Let me give you one experience. I was leafleting for a progressive candidate in the 1980s near a Catholic church. Central American issues were important at the time and we had some CISPES people with us.
People were fine with the idea that we were putting campaign fliers on their cars. In fact, on the whole, they were most likely sympathetic to the candidate.
The Republican/libertarian opposition came along and started leafleting as well.
One independent "former" Trot guy decided he would take it on his own to pull the opposition leaflets off all the cars he could. He wasn't one of the CISPES group at all, but a grad student of history.
People coming out of the church who saw that took offense, pointed it out, and we had to do something about the guy (told him to give us back his leaflets and go home).
People have a strongly negative reaction to the idea that you are trying to make up their minds FOR them by "protecting" them from political speech with which they may even disagree.
Peter Kosenko
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 13:36:05 -0500
>On LBO-talk, I doubt that anyone would condemn left-wing hackers for
>defacing & otherwise attacking websites operated by right-wingers or
>imperialist governments. Why, then, scold Brown students of color
>for taking & destroying *free* student papers, *which usually isn't
>even a crime by capitalist standards*?
>
>Yoshie
>