As of the fourth of July, nearly one-hundred people have defied a judge’s ruling that attempted to ban dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. Each person has his own reason for dancing, including Will Duffield from Pennsylvania. Will travelled to the Jefferson Memorial twice, once on June 4th to dance with about fifty other people and a month later on July fourth (a.k.a IndepenDance Day) to dance with four other people.
Will explains his reasons for dancing below – first on the video I captured during Free Talk Live at PorcFest 2011, and more recently on a Facebook note that we have permission to republish here:
As a human being I have certain rights. The right to the sweat of my own brow, the right to act in a way which brings me happiness, lest it interfere with the rights of another, the right to do with my body and my land whatever I desire. These are not privileges, they are rights, and rights, as I remember, cannot be separated from the man who posseses them. They are as intrinsic as the very flesh and bone from which a man is made. These rights, they are derived not from government but from our creator. These rights are human rights, not American rights, not Canadian rights, but human rights. Human rights are given to us at birth, not at the signing of a birth certificate along with the assigning of a mandatory social security number.
Despite these human rights with which I have been born, there are those who would seek to deprive me of my property, my happiness, my life, and my rights. The stupid ones do it at night in the name if their own greed, and are looked down upon, while the intelligent ones do it in broad daylight while wearing badges and robes, stealing in the name of the greater good or in the name of a serialized statute that neither you nor I know enough about to oppose. They ask that we pay them for our own security, yet they spend the fruits of our labor securing their own power, not our rights as people. They demand that we pay them a portion of all that we create, all that we rightfully earn, all while pissing away what we have given them, using it to subjugate the men of other nations with whom we have no quarrel. Using our funds to cage those who do with their bodies that which the men in tall chairs and robes have arbitrarily decided that they cannot. They act as though it is in their power to strip us of the rights with which we are born, and many men allow them to act in this way, unhindered and unmolested.
Would the reaction of the common man be the same if those in the courts and police stations took their fellow men outside and stripped them of their skin, their flesh, and their very bones in front of the assembled masses? I think not. No, our problem comes from an gross misunderstanding of our rights, where they are derived from, and who can take them away. Human rights are as much a part of a man as his limbs, and they will only be secure when we begin treating them as such. When he who attempts to strip a man of his rights is treated as though he attempts to strip a man of his flesh, then, and only then, shall we have justice. When in the public mind the unjust judges and police officers are tossed in with the knife wielding serial killers, then we shall have back our rights. In order to secure our rights as men, we must acknowledge that those who aspire to take our rights are less than men, for our rights are us, we are our rights. You cannot have one without the other. Without human rights, man ceases to be man, man ceases to hold the potential he once did. Hold that right, hold that potential, hold your human rights. You have been born with them, they are inalienable.
At PorcFest, Will camped on the site provided by the Civil Disobedience Evolution Fund, which hosted some of the good people who have disobeyed bad laws. The donations from our supporters allowed this to happen.
John Kurtz is an Orlando real estate broker who has been a political activist for years. In 2010 Kurtz resigned from the Orange County Republican Executive Committee and began focusing his efforts on out of the system activism and civil disobedience. Kurtz made waves when he publicly defied Orlando’s group feeding ordinance by holding multiple food sharings at Orlando City Hall in protest. Kurtz founded OrlandoCopWatch.com which has received significant recognition from local media and the community for its efforts to hold police accountable. Kurtz served as the Orlando Coordinator for the Fully Informed Jury Association, and participated in one of the countries most active Jury outreach campaigns. Kurtz and others where so effective in disrupting the tyranny process that a Judge made two separate orders banning jury outreach at the Orange County Courthouse. Kurtz and others including Julian Heiklen are actively disobeying those Judicial Orders and continuing to hand out Jury info in defiance of the Judge. On January 1, 2011 Kurtz was arrested while filming a police officer seriously abuse a suspect. Kurtz was charged with Battery on a Law enforcement Officer, resisting and obstruction. The video camera that Kurtz was filming with ‘went missing’ after Kurtz’s arrest. Kurtz insists that if this evidence wasn’t lost or destroyed it would easily prove his innocence. Kurtz refused to take any plea deal and is set for Jury Trial, facing a maximum sentence of six years in prison, at the end of June, 2011.
