Posted on 11/01/2007 10:41:58 AM PDT by radar101
These men and women have the right to the very freedom accordant with the foundations of this country and the decency afforded a burial free from strife.
Fred Phelps has no trump card.
I’ve actually seen these people in action. It was quite some time ago, and it wasn’t a funeral. It is nauseating. There’s nothing righteous about it. It’s hate, pure sick, twisted hate.
Yep, this is a good one. I understand all the fear about precedences and all that. Actually, I think Fred is terribly sick, and society should have put him away long ago for terrible abuses to his family, but that’s another matter.
I wonder what I’d have done had this bunch showed up at Karl’s funeral. Knowing me, I’d probably have gone over to them and acted even crazier than them. I doubt that they would tolerate that as well as everyone else has tolerated their behavior.
I guess the bottom line is that, in days gone by, they would not have survived this long doing what they do. They have absolutely no tolerance or respect for others. They are lucky to be alive, and they should be considerate of the society that allows that. $11 Million is not much of a price to pay...
Yeah, buddy, I’ll be bumpin’ that. Ever’ bit of it.
I was going to post something similar, but hit the backspace key then, and now. You said it well.
Yes, my 11-year-old son is alive and well, and relatively close to me, as he is up in his bed sleeping.
Freedom requires tolerance of divergent views, if you define “tolerance” as “not wanting government to interfere with or dictate”.
My belief in the constitution and limited government is not in a theoretical sense filtered by how a feel about specific actions. If the constitution were to be applied based on how we feel, it would be a very weak protection indeed from the evils of government.
This lawsuit wasn’t about the right to protest. They obviously had the proper permit to protest, or they would have been dispersed.
This lawsuit was based on the effect of the apparently legal protest on people who could hear the protest.
So, in your case, if you register for a rally, and you hold your rally, and I live in a house across the street, and am confined to my bed, and I can hear your lawful protest, and it turns out you are protesting something I really support, and it upsets me, I should be able to sue you for damages?
By your rational, your son can be bullied at school in the hallway, in the bathroom, on the way home without recompense, because after all, the bully has a right to say what he wants -probably telling your son his dad is a fag. God forbid something happen to you and the little bully tells your son you’ve gone to hell and deserved to die. We shant dare require the teacher or principal impinge on the bully’s rights. After all, the evils of interference by the teacher are a much worse evil. Good luck to your son as you teach him to tolerate, he learns he doesn’t have any rights, and he learns that his feelings don’t have any merit.
He got OJ’s house in California, cars, Rolexes and Heisman trophy, plus all of the royalties on his book so far. Homesteading or bankruptcy won’t protect real estate like the church building.
That is actually good news. I detest OJ and the court system that freed him.
I do not know how the father ever kept his sanity.
As far as the church property, I don’t know the laws in that state.
Remember, the filing reverses any civil court ruling, and places the assets at the disposition of the federal court.
Somehow, I doubt that they are going that route.
They still have other legal strings to play out.
But it is very good that the plantiffs prevailed in this round. - Thank you for your post - bill
Great photo! Kudos to every one of them and kudos to you.
Pay no attention to Charles Wayne.
Some day when he spouts that tripe off in real life, he will wonder why he is laying on the ground.
The missing link in your argument is the aggravating factor that, to make the situations comparable, I would have to have come to town from out of state for the specific purpose of gloating over the fact that you were sick.The situation is not entirely dissimilar from that of criticizing public figures. You can do it, and you can even say things which are wrong - but when it comes to recklessly disregarding the truth which you know or certainly should know, you cross over into what the court has labeled "actual malice." And I think that the dynamic of cult demonstrations at funerals is similar.
Actually, the law is pretty clear the schools are allowed to regulate speech, and the bully would be punished. And if the bully was harassing, that also is a violation of school policy, and could be a violation of the law.
However, IF the law allowed a bully to say those things to my child, my argument is that allowing me to SUE the bully to exact “punishment” that the law refuses to exact seems wrong to me, because it allows ME, and 12 JURORS, to write the laws, under the authority of government.
