My first encounter with free speech in Asheville came when the Libertarian Party was going to host a tri-partisan Constitutional Forum at UNC-Asheville about four years ago. Libertarian presidential hopeful Michael Badnarik, Republican gubernatorial hopeful Fern Shubert, and local ACLU big-wig Bruce Elmore were the invited speakers. (We couldn’t find a Democrat candidate who we thought knew anything about the Constitution, and Bruce did a bang-up job expounding the pitfalls of tyranny by the majority.)
I had wanted to hold the event at AB-Tech, where it would cost less, but I had only one vote. To present at UNCA, we first had to find a student organization to sponsor us. With our bad reputation as Libertarians, we were lucky enough to snow one of the socialist/anarchist groups into hosting us. We were next given a gag order by the university and told we couldn’t advertise the event in any way without first going through some agency with a Nazi-sounding name akin to “Bureau of the Thought Police.†The BTP and our sponsors, for the most part, acted like a black hole, and as I recall did nothing until about a week before the event. I recall going to some anarchist rally downtown to find my contact with the student group, as he was not answering his calls. I had never met him, but through divine providence I succeeded in my mission. The day of the forum, Fern finally broke the gag order and spilled the beans on Matt Mittan’s radio program.
All the while, Ralph Nader was gearing up for a UNCA visit the day after our forum. He was on TV, in the mainstream newspaper, and all over the radio, and his supporters had written ads all over the sidewalks in and around UNCA. It was at this time that I first learned of free speech zones.
