Damon Atkins and the right to protest

How often do Leftists disrupt Conservative events with counter-protests? It happens a lot. Those protests are usually characterised by lots of yelling, the use of megaphones, the beating of drums, and/or the use of various other noise-making implements. And do the police roll up, and tell them that they mustn’t be noisy, or else they’ll be arrested for disturbing the peace? As a general rule, no, they don’t.

Yet when a handful of Conservative Christians hold a counter-protest against a Pervert Pride Month event, what happens? The Christians are told to shut up, and someone gets arrested.

This happened recently in the city of Reading (Pennsylvania), when Sergeant Bradley T. McClure, a tyrant and bully police officer, arrested Damon Atkins, who was part of a Christian counter-protest against a Pervert Pride Month event being held outside the City Hall.

The event was attended by homosexuals, transsexuals, and drag queens, as well as some young children. Sergeant McClure (badge number 668) was accompanied by two female police officers, one of whom was sporting what has been described as a “lesbian haircut”.

Sergeant McClure warned Atkins against creating a disturbance, even though all that Atkins had done was to hold a sign and proclaim the word of God. Atkins had not crossed the street to engage the people attending the Pervert event; he had not attacked any homosexuals or other perverts; nor had he verbally abused them.

When Atkins began once more to proclaim his Biblical message, as is his right under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, Sergeant McClure aggressively moved towards him, held him in a “pain compliance” position, handcuffed him, roughly turned him around, marched him over to a wall, tripping him up on the way by stepping on his foot (possibly deliberately), and then pushed him up against the wall.

The police sergeant was later seen contemptuously throwing Atkins’ backpack on the pavement (hopefully nothing inside it was broken). McClure behaved in a brutish and thuggish manner, whilst Atkins acted throughout with a calm and dignified demeanour.

Sergeant McClure subsequently filed an arrest report, in which he lied about Atkins. McClure attested that less than a minute after Atkins was given a warning, “he resumed yelling derogatory comments to the people at the event”. But that was not the case; all Atkins had done was to begin to speak loudly; in fact, all he managed to get out before the thug McClure arrested him were the words “God is not the…” (Atkins later said that he was about to say “God is not the author of confusion”, a quote from 1 Corinthians 14:33, in the Bible). The words “God is not the…” do not constitute a “derogatory comment” (nor was the full intended sentence derogatory, for that matter).

Showing his authoritarian colors, the Mayor of Reading, Eddie Moran, declared that the rights granted by the First Amendment did not include the right to protest on the other side of the street from the City Hall where the event was being held. Coincidentally, the Mayor was in attendance at the Pervert Pride gathering (he later described it as a “wonderful event”). Well, how about that? And what are the odds that Sergeant McClure was aware of the Mayor’s presence at the homosexual rally?

It has been said that “a fish rots from the head down”, and it sounds like the City of Reading is rotting from the top — all the way down, from the office of the Mayor, to the cops on the beat. Indeed, it would be fair to say that something is rotten in the City of Reading.

However, with the release of the video, showing the fat police thug arresting the peaceful Christian protestor, the City of Reading began to receive some pretty bad publicity. The Police Chief, Richard Tornielli, said that the local Police Department was inundated with hundreds of calls complaining about the arrest of Atkins.

Like the snivelling weasel he is, Tornielli tried to turn the situation around, by saying that the calls were taking up valuable police time; he was crying to the media about some alleged “threats” supposedly being made to the police department — because, for him, this wasn’t about the poor Christian man who was falsely arrested and deprived of his liberty and political rights; oh no, far from it. Instead, Tornielli wanted to divert journalistic attention away from what has been called a “politically-motivated kidnapping by the police” — and so he tried to get the media to focus on his own supposed woes instead. It was like watching a wife-beater seeking sympathy for himself because his knuckles were bleeding.

Nonetheless, there was a somewhat positive outcome — the local District Attorney decided to drop the charge against Atkins, after reviewing video footage of the incident. However, that does not change the fact that Damon Atkins had his freedom taken away from him when he was arrested and placed in custody; he also suffered public embarrassment and humiliation, due to the unlawful arrest; and, perhaps most importantly, he had his right to freedom of speech and his right to freedom to protest curtailed, quite possibly for political reasons.

