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I wasn't going to comment on this here, but the topic came up again on The Daily Show last night, so I think it's worth discussing in a little more detail.

By now, no doubt everyone has seen the story: a man (out shopping with his son) bought a T-shirt that said "Peace on Earth" in a mall, and the mall arrested him! For wearing a T-shirt he bought at the mall! What is the world coming to????? One can easily imagine the 23-year-old man who just thinks peace is a good idea on general principles, the mall selling a brightly colored shirt (perhaps tie-dyed, perhaps even in leftover Christmas colors) with that innocuous (even Christian) slogan on it, and then the evil mall security carting the guy off to jail while his innocent 3-year-old son looks on with sad eyes.

At least, that's what I imagined when I first read the abbreviated version of the article that's been published in various places. Only the truth isn't quite so blatantly ridiculous.

According to the story in the Times-Union, the man is 60, the son is 31, and they both had T-shirts printed up at the mall with words that they chose. The son's T-shirt said "No War With Iraq" on one side and "Let Inspections Work" on the other—a much more specific political message, much more like the slogans one might find on an activist's sign. (Should people carrying political signs be allowed to wander through malls? Interesting question; I'm not sure where the dividing line is or should be.) When the son was asked to remove his shirt, he did. The father was asked to either remove his shirt or leave the mall, and he refused to do either, so he was arrested for trespassing (because a mall is private property). Also (from a different article), on Dec. 21, a couple dozen people wearing "Peace on Earth/Don't Invade Iraq" T-shirts had descended upon the same mall, and had been asked to leave; presumably mall management had seen that as some sort of a protest march (though it was intended to be non-disruptive), so presumably mall security was still a little twitchy about the possibility of more activism along the same lines. None of these facts change the legal question, but they all change the mental image that the abbreviated story conveys.

I should note that I do think the real story is still ridiculous. People should obviously be allowed to wear T-shirts bearing slogans in malls; mall security was clearly overreacting; people wear much worse T-shirts in malls all the time. My point is mostly just that the story is being widely and subtly misrepresented (nothing actually false, just suggesting a host of misrepresentations through omission), and that the real issues involved are interesting and more complex than they initially appear.

A lawyer friend of mine says that malls have been determined (by a Supreme Court case) to be semi-public spaces, so in this case freedom-of-speech probably does trump private property. And the man who was arrested was an attorney, so he was probably aware of the legal issues involved. It seems unlikely that he's going to lose in court over this.

So, yes, it's outrageous that it happened at all. But it's not quite as outrageous as a lot of people are making it sound.