.C.L.U. affiliates found the lessons of Charlottesville straightforward. “If white supremacists march into our towns armed to the teeth and with the intent to harm people, they are not engaging in activity protected by the United States Constitution,” the California affiliates declared.
Yet some A.C.L.U. members expressed concern the A.C.L.U.’s resolve to defend the most controversial speech may be weakening after Charlottesville. Nine longtime A.C.L.U. members wrote to the organization that the new criteria for accepting cases were an “invitation to shirk responsibility for protecting the Bill of Rights.”
In an interview, Norman Siegel, the former head of the A.C.L.U.’s New York affiliate and a signer of the letter, noted that refusing to take armed groups as free speech clients would have meant turning down, say, the Black Panthers.
“Presumptions about a group that carries arms,” the letter states, may be “used to invent rationales for declining to represent certain clients.”
Complicating matters is the fact that some armed militiamen who attend right-wing demonstrations claim to be there not as participants but as peacekeepers.
George Curbelo, a commander of a rifle-toting militia contingent at Charlottesville, said his group traveled to the rally to “support and defend everyone’s constitutional rights.” Some people assumed his men were with the white supremacists.
But Mr. Curbelo said his contingent of a militia called the New York Light Foot had no “affiliation with the white supremacists that were there, their narrative or actions.”
As the A.C.L.U. considers the lessons of Charlottesville, it has remained largely on the sidelines as the alt-right movement reignited a free speech debate on college campuses. Since Charlottesville, public universities in at least six states have rebuffed attempts to bring the alt-right ideologue, Richard Spencer, to campus, citing the risk of violence.
In Florida, Mr. Simon, the state A.C.L.U. director, publicly said the University of Florida should not have blocked Mr. Spencer from coming to campus after Charlottesville. But in some other states where universities have blocked Mr. Spencer, the A.C.L.U. has said little, even as the debate plays out in newspapers and on social media and, in Michigan, in federal court.
Whatever comes of the debate inside the A.C.L.U., leaders of the alt-right say they are looking past the civil liberties union and seeking to forge more sympathetic legal alliances.
“We do not want or need their help,” Kyle Bristow, a Michigan lawyer who identifies with the alt-right, wrote in an email, explaining that he was building a network of like-minded lawyers.
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