11/5, "NJ ACLU to sue NJ Transit for firing employee who burned Koran on 911 anniversary," NJ.com, C. Megerian
"On the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, Derek Fenton stole headlines by burning pages from the Koran in Lower Manhattan to protest a planned Islamic community center there. Two days later, he lost his job at New Jersey Transit for breaching the agency’s code of ethics.
- Now the American Civil Liberties Union says Fenton should get his job back. The group will file a lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court saying Fenton was unconstitutionally fired for exercising his free speech rights.
"If you allow governments to censor one kind of speech, you open the door to censorship of all kinds of speech," said Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the ACLU in New Jersey. "Our individual right to free speech depends on everybody having it."
- A spokeswoman for NJ Transit declined to comment today. When Fenton was fired, the agency released a statement saying it had "concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore was dismissed."...
Fenton was not working that day, nor did he identify himself as an NJ Transit employee, the lawsuit said....
Corrado said "this is the kind of case the First Amendment exists for." He drew a comparison to flag burning,
- "upheld as free speech by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989 and 1990."
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via Weasel Zippers
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