People exercising their right to free speech are quite often dickheads
It's 1996 and a young theboss is graduating from an elite east coast college where he has spent four years being indoctrinated by godless multiculturalists. It's a gorgeous June day, and he cannot be called hungover because a hangover implies waking up and he did not sleep. He's sweating through the wool suit he is wearing, because it never occurred to him to buy linen.
Anyway...very happy day.
President Bill Clinton is on hand to deliver the commencement address to all his wife's future contributors. President Bill delivers a great speech where he announces this that or the other about the '96 campaign and also makes a joke at theboss' friends expense - the friend being the Salutatorian. The joke is only possible because Clinton understands Latin because of course he does.
Anyway, the ceremony ends and it is time to walk out the gate that no undergraduate ever walks out because to do so is to guarantee failure to graduate. Tradition is weird, man.
Theboss is sweating bourbon at this point but is excited that the moment has arrived. He holds the hand of the dear friend he was sitting with, walks throught the gate, and almost trips over the enormous (and I mean enormous) picture of the bloody fetus that is being held by one of dozens of the anti-abortion protestors who apparently followed President Bill everywhere. His friend immediately starts bawling hysterically. Other women in line are losing it. Dudes are screaming four letter words at the protestors who have turned a sacred tradition into an enormous political clusterfuck. If theboss wasn't wearing an ill-fitting graduation gown and was generally a pussy, he might have thrown a punch at one of the least threatening of the protestors. Because, really, these people were jagoffs of the highest order and had completely ruined a special moment.
But theboss did not. And no one else did.
They had a belief and the right to express that belief. That right exists no only within the Constitution but within a human's soul.
Here's the thing. No one likes encountering protestors. Believe me, I lived in DC for a decade. These people are genuine pains in the ass. The guy on Mass Ave with the sign about how Catholic priests molest boys all over the world? Asshole. The 100 percent correct Code Pink protestors from the Bush Era? Assholes. All I want to do is walk my dog or go to dinner and someone is yelling at me about human trafficking or abortion rights or how there shouldn't be abortion rights or how Lyndon Larouche knows the answers, man.
You know what you can't do though?
Shoot somebody because they are annoying.
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