There’s a book a read on this subject of courts legislating through lawsuits, I don’t THINK it was in Mark Levin’s book on the courts but maybe it was, I think though it was the author of the Common Good books, can’t remember his name right now.
You seem to support a law forbidding protests within some distance of a funeral that is in progress. I believe such a law has been tried, but the courts have struck it down as unconstitutional.
My beef here is solely the use of the civil courts to make “law” that you can’t get through the legislature, or past the constitutional muster.
But now you’ve stepped into two problems. But first, let me modify my analogy to be more exact.
What if I work for some company, and the protesters are arguing that the work I’ve been involved with makes people sick? What if further, they chose where they are protesting because they know I’m in a hospital there, and that I work for the company? They aren’t really protesting ME, but they are using my illness as a foil for their argument. — I’ll note that this is an extension of my argument before.
OK, your two problems. First, the argument here is that a person can sue for emotional distress even if the speech is protected. You are now saying that this would only be true if the protestors KNEW there was a person nearby who might be offended, NOT simply that there WERE people who were offended. That’s a different argument, But would imply that so long as I got word to the protestors that I was there and was offended, they would have to stop.
The larger problem is in your last statement, where you mention saying things that you know are false. In this case, I have little doubt these people believe that what they are saying is true. Further, I don’t think anybody argued in court that what they were saying was false — as it is a religious argument, it’s rather hard to make a factual claim. Can you sue because someone believes God struck down your loved one? Can you sue because they seem HAPPY God struck down your loved one?
If there was a freak accident and all the pro-choice members of the Supreme Court were killed, and some pro-life people held a victory rally to express their pleasure that God has finally brought vengeance and justice on those who mocked him, could we arrest all those people? What if they did this on the steps of the Supreme Court? What if they did this within shouting distance of whereever the funeral service was held?
At what point do you allow these pro-lifers to be sued for ten million dollars? I would say at the point where they actually BREAK THE LAW in their protest. Although I would condemn their “victory protest” in any case.
I argue that burying your son in peace is a natural right, and that it is reserved to the people. You can either vindicate that right in court, or you can clean up the mess when something really bad happens. There are laws against reckless endangerment, whereby you can be arrested for doing something so aggressively dangerous that it is a matter of luck that nobody was killed or seriously injured because of it - and everyone knows that burying your child is the most stressful thing that can happen to you. Add to that the stress of someone cursing you and your son, and it would certainly be no miracle if a father or mother of a war casualty had a heart attack or stroke because of it.And there can be no argument that those kooks don't know what they're doing, and what they risk causing. I say that the law legitimately can and must control that behavior. It can by the logic above, and it must because (long after the passage of the First Amendment) the law outlaws dueling, which is how any patriot at large would have reacted prior to that prohibition if anyone had aggressively gloated over the death of a soldier. And it also must because the government has to protect patriots or it will lose its own legitimacy.
Allowing a band of kooks to harass patriots at their most vulnerable and counting on volunteers to screen the protesters from view and drown out their sound with (illegally degraded mufflers on) motorcycles while the government protects the "protestors" may be your idea of "law," but it is a sorry excuse for order.
If I had an absolute right to free speech, I’d tell you what I really think.
But I don’t.
I’d get banned.
There are some things that are not permitted. Period. And there are ramifications.
And if you didn’t get banned, because the owner of the site didn’t think what you said violated the rules, do you think I should have a right to impose my own rules on the site by suing you for emotional distress?
Should I and 12 jurors get to decide what the rules are for the site? Worse, should I and 12 jurors get to scare people so much that they are afraid of doing anything, since the “rules” that govern when you will get sued into bankruptcy are not known in advance, and are subject to my whim and the whim of 12 jurors?
Let’s put it another way. We both hate what these people are doing. It’s dispicable.
But is it 12 million dollars worth of dispicable? That’s more money than 99.9% of us will make in a lifetime?
