Ann Arbor's transit agency has a less-fuzzy advertising acceptability policy, but still won't post anti-Israel ads on buses, the Associated Press reports.
The more detailed guidelines were drafted after a federal judge said the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority's prohibitions against certain ads were vague and unconstitutional. That ruling last fall came in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
An AP dispatch in The Detroit News fills in the background:
The ad [submitted] by Blaine Coleman would have skulls and bones and say "Boycott 'Israel.' Boycott Apartheid."
The bus agency says putting Israel in quotation marks implies that it doesn't exist. The agency says the ad also ridicules a group of people.
Judge Mark Goldsmith of Federal Court in Detroit asked each side for new legal briefs addressing why Coleman, a 55-year-old Ann Arbor attorney, should or shouldn't be allowed to buy space for his rolling message.
Goldsmith said last September that the First Amendment overpowers the authority's discretion to run only ads it considers in "good taste," according to the Ann Arbor Chronicle. On Jan. 3, the agency's board rejected the ad again, citing its revised policy's "prohibition of political or political campaign advertising, as well as a prohibition against holding a person or group up to scorn and ridicule."
Coleman, a lawyer since 1986, is an activist who comments regularly at Ann Arbor City Council meetings and student government forums at the University of Michigan.
