the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Westwood NJ, a Westwood man wants to fly anti-abortion flag at Borough Hall. The borough resident and anti-abortion activist is requesting the display, citing the rainbow flag flown at Borough Hall for LGBT Gay Pride flag.
In April 2017 , Jan Phillips attempted to strong arm the Ridgewood council in the name of civility by pushing them to hang a Gay Pride flag over Village Hall ,at the time it was rejected for various reasons and many readers suggested ,if the council flew the pride flag over Village Hall , that would open the door to flying all kinds of other flags .
The former Ridgewood Mayor was even attacked by the then editor of the Bergen Record and called a racist and homophobe . The Ridgewood blog suggests , the borough of Westwood send the legal bills to the Bergen Record , if they were good enough to call people racists and homophobes they should be also willing to pay the legal bills they may have caused to incur .
This was inevitable. It just took longer than might have seemed likely at the time. Huge mistake to capitulate to the Jan Phillips (Aronsohn) crowd. They made a lot of noise and the council caved. Dreadful precedent that will reverberate for years or decades and far from Ridgewood.
Constitutional Law 101. Municipalities are certifiably insane if they imagine that it could be in any way appropriate to dance this particular two-step: 1) Evaluate in a legislative body the substance of a third-party message proposed for public display on public property; and 2) Approve such public display on municipal property because said legislative body loves that message and darn well wants to signal its approval of same.
.
Why did our well-paid village attorney not put the Kibosh on this? Regardless of what one thinks of the particular message that received approval and (by now) two month’s free advertisement from our elected village legislative body, how (constitutionally speaking) can that body now legitimately say “no” to a similar-situated month-long display containing, say, an opposite message, or even any other message for that matter!?! Why did the Village’s legal counsel not lay out this easily-predicted problem in stark enough terms to persuade our illusurious council members of the utter folly of their planned course of action?
Village’s legal counsel did “lay out this easily-predicted problem in stark enough terms” They ( The Council ) decided not to take his advice.
Exactly what were the terms used?
Surely the readers of TRB.net can be trusted to determine for themselves if they were sufficiently stark.
Do your research. Go back to the archive of the council meeting where this was discussed. I saw it in real time and the Village Attorney did inform the council that it would open a can of worms.