There’s a razor-thin line between crude and colorful.
Bo Rupert, a feisty Lewis County resident, lives in that ill-defined space.
If he doesn’t agree with something, he’ll let you know, often peppering his assessment with foul language and animated gestures.
I’ve met with him a few times over the years. On one occasion, he asked that I write a story calling for the resignation of a local police chief. More recently, he told me exactly what he thought of our coverage of the Greenwood Memorial Park debacle.
It was not a glowing endorsement.
Much of his mindset appears to have been formed by his own collisions with the law.
Like anyone with a criminal history, he’s quick to note that there is corruption among the professions aimed at protecting us and enforcing laws.
Perhaps those factors combined to complicate his attempted entry to the Lewis County Courthouse Sept. 11.
Rupert was stopped at the metal-detector that acts as the de facto entrance to the Lewis County Law and Justice Center in Chehalis.
He wasn’t carrying a weapon, or anything else expressly banned from the premises.
Instead, he was wielding a box of business cards supporting the candidacy of Brian Green, who is running an underdog campaign to become the next sheriff of Lewis County.
Rupert is, if anything, passionate. That’s readily apparent in the video he recorded, in which he loudly protests the holdup and demands that the authorities allow him his constitutional right to enter.
More specifically, he wanted to know what law prevented him from passing through.
When he was told that Detective Dan Riordan had directed the security guard not to allow the campaign materials to pass, he became indignant, maybe righteously so.
“Dan Riordan ain’t God, and Dan Riordan ain’t a judge and Dan Riordan don’t make the laws,” Rupert told the guard. “Until Dan can recite a law to me about why I can’t bring what’s in that box in here, I hate to say it, but Dan needs to eff off.”
Crude. Colorful. Passionate.
Eventually, Rupert attracted the attention of a Chehalis police officer, as well as sheriff frontrunner Undersheriff Rob Snaza and Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer.
None of them could immediately provide Rupert with the law that barred him from entering, despite repeated demands.
Probably because such a law does not exist.
Eventually, Meyer appeared with a note detailing a Supreme Court case preventing campaign materials at schools. He later cited a separate court case out of California that found courthouses, like school districts, are public property, but are not considered “traditional” places for public discourse, according to today’s story on page Main 6.
Hardly the set-in-stone law Rupert was looking for.
Meyer eventually admitted that Rupert should never have been prevented from entering the facility with the business cards.
The entire episode appears to me to be a mistake on behalf of those who halted Rupert, an unneeded and perhaps misinterpreted confirmation of the young man’s qualms with authority.
Maybe they were aware of his history, and perhaps he was more confrontational than he needed to be.
But I can’t think of a worse way to handle a man who believes his rights are being trampled than trampling his rights and not providing any immediate solid reasoning.
I’m sure they were caught off guard, and I am 100 percent certain this is not an effort to damage to Green’s campaign. If anything, it accomplishes the opposite, and Green has done enough harm to his own pursuit through callously ignorant comments criticizing a fallen deputy and a lack of traditional campaigning.
Still, the video is interesting in that the man with a criminal history, a camera and a chip on his shoulder somehow appears to be the moral winner.
Yes, there’s a razor thin line between colorful and crude.
There’s also sometimes only a microscopic divider between enforcing laws and violating rights.
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Eric Schwartz is the editor of The Chronicle.
