Onondaga County Courthouse
The old Onondaga County court building is home to the county legislature. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

An Onondaga County lawmaker on Tuesday proposed a law to curb residents’ ability to protest outside of religious institutions.

Legislator Tim Burtis, a Republican, proposed the “Places of Worship Protection Act” in a meeting of the legislature’s Ways and Means Committee. 

If passed, the law would require protesters to maintain a 35-foot distance from places of religious worship when demonstrating one hour before the start of any event and one hour after the end of any event. The restriction includes non-religious events.

Burtis framed the law as a measure to protect worshippers attending religious services and said the measure was inspired by a protest in a Minnesota church at the beginning of the year.

“It got me thinking about the church that I attend and other churches in my district that may be large, and I became concerned, and started asking questions,” Burtis said. “… Seems like these are divisive days, and in my opinion, this is, we need to lead here in this area.”

A civil liberties expert, however, has said the law could introduce significant legal liability for the county while violating residents’ First Amendment rights. Justin Harrison, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, reviewed the text of Burtis’ proposed law and called it “flatly unconstitutional” and “probably the most offensive to the First Amendment” of any similar proposals he’s read. 

“If they pass it in this language… it gets sued out of existence,” Harrison said. “It might be in effect for a short time, and it might not be us who files the lawsuit, but this will not survive its first encounter with the courts.”

The effort mimics similar proposals in downstate New York, where lawmakers in Nassau County and New York City have approved so-called “buffer zone” policies. Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday signed into law a more extensive “buffer zone” law that prohibits protest within 50 feet of houses of worship. 

Hochul’s support for “buffer zone” policies outside schools and houses of worship resembles that of Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, her Republican opponent in the New York state gubernatorial race.

NYCLU in April sued Nassau County, Blakeman, and Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder over Nassau’s buffer zone law. Blakeman is the Nassau County executive. The organization has argued buffer zone laws may quell future mass demonstrations like the recent string of “No Kings” protests.  

Despite Hochul and Blakeman’s support for buffer zone laws, the New York State Penal Code has since 1999 said anyone obstructing, interfering, or intimidating an individual seeking to exercise their religious freedom can be charged with criminal interference in the second degree. 

A federal law, the Freedom to Access health Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, since 1994 has protected citizens from physical obstruction, intimidation, injury or threat of force while entering health clinics and houses of worship.

The federal government used the FACE Act to indict protesters who on Jan. 18 entered Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota to protest David Easterwood over his position as the acting field director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s St. Paul office. Easterwood is also a pastor at Cities Church. 

The protest occurred during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “Operation Metro Surge,” in which more than 4,000 ICE agents flooded the Twin Cities to enforce President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Those agents met fierce resistance from residents, which grew more intense following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both American citizens and Minneapolis residents killed by ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. 

The incident resulted in 39 federal indictments, including journalist Don Lemon, who was reporting on, not participating in, the protest inside the church. What concerned Burtis was how he would personally contend with a hypothetical protester barring his entrance to his church, the legislator said when asked by a Central Current reporter.

Burtis acknowledged the actions his proposal is meant to address are already prohibited by federal and state law. In addition, words meant to incite violence, or “fighting words,” are a subsect of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment.

But protesters have a right to free expression, and so long as they demonstrate within the law, one individual’s comfort or lack thereof is not the basis for enacting legislation to limit Americans’ constitutional rights, Harrison said.

“Even the Supreme Court has said that your two options basically are looking away or saying something back. You either engage in the debate or you ignore it,” Harrison said. “but you can’t push it down the street just because it makes you uncomfortable.”

Burtis said the law doesn’t address any recent incidents in Onondaga County. Even so, Burtis argued, his proactive policy proposal may serve a purpose in the future.

Democratic legislators were quick to cast aspersions on Burtis’s bill.

Legislator Mo Brown, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, questioned how the law would be enforced. He suggested the proposed law would burden police with cluttered guidelines regarding the rights of protesters. 

As written, any person charged under the proposed law would receive a misdemeanor and face a fine of no greater than $250, imprisonment for no more than one year or both.

“I would like to know what the buy-in is from law enforcement,” Brown said.

Other legislators questioned how the law differed from existing federal and state protections. Burtis argued that since those laws are decades old, Onondaga County residents might not know they exist. 

Majority Leader Nodesia Hernandez said it is atypical for the legislature to enact laws in order to remind residents of existing laws. Hernandez said that in her three years in the legislature, this is the first time a legislator has proposed creating a law to draw attention to existing laws.

Burtis, like other lawmakers advocating for safe spaces protected from protest, invoked heightened polarity and division throughout the country in justifying the new law. He said that while the country’s founders are his “favorites,” the world is “potentially a more dangerous world today than 250 years ago.”

His contention is at odds with Harrison, the NYCLU lawyer. The proposal is “absolutely inconsistent” with the text of the First Amendment, Harrison argued. 

The same division and polarity are the reasons why governments should not be trying to increase the frequency and intensity of protester encounters with law enforcement, Harrison said. 

“Protesters are under attack from all sides based on viewpoint, but everybody loves to beat up on protesters. Sometimes that’s literal,” Harrison said. “… People are going to take to the streets. Let them speak their minds.”

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...