Here’s to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, is celebrating its 220th anniversary today. The senior minister here at our church, Amy Zucker Morgenstern, went to a vigil in Palo Alto to celebrate the birthday and protest rising threats to the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
I was not able to go to that vigil, but Hershey, a member of the Palo Alto church, sent me an account of something a UMC minister went through while participating in the West Coast Port Shutdown on Monday in Seattle — this minister’s account, with free speech, religion, and an attempt to keep a public assembly peaceable, seems quite relevant to today’s birthday celebration.