Fair Enough - Hennipen County

Fair Enough - Hennipen County District Judge Marilyn Brown Rosenbaum yesterday handed both sides a victory in the battle over implementing the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

Rosenbaum said a section of the law requiring verbal notification and dictating the size and wording of signs to prohibit guns in churches and other private places, such as businesses, forced the churches "to violate their sincerely held beliefs. . . . and the loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury."

She denied requests for orders that would have allowed the churches to ban guns from their parking lots, and release them from the law's requirements in their roles as employers, landlords and operators of child-care facilities.

She issued a restraining order allowing churches to use non-state-approved wording, typeface and print size in advising worshippers not to bring guns to church. This was the tempest that the Edina Community Lutheran Church (which numbers, among its many well-heeled DFL worshippers, former US Attorney and DFL Gubernatorial hopeful David Lillehaug, who was back at work doing the party's bidding in this case) yanked out of the teapot.

The funny part? Listening to the spin (especially from the unctuously smug and sanctimonious churches involved), you'd have thought this was going to be the first step in the repeal of the MPPA.

The results reflected what more rational minds have thought all along. In many ways, I'm happy about the whole ruling; I wasn't really comfortable with requiring churches to use state-mandated signage, either. And the judge refused to allow churches to bar legal firearms from the trunks of cars in the parking lot, which I think would have been a disastrous precedent along with being really lousy law.

Above all, though, I think it cuts the legs out of under the anti-MPPA movement (of which more below). Where do they go from here? The parts of the law that actually pertain to firearms have been tested in courts, over and over again. They haven't a leg to stand on in most cases.

The next battlefield for this law will be when local governments try to supercede the law on their own property or in their own city limits. I'll be following these attempts very closely.

Paging Gloria Swanson - I saw my first "Repeal Concealed Carry" bumper sticker yesterday. It was on (what else?) a Volvo, while I was driving through (where else?) Mac-Groveland.

And in other forums - on the radio, in the coffee shops, on Minnesota political discussion groups - I've heard various pundits saying "this law is going down! There's no way the people will let this go on!

Now, if you remember back a year or so (and I'd link to the posting if my permalinks worked), I was saying that Concealed Carry was a bellwether issue for the DFL in Minnesota; if the DFL couldn't win on this issue, which is so utterly anathema to the party's philosophy and beliefs, it coudn't win anything. I heard on person comment "I'm seeing so many No Guns signs, I can't help but believe that this thing is doomed". I pointed out to this person that he lived in one of the strongest DFL-cum-Green districts in the Twin Cities; the sentiments there were very unlikely to be echoed in Grand Rapids or Rochester, or even much of Eden Prairie and Oakdale.

Indeed, this issue has loudly brought out something that's been in evidence (if quietly) on so many others. The Metro DFL reminds me of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

You know the movie - Swanson plays a washed-up star from the Silent Movie era. In her mind, she still thinks she's on the A-list, still can get the best table at Elaine's. She still thinks she has all the clout she had 25 years earlier. She feels that if she just flashes that smile, or stomps her feet hard enough, people will cower and bow and scrape the way the used to.

And it's no wonder - when you've hit the highest high, it's hard to be back in the gutter scrapping for nickels again.

The Metro DFL - and the "moderate" Republicans who were for so long their lapdogs - used to run the show, absolutely and without question. But last November changed all that.

And it's on the Concealed Carry issue that the DFL will probably get their first real taste of what it's like to be all washed up the minority. Like Norma Desmond, they will cajole, and holler and stomp and kick, expecting to get their way the way they did for most of the last 40 years in this state. And they won't.

And it makes me all tingly!

Posted by Mitch at June 7, 2003 05:01 PM