A D.C. Council member is mulling emergency legislation that would bar demonstrations outside homes in residential neighborhoods, a response to increasingly aggressive protests by an extremist animal rights group.
Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh has submitted written notice that she will introduce the Residential Tranquility Emergency Amendment Act during the council’s final legislative meeting of the year. Cheh, a constitutional law professor, contends the group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has harassed numerous D.C. residents in their homes — shouting obscenities, yelling death threats, banging on doors.
The legislation, at least one draft of which was obtained by The Examiner, would make it a misdemeanor “for any person to repeatedly engage in unwanted targeted picketing before or about an individual’s dwelling place in a residential neighborhood with the intent to intimidate, threaten, abuse, annoy, or harass the individual.” Picketing under the measure is defined as “marching, congregating, standing, parading, demonstrating or patrolling … without the implied or express consent of the occupant.”
Cheh said Friday she had not committed to a version, or any bill at all.
“Nobody believes in free speech more than I do,” she said. “But there has to be a line here and I’m just trying to figure out what it is.”
The bill drew immediate repudiation from labor groups and the American Civil Liberties Union. It may have been inspired by one group, but the legislation is certain to affect unions and other organizations that use picketing as a means of getting their message across, said Johnny Barnes, executive director of the ACLU’s national capital-area chapter.
“The best answer to speech you don’t like is more speech, good speech,” Barnes said Friday. “When you limit speech, it becomes very dangerous.”
Similar anti-picketing laws have withstood U.S. Supreme Court scrutiny. The First Amendment “permits the government to prohibit offensive speech as intrusive when the ‘captive’ audience cannot avoid the objectionable speech,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 1988, in the majority opinion of Frisby v. Schultz.
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty is behind a global campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences, a British-based business that tests drugs on roughly 70,000 animals a year. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described SHAC members as radicals who employ “frankly terroristic tactics similar to those of anti-abortion extremists.”
Attempts to locate a contact for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty were unsuccessful.
This is the second protest-related bill that Cheh has backed this year. Watered-down noise restrictions approved in June restrict daytime noncommercial speech in residential neighborhoods to no more than 80 decibels when measured from inside the nearest occupied home.
