New rules for Moral Mondays

North Carolina protesters hoping for their voices to be heard by legislators in Raleigh now face stricter rules on where they’re allowed to exercise First Amendment rights at the legislature.

Kory Goldsmith, interim legislative services officer at the N.C. General Assembly, signed a memo Jan. 13 that allows police to designate specific areas where protesters can stand along the second-floor rotunda and “adopt reasonable time, place and manner restrictions” within the building.

The rules deem that borders of the protest areas must be clearly marked and provide unobstructed entry to the chambers, the chapel and the legislative services office. Demonstrators also can’t block elevators or the photocopying station.

The new rules come months after the legislature gave protesters access to the second floor in May 2014 but banned demonstrations on the grass in front of the building. These changes followed the arrests of nearly 1,000 protesters in summer 2013 during Moral Monday protests.

“The existing rules deal with noise, this is really more about physical location,” Goldsmith said.

Goldsmith said the purpose of the new rules is to provide better traffic control on the second floor. She said some protests made it difficult to get to the legislative services office and the chambers.

“We’ve got an area that has a number of different uses depending on the time and what’s occurring, especially during session,” she said.

Patrick Conway, a UNC economics professor arrested during a protest in May 2013, said in an email that he believes these changes seem to increase the accessibility of the area — but they also reduce the space where protesters can stand.

“The day-to-day pathways of the bureaucracy in the legislative building are being given priority, when in fact priority should be given to those within to have their voices heard on the legislative issues of the day,” Conway said.

The legal team at North Carolina’s NAACP chapter — the group that coined the term “Moral Monday” in 2013 — is looking into the new regulations but the group refused to comment further.

Goldsmith is unsure whether Moral Monday protests will occur this year, but she said violators of the additional rules will be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Shauna Rust, co-president of the UNC Campus Y, said she has protested in a Moral Monday before and said the new regulations will not stop those wishing to speak their minds.

“The legislature has taken notice that many North Carolinians are unhappy with the way the state is currently being run — and they are trying to silence those voices,” she said.

state@dailytarheel.com