By Keziah Mendez —
On the day the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, antifa rowdies thronged Seattle, and Pastor Matthew Meinecke thought it was the perfect time to go out and publicly read the Bible to the protestors. The mob attacked him violently.
Then he was arrested by Seattle police.
Yes, arrested.
Meinecke’s arrest and subsequent banning from street-preaching was overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The prototypical heckler’s veto case is one in which the government silences particular speech or a particular speaker due to an anticipated disorderly or violent reaction of the audience,” wrote Bybee, one of the three presiding judges presiding, as reported by the Seattle Times. “As such it is a form of content discrimination, generally forbidden in a traditional or designated public forum.”
The June 2022 arrest was one of two while Meinecke street-preached. The second arrest was at the Seattle Center, where Meinecke preached the Gospel to the crowds of Annual Pride Fest.
“The police arrived, and what he discovered was that for the same thing as they mentioned two days earlier, they figured he was the problem,” says Nate Kellum, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, “and that he had to go, and when he resisted, that’s when he was arrested again.”
From the arrests and from other confrontations with police as Meinecke preached, Kellum deduced that the Seattle police was enforcing a policy to favor the mob over street preachers.
“What had happened was the city of Seattle effectively made reading the Bible aloud a crime,” Kellum told CBN.
Meinecke is a brave man. When he was first arrested, he reached out to protestors with the love of Christ, reading the Book of John.
“He has very earnest prolife beliefs, but that was not his purpose,” Kellum says. “His purpose was to preach the Gospel.”
As he read from the Book of John, he was surrounded by a hostile group who hurled insults at him, Kellum says. Wishing to avoid conflict, Pastor Meinecke moved a few feet down the road.
A protestor snatched his Bible out of his hands and began tearing pages out, desecrating it. “Undeterred, Pastor Meineke retrieved his second Bible and continued reading,” Kellum says.
Later, antifa rioters surrounded him and violently picked him up. Attempting to impede being hauled off, Pastor Meineke grabbed a traffic sawhorse sign. “They picked up him and the sawhorse,” Kellum says.
The carried him for a block and dropped him on the concrete.
“It hurt,” Kellum tells. “He started brushing himself off. He found another spot and started reading again.”
Some other protestors knocked him down. One grabbed his shoe.
Finally the police, who were nearby the whole time, intervened, Kellum says.
“The police did not come to help Pastor Meinecke. Rather, they told him he was the problem,” Kellum says. “They told him, ‘You have to leave the area. You can no longer speak with people.’”
Pastor Meinecke felt his First Amendment Free Speech rights were violated.
“He wasn’t willing to walk away,” Kellum says.
Police arrested and held him for hours until the pro-abortion protest was over.
In legal terms, such a police action is called a heckler’s veto, conceding to the pressure of the mob to shut up the unpopular speech, Kellum says.
Against the police, Meinecke filed a federal civil rights complaint against the city of Seattle and three Seattle police officers in March 2023. The lower court denied his petition to protect his free speech and bar the police from arresting him.
But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him in April 2024.
“I’m glad now that Mr. Meinecke will be able to speak,” Kellum says.
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About this writer: Keziah Mendez studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near West Los Angeles.
