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Hippie group founder urges suit vs. feds
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Hippie group founder urges suit vs. feds
By CHASE SQUIRES, Associated Press Writer
29 minutes ago
A founding member of a hippie movement called the Rainbow Family suggested Saturday that it launch a federal lawsuit against a growing crackdown on their annual gatherings.
Barry Adams, known in the Rainbow Family as Barry Plunker, told a council circle at the first day of this year's weeklong gathering at Routt National Forest that federal pressure has gone too far.
Dozens of Forest Service officers, county deputies and Colorado State Patrol officers are manning checkpoints and patrolling camps as thousands of hippies flood the forest about 30 miles north of Steamboat Springs.
Under federal rules, any gathering of more than 74 people in a national forest requires a permit. Officials have said that in a fire, the narrow dirt access road would become clogged and campers would be trapped.
The clash between Rainbows and federal officers at national parks has become such an annual tradition that the Forest Service in 1998 established a national response team to deal with the group. Members defying federal orders typically are issued citations for camping illegally.
Rainbows say this year federal officers are issuing hundreds of citations and set up a makeshift federal courthouse nearby.
"There's only one way to stop these people and that's to take them on, legally," Adams told about 100 Rainbows at the council circle.
Rainbows say they have no leaders to request permits, and they shouldn't have to beg to express a constitutional right to freely assemble.
The Forest Service estimated that by Friday night about 6,000 tie-dyed hippies were camping in makeshift villages. That number swelled dramatically Saturday, the first official day of the gathering. An updated official estimate was not available.
Rainbows formed drum circles, exchanged beads, batik and crystals, and lined up at communal kitchens for meals. Everything is free, from meals to yoga classes to massage. Hugs are doled out at every turn and members greet each other by saying, "Welcome home."
Adams, 61, was drifting with a group of fellow hippies in the 1960s after his service during the Vietnam War when he decided to fulfill a vision of holding a giant gathering based on peace and love. Since the first Rainbow Family gathering in Colorado in 1972, he said, the federal government has denied permits and has done what it could to block the annual gathering.
Adams has spent months in jail for violating assorted bans and has fought his own cases. Traditionally, he said, the Rainbow Family has refused to let itself be pinned down as an organized group.
On Saturday, he said it's time to realize the government already considers the Rainbow Family an organized spiritual group. Then Rainbows need to take advantage of that classification, hire attorneys and demand rights as a religious organization.
"I never thought there would be a problem with our federal government for us to go out in the woods and pray," Adams said. "We as a people have rights. We have a right to free speech."
By CHASE SQUIRES, Associated Press Writer
29 minutes ago
A founding member of a hippie movement called the Rainbow Family suggested Saturday that it launch a federal lawsuit against a growing crackdown on their annual gatherings.
Barry Adams, known in the Rainbow Family as Barry Plunker, told a council circle at the first day of this year's weeklong gathering at Routt National Forest that federal pressure has gone too far.
Dozens of Forest Service officers, county deputies and Colorado State Patrol officers are manning checkpoints and patrolling camps as thousands of hippies flood the forest about 30 miles north of Steamboat Springs.
Under federal rules, any gathering of more than 74 people in a national forest requires a permit. Officials have said that in a fire, the narrow dirt access road would become clogged and campers would be trapped.
The clash between Rainbows and federal officers at national parks has become such an annual tradition that the Forest Service in 1998 established a national response team to deal with the group. Members defying federal orders typically are issued citations for camping illegally.
Rainbows say this year federal officers are issuing hundreds of citations and set up a makeshift federal courthouse nearby.
"There's only one way to stop these people and that's to take them on, legally," Adams told about 100 Rainbows at the council circle.
Rainbows say they have no leaders to request permits, and they shouldn't have to beg to express a constitutional right to freely assemble.
The Forest Service estimated that by Friday night about 6,000 tie-dyed hippies were camping in makeshift villages. That number swelled dramatically Saturday, the first official day of the gathering. An updated official estimate was not available.
