A Stitch in Haste

It seems to me that if you have a First Amendment right to wear a jacket with "Fuck the Draft" on it in a courthouse (and you do have that right -- see Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971)), then you obviously also have a right to wear (or, more correctly, to sell) a t-shirt with "Stop Snitchin" on it on the streets of Boston.

That city's activist mayor, however, disagrees:

Joining a contingent of politicians, law enforcement officials and youth outreach workers ordered to an emergency meeting at City Hall yesterday, [Mayor Thomas M.] Menino vowed to combat the soaring crime rate.

Among the steps: Sending city Inspectional Services Division officials to seize T-shirts emblazoned with the "Stop Snitchin" message.

"It's wrong," Menino said. "We are going into every retail store that sells the shirts and remove them."
...
The mayor did not say what legal authority ISD would cite in seizing the shirts from retailers.

Hardly surprising, since there is no authority to cite, unless someone wants to make a case for the "imminent lawlessness test" of Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). But of course merely wearing (or selling) a t-shirt like this cannot be reasonably deemed to be a guarantee, or even a call for, imminent lawlessness. This is the most patently unconstitutional, and patently absurd, action by a local hack politician I've seen in quite a while.

Remind me again why democratically-elected politicians are so much better than unelected judges?

Via Hit & Run by way of Sploid.