Why is it better that this is happening in Montana and not Massachusetts?
This is clearly an attempt to silence free speech. An attack on our American Values. An attempt to intimidate and silence those opposed to the groups agenda. When it suits them, they openly break laws, and advocate breaking them. Yet for their opposition they are nit picking, in a sad attempt to stop others from meeting and discussing this issue.
(uh, this is the way the post was suppose to read...sorry, I mixed up two postings!)
This is just a wild guess, but the judges in Montana may just be a LITTLE less liberal than those in Mass. ;->
Because, ultimately, the decision will be before the Montana Supreme Court, and not the Massachusetts SJC. Which one do you think is likely to sustain the church's free speech activities?
This is clearly an attempt to silence free speech.
No one has the right not to get sued. If we are to have freedom, then freedom must always be defended.
There's an old maxim about picking your battles. Gay rights groups used to follow it quite well, only trying to challenge the laws in places where they were likely to get a judiciary more in sympathy with their views. Overreaching and trying to get judicial victories out in flyover country is likely to backfire on them. By the time the SCOTUS takes up the issue of gay marriage, and gay hate speech, there is likely to be an entire body of law in many jurisdictions that do not favor the gay rights side.
It's not absolutely determinative of what the SCOTUS will do, but it will be a factor influencing their decisions. By the time that the SCOTUS struck down bans on interracial marriage, only a relative few states had laws against it, and only Virginia was still actively enforcing it. If the SCOTUS visited the issue right after California's Supreme Court struck down CA's interracial marriage ban in 1948, there might have been a precident set that would not have fallen so easily in 1967. The same thing is possible here.