The People's Republic Of Cleveland Heights

The good liberals in Cleveland Heights, Ohio USA are no doubt upset over Arizona's show me your papers immigration law being upheld by the Supreme Court.  One had even traveled to Arizona a couple of years ago to protest the law.  The complaints against the law usually center around the fear that it leads to racial profiling and just plain isn't fair.  As President Obama stated, "No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like."

Perhaps the president should look to Cleveland Heights next and lecture his supporters on the Cleveland Heights City Council (based on the way they spoke at their candidate forum last fall, which I attended, I presume they are all Democrats).  After an incident at a Coventry street fair last summer, the city council enacted a curfew on youth in a few districts in the city.  A group of youths in the city have pointed out that this is discrimination.

It is.  There's no minimum age for the Bill Of Rights and the freedoms it protects such as assembly and speech.  On the level of practicality though, cities can often get away with nonsense such as this since kids can't vote so they're easy for politicians to pick on.  By the time those same kids can vote, curfews don't affect them anymore so they typically don't care about the issue.

As a result, an African-American youth (there's a racial dynamic at play in the curfew's enactment, and perhaps its enforcement as well) on Coventry has to show the police identification to prove that he or she is eighteen so that he or she can walk down a public street at 6:01 p.m., and the good liberals of Cleveland Heights don't seem to care.

Perhaps they're too worried about fighting discrimination in Arizona to notice what they're doing themselves.