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 FurrowedBrow
Free yourself from yourself
 
Registered: 04/20/08
Posts: 12,045
Loc: Carpal Tunnel
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 Greene: Aurora mall's "family-friendly" guideline wears thin [CO]  1
#426472 - 05/31/10 02:01 PM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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Greene: Aurora mall's "family-friendly" guideline wears thin
By Susan Greene
Denver Post
Jake Gailey got his tax refund last week, then headed straight for the mall.
His first stop at Town Center at Aurora on Saturday was a hat shop where he dropped $27 on a Broncos cap.
He and his girlfriend planned to continue shopping, but there was a glitch. A man in a suit and earpiece stopped the couple in the middle of the mall and told Gailey to wait right there.
"I've got him," the man signaled into his walkie-talkie, as if in some sort of dragnet.
Several security guards, mall employees and Aurora police officers hurried to surround Gailey. There was a problem, they said, with what he was wearing.
Gailey is a 28-year-old carpenter who likes to express himself with T-shirts. He was wearing his new favorite Saturday version — a short- sleever with a "Yes We Cannabis" decal resembling Barack Obama's campaign logo, but with a pot leaf.
The posse gave him three choices. He could take off the shirt, wear it inside out or leave the shopping center. After all, they told him, it was family night.
"We're family-oriented," says Aj Coffee, manager of the mall, which has grappled with a heavy teen presence. "We here at Town Center wanted to make sure it was family- friendly."
Gailey refused all three options, arguing that he was singled out for his legalization views. He offered to show his state medical-marijuana card. No one was interested. He started talking about his free-speech rights — loudly, so that fellow shoppers could hear him. He says a cop grabbed his arm and threatened to arrest him.
The mall has a police substation where the officers and security guards discussed pressing trespassing charges. They finally released him, banning him from the center for a year.
Gailey signed the trespass citation and left with his girlfriend, his freedom and his new hat.
It's not having to stay out of the mall that bugs him. He can easily go a year without The Disney Store or Hot Dog on a Stick.
It's the principle, he says.
Oriental Gifts, a store in the center, sells pipes and bongs for smoking pot, apparently without hassle from the mall. Spencer's Gifts carries marijuana cookbooks, "420 Things To Do Stoned" T-shirts and the ever-popular "Pot Culture A-Z, Stoner Guide."
Spencer's also sells racks of T-shirts that, trust me, are far raunchier than Gailey's.
The mall defends those products, equating them to lingerie from JCPenney. There are appropriate places for using them, Coffee says, and her center isn't one of them.
"Is it the mall's position, or that of the Aurora police, that any person purchasing a marijuana-related clothing item at the mall should then be prohibited from wearing it until exiting the mall," asks Gailey's attorneys, Jessica and Rob Corry, in a letter Wednesday.
The couple cites a lawsuit against Westminster Mall in which the Supreme Court looked at the extent to which private shopping centers serve as public spaces, especially if they house government offices. The Town Center at Aurora not only markets itself as that city's civic hub. Given that it houses a police substation, they argue, it also needs to tolerate political speech like Gailey's T-shirt.
Coffee says her parent company, Simon Property Group, is all for free speech.
Just not, you know, "when it's inappropriate."
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FurrowedBrow
Free yourself from yourself
Registered: 04/20/08
Posts: 12,045
Loc: Carpal Tunnel
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Re: Greene: Aurora mall's "family-friendly" guideline wears thin [CO] [Re: FurrowedBrow] 1
#426473 - 05/31/10 02:03 PM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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That reminds me of a time in high school. I wore a marilyn manson shirt to school and on the back it said "sex is dead" between the shoulder blades. Teacher made me turn it inside out. What a douche. It must be nice living in that kind of a world where things don't exist if you dont acknowledge them.
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