MA Gov. Deval Patrick: “It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t"

Massachussettes Governor Deval Patrick: “It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t, but... it’s a free country.”

Quote:

September 2, 2010

Independent gubernatorial candidate Tim Cahill blasted Gov. Deval Patrick yesterday for appearing to suggest he wished America wasn’t as free so that last week’s Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke would never have happened.

“It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t, but . . . it’s a free country,” Patrick said on the “Jim & Margery Show” on WTKK-FM. “You know, you got to, you got to respect that freedom.”

The comment had Cahill lashing out at his liberal rival.

“It’s pretty unbelievable and typical of the far left,” Cahill told the Herald. “When they don’t like what the other side says, they want to close down free speech.”

Patrick later in the day defended his radio remarks, stressing he has long defended freedom of speech. The governor said he meant that Fox TV host Glenn Beck should not have chosen the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech on its 47th anniversary to hold his “Restoring Honor” rally. The rally was held Saturday.

“I wish they hadn’t chose that place and that day to have that event,” Patrick said. “But it’s a free country. That was my point, and it has to be respected.”

Cahill, who has courted Tea Party followers and appeared on Beck’s show, slammed Patrick for saying the Lincoln Memorial was somehow sacred ground.

“If the governor thought it was OK to build a mosque near Ground Zero, he should think it’s OK for Glenn Beck and other people to speak at the Lincoln Memorial,” Cahill said. “He wants to have it both ways.”

The governor, a former Clinton administration civil rights official, recoiled at the notion he would abridge Beck’s or anyone’s rights.

“I’ve been involved in civil rights for most of my career,” Patrick said.

Earlier in the exchange between Patrick and host Jim Braude, the governor had talked about King’s “I Have A Dream” speech being one of the “seminal sources of inspiration” for him as a boy and said the Lincoln Memorial was “sacred ground.” He called Beck’s rally theme of returning to “transcendent values” powerful.

Braude then interrupted the governor to ask if he was “troubled” by the event.

Braude said he didn’t think Patrick was calling for Beck or anyone else to have their rights curtailed, and said he wouldn’t have moved to another topic if he had.