> Brandenburg [...] made the right to freedom of (political) speech's protections in the United States almost absolute.
Ah, yeah that is a good point, since these protests are political speech. Does it matter that the protests are assembling? I could imagine the protected ability to say anything you want about politics, while reserving some rights about the ability to do anything.
Personally, I don’t think it should be illegal to protest this. It doesn’t seem like a particularly bright idea though.
This situation doesn’t have a lot of legal precedent, and it might cause some to occur right now. But since communicable disease is a threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the law and constitution weren’t exactly written with global pandemic in mind, do you think the ability to assemble should be absolute?
> Half of this doesn’t apply to the US.
Here’s the US specific list... it’s still long
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
* Actually, would you mind listing the specific exceptions above that you believe do not apply to the US? I could be wrong, but I scrubbed through all of them and can’t find a single one that doesn’t seem to apply at least partially.
In the US, fighting words, obscenity and pornography are there explicitly; false statements of fact covers things like libel, slander, dignity and perjury; the imminent lawless action exception covers sedition and incitement; commercial speech and speech owned by others covers classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, and non-disclosure agreements; right to privacy is implicitly granted by several amendments in the constitution, and the right to be forgotten has legal precedent. I think that’s all of them. What did I miss?