Protesting at the VA with upside down flag is wrong

Did this group think of the other veterans going to the VA for medical treatments? Did they think that their actions for the sake of homeless veterans would actually emotionally harm other veterans?

This is VA property. It is not privately own. A person can do what they want on their own property but everywhere else, there are rules. Even on a city street there are rules to protect the rest of the public.

Their cause was for good reasons but what they did was wrong considering where they did it.

Judge Johnnie Rawlinson wrote "This veteran has earned the right to exercise the full spectrum of First Amendment protections, we should not whisk away those rights with the flick of a pen.” But it would have been great if the rights of other veterans mattered as well. They were entering VA property that is supposed to be there for them because they served this country under the flag used as a prop during a protest.

On flag protests, court takes the VA’s word
San Francisco Gate
By Bob Egelko
Posted on Friday, March 14, 2014

The Department of Veterans Affairs has rules prohibiting the “posting of materials” on its property without prior approval. But when a group of veterans draped a U.S. flag on a fence outside the VA’s health facility in West Los Angeles as part of a weekly protest, officials had no objections — until the the vets started hanging the flag upside down, and were promptly threatened with criminal prosecution.

The protesters responded with a First Amendment lawsuit, claiming viewpoint discrimination, and the VA then pledged to enforce its rules uniformly — a promise that didn’t satisfy the protest leader, but was good enough for a majority on a federal appeals court panel.

“We presume that the government acts in good faith,” Judge Jay Bybee said Friday in a 2-1 ruling of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that denied an injunction against the VA. If the agency goes back on its word, Bybee said, the veterans — who have already won a ruling that the previous practice was discriminatory — can go back to court.

All that means, said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Peter Eliasberg, is that the govrnment can violate someone’s rights and get away with it. “If you have a right,” he said, “you should have a remedy.”

Eliasberg’s client, Robert Rosebrock, is the leader of a group of veterans who have held protests every Sunday since March 2008 against the VA’s refusal to allow homeless veterans on a lawn inside the locked fence of its 400-acre facility in West Los Angeles. Eliasberg said the agency has rented some of its property to a car rental company and a private laundry while homeless vets sleep on the streets outside.
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