Not to sound crass, but if I could swing it so that when I die, my family could get 12 million, and all we had to do was put up with some boorish people for an hour, I’d take it.
TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS. For standing 1000 feet away from a funeral, and saying things that made people feel bad.
And that could be ANY of us. Because there is no law that said he couldn’t do that, and no standard by which they are being judged.
THen pass a law, and get it past constitutional muster. That way, we all know when we are allowed to be annoying, and when we are not allowed to be annoying.
A 10 million dollar verdict is a prohibition on whatever speech is being targetted, and acts as powerfully as any criminal statute. Except, as I have said, how do you know what free speech YOU are going to engage in that is going to get 12 jurors of your “peers” to award someone 10 million?
For those who support abortion, an abortion is the most stressful thing a woman can do, and if you yell baby-killer at them as they go to do it, you could well endanger their lives. At that most critical time, you certinly should be punished severely for being so reckless with your words.
See how easy it is? Now you are bankrupting the pro-life movement.
Maybe their church or homes, unless they lease!
Any time you use government, you are using a blunt instrument and unintended, or craftily and insincerely intended, consequences are only too common. I certainly don't think it's a free lunch. But I do believe that, contrary to your fears, the more we use their tactics the less legitimate those tactics will be seen to be.I would go so far as to attempt to sue the Associated Press out of existence. On the grounds that it is the mother of all combinations in restraint of political speech. How can a newswire restrain speech? It does so all the time, as we all know, by producing, and even constituting, a vast stream of propaganda to the effect that any incident which the AP and its component news feeds know which you do not yet know is important, and anything that you already know is irrelevant.
Take as an excellent example the Duke "rape" case. It was, as is now officially known, not a rape case but another Twana Brawley hoax. A vast stream of propaganda supporting the Crystal Mangum allegations labeled it a "rape" case, even though you could tell from day 2, and strongly suspect from day one, that it was a hoax. It took no genius to see that Nifong was trying his case in the newspapers and especially on TV, in blatant violation of legal ethics. It took very little time for it to become obvious that the lacrosse kids were behaving exactly like innocent accused, submitting to DNA tests and volunteering for polygraph tests. It took very little, indeed hardly any, time for the template to come out that these guys were guilty - all of them - because they were white and from prosperous families.
Guess what? People from prosperous families have a lot to lose, and Crystal Mangum had nothing to lose. And it turned out that Michael Nifong had next to nothing to lose, either - he was professionally in a box, where someone he had fired was going to defeat him in the upcoming election and fire him, before he could get his pension vested. The charge that an entire college sports team, consisting not of poor black kids but prosperous white kids, would commit a rape and cover up for each other as efficiently and comprehensively and consistently as the Duke Lax team did - and get the moral support of the women's lacrosse team members in the process - was always absurdly improbable.
The template of our propaganda organs, operating in unison through the AP, is that talk - their stock in trade - is important and action and reality are strictly secondary. Theodore Roosevelt said "it is not the critic who counts," but that is precisely the opposite of the message of our propaganda organs, and of the AP. And that is entirely sufficient to explain why journalism claims to be objective, and why it is almost perfectly subjective.
It takes an awful lot of power to be able to "speak 'truth' to 'power'." The AP and its organs had the power, and they used it to define those Duke boys as "powerful" and Crystal Mangum as "powerless." Which was in the circumstance precisely the opposite of reality. Her uncorroborated word was enough to put those boys through the wringer, and cost their parents millions of dollars in legal fees. And what did she lose? The state investigator who cleared the boys cleared her of lying, simply noting that she was just crazy enough to believe anything - so you could never convict her of intentionally lying. And, certainly in Durham, that obviously is perfectly true. Jesse Jackson promised to pay for her education - whether her charges were true or not.
So, just like the kook "Baptist church," the AP et al are above the law. But I say that they are not above the law; I say that a civil lawsuit should bankrupt them. The Duke lacrosse boys have an open and shut case of "actual malice" and they should bring civil RICO charges.
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