Loading ...U.S. Supreme Court sides with Fred Phelps
flockwoodFuneral pickets are constitutionally-protected speech, nation’s high court declares in 8-1 ruling.
So who voted against Phelps?
Justice Samuel Alito.
“Respondents’ [Phelps'] outrageous conduct caused petitioner great injury, and the Court now compounds that injury by depriving petitioner of a judgment that acknowledges the wrong he suffered.
In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims like petitioner. I therefore respectfully dissent.”
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March 2nd, 2011 at 3:59 pm
Alito contends that WBC’s actions were illegal because they targeted a private individual. However it is clear the WBC doesn’t really care about the individuals; it’s all about getting a message out to the public.
March 2nd, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Tonight is a night to be grateful to not be on the supreme court. Yuck.
March 3rd, 2011 at 10:15 am
Glad to see free speech being held up even when it is so repugnant. It’s also nice to see it held up so strongly in a bipartisan (as far as the court’s leanings go) way.
Not so glad to see Sarah Palin’s response tweet:
“Common sense & decency absent as wacko ‘church’ allowed hate msgs spewed@ soldiers’ funerals but we can’t invoke God’s name in public square”
Leave it to Palin to respond in the most reactionary way to just about anything newsworthy.
March 5th, 2011 at 7:24 am
The Westboro Baptist Church demonstrations are hateful, but I find this one even more disturbing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NutFkykjmbM
There’s something wrong with telling American citizens to “go back home” just because you don’t approve of their religion.
March 5th, 2011 at 10:16 am
Yeesh at least I have a feeling a lot of people think the Westboro folks are nuts. If you’re protesting gays, veterans, and American itself simultaneously you’re going to offend a majority of Americans.
But that crowd…
I’m not entirely sure there aren’t people in my city who might feel the same way, and that scares me.
March 6th, 2011 at 7:46 pm
Anthropologists recognize that one of the signs that a culture is breaking down is the loss of dignity surrounding rituals and ceremonies for the death. I’m with Justice Alito on this one.
March 6th, 2011 at 10:05 pm
Virtually all of America disapproves of the actions of Westboro Baptist Church, including the justices. It would be a mistake to interpret the court rulings as saying otherwise. The real question is how we as a society should respond when face with the voices of an ugly minority. Many societies suppress speech instead of protecting individual freedoms. That is another kind of “breaking down”.
March 7th, 2011 at 2:01 pm
My thoughts exactly. A few reviled nutjobs do not represent our culture’s feelings about death rituals.
March 8th, 2011 at 12:49 pm
The only place I know of where these nuts were afraid to go protest was in my ancestral county, Owsley County, Kentucky, where even these guys knew that if they disrupted a funeral, all the police in the world couldn’t have protected them.
I guess in the mountains they haven’t quite lost the desire to preserve their funeral practices.
March 8th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
It is the fact that they are using a private service for public ends. The funeral is not the general public’s business. It is the family’s business.
Where I see the point of the Court is that when the funeral becomes public by use of mass media, then the Westboro Wacos can put in their two cents. However, there should be a distinction between simply reporting a funeral and editorializing on it. This is the distinction Justice Alito is trying to make, but it very difficult to say where the line is.
At a soldier’s funeral in my town, a biker club used the same free speech to park their bikes in front of the Wesboro Dunderheads and rev their engines when the funeral procession came by to drown out the rants of those nut-jobs.
Private citizens staked out the statutory limit around the church and the cemetery. I hate to think of the carnage that would have taken place if those morally-challenged protesters had put one toe beyond the line.
March 22nd, 2011 at 11:30 am
I like that story, John. Bikers have the right to free speech, too.
I guess I see the analysis as one of absolute rights under the First Amendment. Clearly the Westboro group has the same right to free speech as anyone else. However, free speech is not unregulated. I can’t go to a Lexington Urban County Council meeting and start yelling at the councilmen, though I am often sorely tempted to do so.
I also can’t go to a service at a church that I don’t like and stand up and start yelling at them, either. The church has a right to the “free exercise” of their religion under the same First Amendment, and I think that includes the right to worship in peace. And I think any court would have to recognize a funeral as a religious service.
I realize that the regulations now in place are supposed to separate the two groups, each exercising their constitutional rights, but it seems to me that the scale ought to tip toward not disrupting an event with real religious and emotional significance to the people involved in it.