Perhaps you are not familiar with these slimeballs....they are not a church, but a group of lawyers. The so called “Protests” they state are designed to do one thing, get people to assault them so they can sue, and they have been moderately successful at it. The signs and words they use are carefully crafted.
What I am trying to say is that their speech IS politically offensive ON PURPOSE, and they are well within their rights to say it. They are not permitted in the cemetary, nor are they permitted in the funeral homes. They draw permits, stay on the sidewalk, and are peaceable. Their material is offensive to most people, but the constitution gives us a right derived from god to peacable assemble and protest. ANY restrictions upon that right leads down a path nobody here wants to go down.
The government is always looking for a way to control the people ( John Dingle, democrat, michigan ) “It took a long time to find a way to control the people.”...He said this about obamacare..do you really want to give an asshole like this the power to regulate your speech?
Well, you and almost everyone by now believes that, but it isn't true.
Please cite the Constitutional text that you believe confers a right of protest in the way these idiots are claiming it.
Among all their other misfeasances, the legal mainstream understanding of exactly what the First Amendment protects has gone seriously off the rails.
The right to speak and the right of the people peaceably to assemble to petition for redress are not the same right. No one has a right to do that which is wrong. If mocking the family of a dead child at the child's funeral is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. To punish Phelps (who should have been horsewhipped long ago), the court would have to discriminate between assembly to petition the government for redress of grievances and this disorderly (because provocative) mob.
But wait--there's more! In order to protect Phelps's "right," it is required by eight of nine justices that the mourners suppress their natural, healthy reaction to this perverse assembly. If they did not suppress their natural, normal, manly feelings then Phelps would have suffered the consequences of his misbehavior long ago.
As with many other novel "rights," such as the "right" of women to dress provocatively without eliciting male interest, the government is behaving in a totalitarian manner by requiring humans to behave in a non-human, even anti-human, way.
Dingle is definitely a tyrant and sociopath, like many Leftists. But there are exeptions to the speech citizens can impose on each other and I think this is one of them. Once it becomes speech directed towards politicians, I think anything goes.