From The Daily Cal’s website:

“In response to a Marine Corps recruiting office established in Berkeley last year, local activists are trying to make it more difficult for future recruiting centers to open in the city.”

This is how they intend to make it more difficult:

“If passed by a majority of Berkeley voters, a proposed initiative would require military recruiting offices and private military companies in Berkeley to first acquire a special use permit.

To obtain this permit, a business must hold public hearings and a public comment period.

If the initiative passes, recruitment offices could not be opened within 600 feet of residential districts, public parks, public health clinics, public libraries, schools or churches.”

Also, military recruitment offices have been compared to “pornographic stores“:

“In the same way that many communities limit the location of pornographic stores, that’s the same way we feel about the military recruiting stations,” said PhoeBe sorgen, an initiative proponent and a member of the city’s Peace and Justice Commission. “Teenagers that really want to find them will be able to seek them out and find them, but we don’t want them in our face.”

For those of you who aren’t acquainted with the non-residential areas of Berkeley, this process would make getting a recruitment office nearly impossible. First, the proposed recruitment office would have to have a special permit that they’d have to obtain through the “public hearing and public comment” process, which means entangling themselves in Berkeley’s sizeable and slugglish bureaucratic net. If they were successful, the 600 foot regulation basically covers anything they could be next to. The assumption that they have to be far away from public entities like schools, parks, and clinics indicates that the city still believes recruiters are “preying” on poor, weak, minority citizens. However, churches? Those aren’t “public” in the same way the other institutions are, and shouldn’t be put in that category (the whole church and state thing).

My elementary analysis: This is the “nice” way of banning military recruitment without actually doing it. I hope the public outcry is loud. But what am I saying, this is Berkeley.

update: welcome, Michelle Malkin readers. Come make yourselves at home!