It should also be recognised that it is a standard police tactic to arrest people at public rallies on flimsy charges, and then drop the charges later on. Doing this serves several purposes for the police:
1) Arrests can be made to remove key personnel from protests which the police don’t want to succeed.
2) Arrests can be used to intimidate not only the arrestee, but everyone else involved as well.
3) The process is the punishment.

The phrase “the process is the punishment” is one which is well-known by police officers. They are fully aware that it costs a lot of money for an accused person to hire a lawyer, arrange witnesses and depositions, and to attend court (with a lawyer). They police know that forcing someone to pay all of those expenses is just as financially damaging as it would be for the accused to get a fine; indeed, sometimes more so. It often happens that the police will wait until the last possible moment to drop the charges, so as to cause the maximum financial harm possible to their victim. It doesn’t cost the individual police officers anything to go to court, so they just walk away at no personal expense, having a laugh at all the money that their victim had to pay out to go through the process (indeed, sometimes police officers get paid overtime to attend a court hearing, if it falls on their day off, so it can be quite lucrative for them).

Another important consideration in this case is the issue of perjury, which still has to be decided. Sergeant Bradley T. McClure lied in a legal document, as part of his plan to have Damon Atkins convicted in a court of law, when he falsely stated that Atkins “resumed yelling derogatory comments to the people at the event”. For that alone, he must be fired, and never allowed to work in an official legal capacity ever again.

Any police officer who lies in an official police statement has corrupted his oath of office. Police officers must be trustworthy, and that means that they must be honest, as well as politically neutral. However, the corrupt legal system rarely charges its own officers with perjury, so corrupt cops have to be dealt with in other ways by the patriot public, such as getting them fired by widespread campaigning about their corruption.

Taking into account many other incidents regarding the interactions of police with Christian and Conservative protestors on many other occasions, it appears that most, although not all, police officers are either part and parcel of the Leftist-dominated Establishment, or they are weak-willed, and are thus going along with the Leftist agenda. Weak-willed cops, who are compliant with authoritarian orders to attack the freedoms of the people, are complicit in the Left’s attacks upon society. All Leftist and transgressor police officers need to be called out and targeted whenever they breach the bounds of decency or engage in political policing.

Every Leftist in a position of power, who abuses or misuses that power, needs to be pointed out, targeted, and removed from office.

This is a part of how we can win. We need to dismantle the Leftist State piece by piece, part by part, person by person.

References:
“Christian arrested in Reading Pennsylvania at a Pride march”, BarelyPreacherMan (on YouTube) [2.16 “God is not the…”; 2.45 stepped on foot; 4.45 backpack thrown]
“‘An unjust arrest!’: Street preacher arrested by ‘tyrant’ cop during PA Pride rally”, CBN News (on YouTube) [2.31 “God is not the author of confusion”; 4.15 stepped on foot]
“Reading Police Chief: Department ‘inundated’ with ‘complaints about the arrest’”, The Lancaster Patriot, 8 June 2023
“Update: Charges dropped as DA reviewed video and determined that the arrest was unlawful”, Caleb Hamilton III @MastrMinimalist (on Gab)
“Police Sergeant Bradley T. McClure committing an unlawful arrest and subverting the US constitution on film”, Erik Zimerman (on Twitter), 7 June 2023
“that the officer lied in his Affidavit of Probable Cause”, Erik Zimerman (on Twitter), 7 June 2023 [photo of Sergeant Bradley T. McClure’s Affidavit of Probable Cause]
“A Christian man was arrested for protesting a “Pride” event on a public street in Reading, PA”, Charlie Kirk (on Twitter), 7 June 2023
“1 Corinthians 14:33”, Bible Hub

See also:
“Arrested at Pride event for free speech | First Amendment violation?”, The Civil Rights Lawyer (on YouTube)
Karishma Rao, ““Clear cut grounds for a civil suit”: Damon Atkins arrest at Pride Day event sparks outrage as Reading police come under fire”, Sportskeeda, 7 June 2023