No speech curbs on Main Street plaza

There will be no free speech restrictions on the Main Street Plaza during The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' 173rd Annual General Conference this weekend.

That news was welcomed by more than a half-dozen street preachers that convened at City Hall Tuesday night, threatening to sue the city if their First Amendment rights were violated.

"We will be on the plaza," Ron McRae, director of Street Preachers Fellowship, said. "We're going to hold a worship service and a church service down there where the plaza is."

McRae said there are as many as 100 street preachers in town for the LDS conference. Late Tuesday, city attorney Ed Rutan met informally with the group to discuss concerns that police in Salt Lake City have wrongly arrested or otherwise violated street preachers' rights. Rutan said he would meet again with the group Wednesday morning.

If McRae isn't satisfied, he said his group has prepared a federal lawsuit against the city, Mayor Rocky Anderson and several individual police officers. The suit could seek money and possibly an injunction against the police department, he said.

In one case, Lonnie Pursifull, the Utah director of Street Preachers Fellowship, was arrested by police; however, city prosecutors said Pursifull did nothing wrong. In other cases, street preachers say police officers have stood by while they've been punched and otherwise assaulted by passers-by.

Rutan said his office is meeting with police officers via teleconference to inform them about the city's existing ordinances and what is and is not legal under the First Amendment.

Along with Anderson, Rutan agreed that further free speech restrictions, dubbed "time, place and manner" restrictions, for conference were not needed on the plaza. Instead, the city's current ordinances — like ones that forbid people from blocking sidewalks and being disorderly — will likely solve any problems that might arise. The pair had discussed implementing more stringent restrictions to keep the peace.

Anderson had some choice words for the street preachers and suggested they are frightening children. He advised conference attendees to "just keep walking and ignore those people."

"They're obnoxious acting in the name of their Jesus," Anderson said. "It is just appalling to me that in front of children they call their mothers 'whores' and 'harlots' just because of the religion they belong to."