MSP's Freedom of Expression booths offer everyone a soapbox

Curt McGee looks up from his Sudoku book, and Gil Tornes sets aside his sandwich. They have a visitor.

It's not that visitors are unusual. McGee and Tornes, Jehovah's Witnesses, get a lot of them during their shared Friday shift at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. But it's rare that visitors to the airport's Freedom of Expression booth want to talk about something other than directions.

Set on either end of the baggage claim in Terminal 1, two easily overlooked Freedom of Expression booths are the airport's way of granting the public its right to free speech in a government-owned building while maintaining order and traffic flow. By securing a free permit, anyone who wants to can reserve time to speak his or her mind to travelers waiting for their luggage.

"We find it quite useful," said McGee, who at 73 has mostly retired from traditional Jehovah's Witnesses door-knocking shifts. "We answer a lot of questions, "Where's the bathroom?," things we can point them to."

On the occasion someone comes to talk to them about their religion, McGee and Tornes are ready. They keep an iPad preloaded with the Bible, and the gray booth is covered with pamphlets asking: "What is the key to a happy family life?" and "How do you view the future?"

"People traveling have spiritual needs," said McGee, who recalled one encounter with a man who was looking for directions and mistakenly wandered to their booth. A little while later, he came back. The man had just gotten a call from his sister, telling him she had cancer.

"He remembered we were here," McGee said. "We provided comfort from the scriptures for him."

After a brief exchange with a fellow Jehovah's Witness who was dropping off her son at the airport, Tornes, 76, went back to nibbling on his chipotle chicken sandwich — made by McGee — and flipped through the latest issue of Watchtower, the Witness magazine, on his iPad. He's been coming here every other Friday for 10 years, "maybe more," he said.

While the booths are open to anyone, Jehovah's Witnesses seem to have cornered the market, establishing a consistent presence here. There are rarely conflicts with other groups for the space. The other booth, on the opposite end of the terminal, tends to draw labor groups that are trying to reach airline employees. There is a Freedom of Expression table in Terminal 2, and some groups leaflet outside airport exits or reserve a spot on the departures roadway to hold up protest signs.

"I always ask them, 'Who do you want to reach?' " said Shelly Lopez, an airport administrator who coordinates Freedom of Expression permits.

Permits dating back to the mid-1990s show frequent use for labor unions getting their messages out, and surveyors looking for public responses on everything from the placement of smoking areas in terminals to the quality of the news programming on the airports' TV screens. Mixed in are permits for political parties, animal rights groups, individual protesters and even artists.

Designated spaces like these were established in airports nationwide following legal battles between state governments and Hare Krishnas, who had long solicited passengers throughout airport terminals. The fight eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices ruled that the airport is a non-public forum — meaning the government can regulate speech, but only to an extent. A ban on literature distribution was deemed unconstitutional.

"So that's where airports had to be a little creative," said Teresa Nelson, legal director for the ACLU of Minnesota. "They had to recognize that you do have to allow some constitutional expression at the airport, but can do some regulation and keep a lid on that activity so that they can also accomplish the goals of the airport."

Not all airports are equal. Dallas-Fort Worth, for instance, draws a square on the floor with blue tape that users stand in for their entire shift. So, MSP's roomy booths, with seating, are a high-end way to get the word — any word — out.

The permit application asks nothing of the content of the speech or leaflets, nor of the reason for reserving the space, and Lopez has seen some creative interpretations of Freedom of Expression in her 15 years in this role. Once, a Northwest flight attendant campaigned in a gorilla suit for labor issues. Last summer, a man reserved a spot outside the gas station where airport cabdrivers, many of them Muslim, fill up; while his wife lounged under the sun in a bikini, he silently held up an American flag, Lopez said.

Bethany Whitehead, an arts administrator, teamed up at the booth last year with visual artist Lindsy Halleckson to provide art activities for travelers. They offered journals for sketching and poems people could pick out of a jar and read.

"I really live my life with the idea that arts can be life-changing," Whitehead said, "so it was nice to have a way to have my agenda — just like someone who is there with a religious agenda — enrich other people."

There are limitations, though. Groups can't solicit for money, and people who reserve the booth cannot beckon travelers to it. They must simply wait for someone to come to them. Whitehead decorated the booth colorfully to draw children to her. But McGee and Tornes' pamphlets don't bring a lot of traffic on their own.

After a quiet stretch on a recent Friday, a man hurriedly approaches the booth.

"Sun Country baggage claim?" he asks.

McGee and Tornes give him a tangle of directions back to Interstate 494 and over to the other terminal. The man looks confused. Then he sees the pamphlets, and a magazine cover asking "Why did Jesus suffer and die?"

"Oh," he said, "I thought this was Information."

"Well," said McGee, "we know most things."

Sharyn Jackson • 612-673-4853