Even if government in Florida is often really, really dumb, Floridians can be really cool.

So, news from Gainsville, Florida. OCCUPY GAINSVILLE set up in Bo Diddley Park. They were offered a 24-hour event license for it, but eventually decided to turn it down, believing that doing so would turn it into an "event" and not an "assembly". So they decided that actual exercise of their right to peaceably assemble meant just doing that; that the license would count as a law abridging the free exercise thereof.

Naturally, they made this choice knowing that they were likely to be arrested for it.

One of the people arrested in Bo Diddley Park was Bo Diddley's son, Bo Diddley Jr. Who was peacefully arrested as he was standing on a platform engraved with FREEDOM OF SPEECH and FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY. The police arrested people, then processed them on the spot, presenting them with a summons and letting them go, rather than taking them to jail, which kept everything low-key.

Actually, the way it worked was that the arrestee would stand up on that platform, then the police would arrest that person while on the platform specifically dedicated to freedom of speech and assembly, then let the next person stand there and be arrested there.

So the police were quite willing to go along with the symbolic effect of this. . . I get the feeling that the officers on the scene might have had a certain amount of sympathy with the protesters, and were willing to run with the irony.