Well thanks very much National Parks Department for providing 5ft of space to exercise my basic first amendment rights regarding freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom in your 500 acre public park.

Muir Woods National Monument, Cal.

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shitaki on 11-03-2009 08:11:48 wrote:

Muir Woods' kind response: Thank you for taking the time to write to me regarding the first amendment area at Muir Woods National Monument. Many of the 392 units of the National Park Service have designated areas like that one. Golden Gate National Recration Area has several designated First Amendment areas that aren't marked by signs like the one at Muir Woods that you saw on noshiz.com, but instead are noted by maps within the park's compendium. The National Park Service has many regulating documents that guide our decisions and the Part 36 of the Code of Federal Regulations is one of the key ones. Section 2.51 of 36CFR covers public assemblies, and lists the reasons a park should or should not issue a permit for a first amendment activity. You may be asking yourself why you need a permit at all to exercise your first amendment right on public land, but several court decisions have upheld the right for the National Park Service to dictate the time and location of these activities. We never restrict the message, but for the protection of the park and park visitors, we can prevent an activity from taking place in an area that would harm a threatened or endangered species, for example. (A side note here, the first amendment activities that require a permit are for activities such as public assemblies, passing out literature, etc. Your first amendment right to wear a shirt with any message on it you want, for example, remains unimpeded within NPS sites.) 36CFR section 2.51e1 states that one reasons a first amendment request could be denied is if the activity would "unreasonably impair the atmosphere of peace and tranquility maintained in wilderness, natural, historic or commemorative zones." This is the reason you won't see political banners hanging from Half Dome in Yosemite, or strung across the Grand Canyon. The courts have taken the desire for a first amendment message to be shared and tried to balance that with desire of park visitors to have a park-focused experience, and designated first amendment areas are what they came up with. Visitors come to National Park Service sites for many reasons. At Muir Woods, one of those reasons is peace and quiet. The first amendment area at Muir Woods was placed where it was so that anyone with a first amendment activity could voice their message to their intended audience but also so that park visitors were still free to enjoy the tranquility of the forest. The sign is there partly so that the first amendment permit holders know where they may gather, but it is also there so that other visitors to the park understand why we're allowing a group to gather within a National Monument. In addition to these "fixed" first amendment locations, any time there is an event in the park we designate a first amendment area adjacent to the event, so that if someone wanted to protest the event itself, they would be located where their message could be heard by their intended audience. I have several guidelines and memos from various sources regarding first amendment activities in the park - it's a topic of great interest to me - so if you want to know more, please let me know and I'd be happy to share more information or if I can answer any other questions, please let me know. Thank you. NoƩmi Margaret Robinson Chief, Office of Special Park Uses Golden Gate National Recreation Area

marie on 03-24-2013 06:03:16 wrote:

I just visited Muir Woods for the first time and was going to blog about this very sign :-)

shitaki on 07-22-2013 09:07:56 wrote:

Hi Marie...blogging's fun...no?

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