Lawmaker’s Facebook rant threatens media for “unauthorized” use of his name

[RoadWarrior]

The First Amendment: How does it work?

Apparently, a local Maryland politician ditched his civics class the day press freedoms were discussed. How else to explain Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter's recent Facebook rant in which he threatened a local newspaper with litigation because—wait for it—his name was used in print without his permission.

"Use my name again unauthorized and you'll be paying for an Attorney. Your rights stop where mine start," Kirby Delauter, the councilman, posted on his Facebook page. He added: "So let me be clear.........do not contact me and do not use my name or reference me in an unauthorized form in the future."

The posting, which has since been removed from Facebook, was his response to a Frederick News-Post report about local parking issues, in which he was mentioned once.

The reporter he threatened, Bethany Rodgers, issued Delauter a brief civics lesson in response: "First of all, there is no requirement to get a person's authorization in order to mention them in a paper, particularly if that person is an elected official. It is not just our right but our responsibility to report on people like you, who occupy positions of trust in our government, and I make no apologies for doing that."

Here is Delauter's Facebook rant:

http://http://i.imgur.com/woEWec6.jpg

The paper responded Tuesday to Delauter with a stinging and comical editorial, in which his name was mentioned more than two dozen times. The headline read: "Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter."

According to the editorial:

…if it’s not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can't use his name (Kirby Delauter)? Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but “Kirby Delauter” repeated over and over again -- Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter? OK, imagine we agreed because of temporary madness or something funny in the water that week, how would we reference "Kirby Delauter" and do our job as journalists without running afoul of our lack of authorization?

Blanks? Sure, we sometimes use hyphens in the case of expletives. Perhaps we could do that: "K---- D-------." Or, perhaps, "Councilman [unauthorized]." We giggled a bit more than we should have when we came up with "the Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter," which doesn't seem as funny written down in black and white and includes his name, which defeats the point. Maybe we should just put his initials, "KD," with an asterisk to a footnote (KD*), or refer to him as GLAT, the acronym for his campaign: "Govern Like A Taxpayer." We could even make it sound a little hip-hop with a well-placed hyphen: G-Lat. Speaking of, could we get away with "K-Del"? Or we could simply go with the Harry Potter-esque "He Who Shall Not be Named." (Cue the lightning strike and peal of thunder.)

Discerning readers will note that the first letter of each paragraph combine to spell "Kirby Delauter."