“Obviously if [the Department of Homeland Security] now has powers to simply take over a New York City street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America, which is a serious departure from our days as a free republic in which municipalities are governed by police forces.”
– feminist author Naomi Woolf, editorializing in The Guardian about the “Stalinist erosion of protest rights” at Occupy Wall Street, after she was arrested for failing to disperse. In an evening gown.