No more book-signings for you
Rick Santorum may be gone from the public scene, but he's certainly not forgotten. His legacy lives in tidbits such as these.
The ACLU brought a lawsuit on behalf of 4 women who were ejected by police from a book-signing at a Delaware Barnes & Noble because they were overheard expressing their objections to the book, see Ricky Don't Lose that Number.
The litigation has been settled, ACLU settles suit over book-signing incident:
The American Civil Liberties Union has settled a federal lawsuit stemming from an incident during which a Delaware state trooper ejected protesters from a book-signing event with former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.).Letters of "regret"? What does that mean? As John Morgan of The Pennsylvania Progressive said: "That's interesting, not letters of apology, but letters of 'regret.' The only thing they regret is getting caught excercising the same sort of intimidation tactics that were so common to the Santorum campaign."Under the settlement, the Delaware State Police will adopt a policy and training program for its officers on the free speech rights of protesters and pay $15,000 for the plaintiffs' legal fees, the ACLU said Wednesday.
In addition, Sgt. Mark DiJiacomo will write a letter to the plaintiffs. Former Santorum aides Ellen Melrose and Becky Barrett-Toomey also will send the plaintiffs a letter of regret and pay them $2,500, the amount they were paid by Santorum's campaign to assist him on a book tour in Pennsylvania and Delaware.
And the Delaware State Police, despite agreeing to the adoption of a training program, nonetheless stated that they did nothing wrong, see State police settle suit over ejection from store. A lot of help training will do when you can't even concede that the underlying offense is offensive.
I'm not sure how Barnes & Noble escaped being included as a party. The Inquirer article notes that one of the plaintiffs said that "Barnes & Noble representatives were not involved in the decision to have the women removed from the store," but I can't imagine that they weren't privy to what occurred. That one of the problems with a big corporate bookseller. A small, independent bookstore would be more involved in events taking place at its store and generally would be more supportive of freedom of speech and expression rights.
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