We’ve attended a lot of Halloween events for the ZRC, and seen some political protesting done at them (as well as participated ourselves, like when we took picket signs and a megaphone to Elgin last October).

Generally speaking, Halloween is a chance to make a statement, and sometimes those statements (and naturally the costumes that frequently accompany them) rub others the wrong way.

It rarely descends into violence. About the worst the ZRC has ever encountered protesting for Zombie Rights was when a drunk at one of our first trips to Halloween on State Street here in Madison tried to wrestle a pro-Zombie sign out of my hands. I chalked it up to the liquor.

Apparently, though, if you don’t like a political statement made by someone in Pennsylvania, and you land the right judge, you can get away with assault and harassment:

The Atheists of Central Pennsylvania decided to walk in the Mechanicsburg Halloween parade. There was a zombie Pope and a zombie Muhammed. On YouTube, you can catch a scary moment. It’s dark and distorted, but a Muslim man comes off the curb extremely offended at Muhammed being depicted in this way.

“He grabbed me, choked me from the back, and spun me around to try to get my sign off that was wrapped around my neck,” said Ernie Perce, who donned the costume.

…

The Muslim man and Perce both called police to report a crime. Both kept walking, and a few blocks down found Sgt. Brian Curtis. He talked to both and came to this conclusion.

“Mr. Perce has the right to do what he did that evening, and the defendant in this case was wrong in confronting him,” he said.

Seems like an open and shut case, right? A guy was harassed, at least by conventional definitions, and possibly assaulted on a public street for wearing a costume another guy didn’t like. The police sided with the costume-wearer, as they should. A crime was committed in public, it even ended up on Youtube, justice will be done, right?

Well, not quite, because once again, as we saw in London last spring, Shambling While Zombie is its own crime in the minds of ignorant people around the world, and at least one of them is a judge:

Talaag Elbayomy was charged with harassment, but District Judge Mark Martin threw it out after criticizing Perce, the victim, and even calling him a “doofus.” The audio is also on YouTube.

Martin, who has done several tours of duty in the Middle East, said Perce would be put to death in those societies for his crime, but Perce wonders why that’s relevant in this country.

“He let a man who is Muslim, because of his preference of his culture and his way of life, walk free from an attack,” Perce said.

So, to summarize: it is now acceptable, court-sanctioned actually, to accost people dressed in a way that you don’t like in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. At least, if they’re an atheist, or dressed as a Zombie. And to have a judge then implicitly threaten you with DEATH by talking about how, in other countries, you’d be executed for speaking out? Wow.

That’s fascinating. Or Fascist, I’m not sure, it starts with ‘fasc’ anyway.

Someone should mail Judge Martin a copy of the First Amendment, he’d probably be surprised at what’s in there.

Also noteworthy for contempt is the defendant’s lawyer, R. Mark Thomas, who claims that being dressed in a Zombie manner on a public street makes you an ‘antagonist’ and deserving of, presumably, assault or harassment in public.

Bonus: the defendant seems to have either perjured himself, or lied to a police officer, as he confessed to grabbing at the defendant on the day of the incident, but said he did not do so in court. Oopsie. Not that it matters, seemingly, in Mechanicsburg.

The ZRC is not about to say that dressing up as a Zombie to make political points is without risk, especially to the larger Undead Community, who may well be uninterested in your particular issue. But, as with the earlier UK Zombie-related political protests, if as a society you start accosting people who DRESS as Zombies when their doing so offends someone, or is part of a protest that offends someone, it’s only a matter of time before you also start accosting actual Zombies going about their business. All that aside from the fact that, in this country, we’re supposed to have a relatively ironclad guarantee for free speech and expression. I had hoped that the sort of abusive, scornful treatment of public Zombiism our 2011 Zombie of the Year fought so nobly against in the UK would not be seen here in America.

I was very wrong. And that, frankly, is more than a little scary.

Truly an unbelievable, and outrageous, miscarriage of justice.

You can see more here:

Story originally found via The Freethinker

Tags: Social Justice, Zombie Public Event

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, February 25th, 2012 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.