Rainbows formed drum circles, exchanged beads, batik and crystals, and lined up at communal kitchens for meals. Everything is free, from meals to yoga classes to massage. Hugs are doled out at every turn and members greet each other by saying, "Welcome home."
Adams, 61, was drifting with a group of fellow hippies in the 1960s after his service during the Vietnam War when he decided to fulfill a vision of holding a giant gathering based on peace and love. Since the first Rainbow Family gathering in Colorado in 1972, he said, the federal government has denied permits and has done what it could to block the annual gathering.
Adams has spent months in jail for violating assorted bans and has fought his own cases. Traditionally, he said, the Rainbow Family has refused to let itself be pinned down as an organized group.
On Saturday, he said it's time to realize the government already considers the Rainbow Family an organized spiritual group. Then Rainbows need to take advantage of that classification, hire attorneys and demand rights as a religious organization.
"I never thought there would be a problem with our federal government for us to go out in the woods and pray," Adams said. "We as a people have rights. We have a right to free speech."
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Rainbow Family to Touch Down in Colo.
By Richard Martin, 6-12-06
If you were in the Steamboat Springs area over the weekend you might have seen a group of slightly gnarly-looking, generally longhaired folks passing through wearing looks of beatific contentment and slightly bemused disregard for their surroundings. In common parlance, hippies.
This was an advance guard of about 150 members of the Rainbow Family, and they were scouting the area for a much larger "gathering of the tribes" planned for Routt County the first week in July.
Then, the annual North American Rainbow Gathering is expected draw at least 20,000 (according to Forest Service officials) and up to 60,000 (according to Bodhi, the Rainbow member interviewed by the Steamboat Pilot Journal) to a spot that has "a fresh water source, one main meadow that is 100 acres or larger and about five to 10 square miles of hippie land," Bodhi explained.
It's easy to ridicule the Rainbowers, with their harlequin garb, their anarchic millenarian ideals and their bogus Native American prophecies. In general they seem to have wandered out of the last Grateful Dead concert before Jerry died and to now have too much time on their hands.
Since the Family are live-off-landers, the Rainbow gathering doesn't contribute to the local economy like biker fests, and it lacks the pseudo techno-cool of Burning Man, which has pretty much taken over as the wild and crazy annual alternative crowd scene to make. And local bureaucrats, of course, see them as a drug-crazed horde descending on some unsuspecting rural community as inevitably every year as boll weevils.
In truth, a fair number of the Family are bourgeois in their 51-week-a-year lives. And they are quick to point out that in some ways the Rainbow Family resembles other unworldly groups with wacko spiritualist beliefs who broke off to seek a better way of life in the West, that the drug use at the Gathering is no higher per capita than at your average Bonnie Raitt concert, and that local law-enforcement invariably comment afterward, with some surprise, on how accommodating and pleasant the Rainbowers are. The Rainbow Family ran an active and long-lived Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
Some Forest Service apparatchiks conduct a running battle with the Family, saying that they need official approval to gather in such numbers on federal land, but the Rainbow Gathering organizers (to the extent there are any; Rainbow philosophy believes that no one speaks for the tribe) adamantly refuse to sign any permits, saying they are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.
Living in Boulder, I feel like I get plenty of exposure to the Rainbow tribes, and I do not envy the fulltime residents or the police officers of Steamboat this summer. Regardless of weather it's going to be a long hot July in Routt County.
But I'm kind of glad they're going to be out there.
the idea of a gathering based on peace, with no money, with everything free or traded just flores me with hope.
good on all of ye rainbows.
also,
they have a good chance if they get classified as a spiritual group, there are tons of "spiritual" gatherings with permits.
its funny how the system divies out permits based on spiritualities not on idealogies, when the line between them is so thin, if there at all.
http://www.myspace.com/thenaughtilistproject