Registered Protesters Protest Protest Registration

by christopher taylor

NEW YORK CITY--Roughly thirty clean-shaven "Daughters of Reagan" picketed outside City Hall, yesterday, carrying Kinkos-compiled signs bearing the phrase "Protest Registration" inside a left-to-right "no" circle. The women, who failed to respond with violence when police tried to muscle them from the newly planted grass, want Mayor Bloomberg to "stop this senseless red tape" and "retake our Constitutional right to assemble."

"With the Republican Party's decision to have its convention at Madison Square Garden came the hordes of misguided youth, marching in the streets," explained Dora McIntosh, one of the protesters. "The City responded in precisely the wrong fashion, by attempting to regulate them. By necessitating paperwork, only the most organized and experienced groups were able to take part on an official level. So we have a fairly coherent voice actually near the convention. Furthermore, the true nutcases, undeterred by technicalities, were bound to show up anyway. Guess who's fault it is if this turns into a violent few days, costing Bush the election? And costing taxpayers thousands to house these hippies?"

Alice Krasden, another protester, puts it differently. "The First Amendment guarantees me that the Feds can't make a law abridging my right to peaceably assemble. Add on the Fourteenth Amendment, and New York can't either. I can't see any way that the City of New York, as a government body dependent upon the State of New York, can justify making me fill out paperwork and not call that an abridgement. I mean, what if I couldn't read or write? What if my hand hurts?"

"Maybe we should be threatening to secede," exclaimed Deb Cooper.

The protesters did at one point have to show a police officer on the scene their registration papers. "We thought we'd be better to err on the side of caution," said McIntosh. "And, no, the humor is not lost on us."