Two weeks into Occupy Wall Street protests, movement is at a crossroads

(Reuters) - A federal judge denied a petition on Tuesday that would have allowed anti-Wall Street protesters to keep camping -- at least temporarily -- in two parks in the nation's capital where they have lived for months.

The National Park Service had banned protesters with the Occupy DC movement from camping in McPherson Square, a few blocks from the White House, starting at noon on Monday.

Scores of protesters have vowed to remain entrenched at the square and at a second site, Freedom Plaza. The demonstrators have been camped at the parks since October.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg rejected a motion by Dane Primerano, of Riceboro, Georgia, for a temporary restraining order halting enforcement of the no-camping rule based on constitutional guarantees of free speech.

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(Reuters) -

A federal judge denied a petition on Tuesday that would have allowed anti-Wall Street protesters to keep camping

The judge, in declining to halt enforcement of the no-camping rule, cited a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that barred demonstrators from camping in Lafayette Park next to the White House to draw attention to the plight of the homeless.

The irony of the police dismantling of occupy groups is that they are destroying the very people who are fighting for the middle class - and them.

As Occupy groups in Washington and Oakland generate contrasting images of Dream tents on the one coast and flag burning on the other, it’s becoming clear that the four month-old protest movement is facing its Hamlet moment: to be or not to be nonviolent.


But despite pleas from many, including the movement’s earliest members, there is no unity on this thorny, even decisive, issue.

“Occupy’s strength has been that as a movement dedicated to nonviolent direct action it claimed to follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” says Catherine Wilson, a political science professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia, via email.

Your lonely perspective of the Occupiers.