Religious freedom and nonpublic fora

[Rob Weinberg]

At 11:02 AM 12/19/97 -0600, Marie A. Failinger wrote:
>Rob,
>   My thinking on this comes primarily out of my experiences as a Legal
>Services attorney, where just about anybody would come into our offices in
>any state of mental and physical disarray, as loud and obnoxious as one
>can get, short of the welfare office or the emergency room.  I was often
>glad to be able to close my office door and not feel that I was the one
>who had to go out and deal with the drunk or the welfare mom's screaming
>kids, that the receptionist would do it.  With the benefit of experience,
>I now wonder if my "relief" that I could do my "real work" was always such
>a good thing. I would concede that
>there have to be some places where government workers can go to get away
>from verbal assault, because no speaker has the right to do that to
>anyone; and even government workers need privacy (and, indeed the research
>shows that people "make" privacy and property for themselves even when
>they are completely deprived of either, as in mental institutions.)

There are some presumptions here that I find, at the least,
distinguishable. My office used to have "duty day" to deal with the public.
Lawyers would take turns handling the calls and the walk-ins. Eventually we
assigned a couple of lawyers and clerks to handle that full time and
relieved litigators and others from doing that.

I see your concerns more as issues dealing with how responsive the
government worker should be to the public, as opposed to how accessible for
purposes of speech government property is presumed to be. The issues you
describe from Legal Services are not different from private practice, or
from the demands my own individual clientele may make of me.  If the public
does not feel my office is responsive enough, their remedy is at the polls,
or the complaint department.

Philosophically, I agree that government should be as accessible and
responsive to the public as possible. But that's a political question, not
a constitutional one.

>
>And there is even a point to creating "contemplative
>public space" at places like memorials and maybe even in courts.  But to
>extrapolate from a rule that you can't bust down a government worker's
>office door (or the entire office for those who only have cubicles)
>that people shouldn't be allowed to speak in the hallways, on
>the bulletin boards, elevators, or
>foyer of a public building simply because it is primarily a workplace is
>going too far, in my view. And these
>distinctions can be made with TPM/incompatibility regimes, but not under
>the public forum regime.

I don't know why. My office is simply not a public forum for speech and
debate (or religious expression, to get back on topic) merely because (a)
the public pays my salary; and (b) we have a "complaint" department that
people can bring their issues to. It's impractical. It's not what you elect
the government to do. I agree it should be responsive and sympathetic to
the public, but me casa ain't su casa when I'm working.

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    Rob Weinberg, Montgomery, AL
http://www.mindspring.com/~robertmw/