Posted on 04/23/2010 6:50:26 PM PDT by SandRat
Your recent editorial “Funeral protests cause disdain” addresses the vexing First Amendment issue in the lawsuit against the “Christian” church that picketed the funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in action in Iraq in 2006: Should “hate speech” be constitutionally protected … or punished?
Albert Snyder was awarded damages against Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka after its members waved inflammatory signs at his son’s funeral saying “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” (God’s “payback” to America for tolerating homosexuality, claims the church), but the 4th Court of Appeals reversed the verdict, ruling that the congregation’s protest was constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment, which broadly forbids the federal government and states from “… abridgning the freedom of speech…”
The case will be argued to the Supreme Court in the fall.
Hate speech — those bigoted epitaths and slurs that degrade and humiliate another human being on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, creed, disability, social class, sexual orientation or gender identity — is now protected under the First Amendment.
Victims of hate speech in America have no legal recourse, while most other Western societies criminalize it. The criminal code of Canada, for instance, penalizes “the willful promotion of hatred.” In France, legendary actress Brigitte Bardot has been convicted of inciting racial hatred five times for her rabid anti-Islamic remarks.
The right to say and print virtually whatever we want springs from Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes’s famous dissenting opinion in Abrams vs. United States (1919), in which the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Russian immigrant and alledged anarchist under the Sedition Act of 1918 for distributing leaflets condeming President Woodrow Wilson for sending American troops to fight in Soviet Russia and calling for a strike to protest the government’s policy of intervention. Holmes said that “the best test of the truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the compitition of the market.”
But now that Holmes “marketplace” has become a venue for suicide bombers and other extremists, it makes sense to ask: Is hate speech protecting or underminging our most basic values as a society? First Amendment expert Stanley Fish, Professor of Law at Florida International University in Miami, wrote recently in The New York Times: “The larger question is, which comes first, freedom of speech as garunteed by the First Amendment, or democracy?” Democracy, thinks Fish, siding with the “consequentialists” who believe that some forms of speech must be regulated in order to preserve First Amendment goals — nothing less than protecting democracy.
By contrast, speech “libertarians” oppose the suppression of any speech (except for a few recognized exceptions), which happens to be the view of a majority of the justices sitting on the Supreme Court today. Thus earlier in the year, in the case of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010), the court struck down a federal law prohibiting political contributions made from corporate treasury funds, effectively turning corporations into individuals, and money into speech. If we visualize speech as a rubber band, it has been stretched to its snapping point.
“Is speech massively funded by large corporations a contribution to the larger good it is supposed to serve? If the answer is no, then it would seem reasonable to regulate it,” Fish concludes. Still, we must ask — how well served is democracy by the Supreme Court’s “money is talk” ruling if, as legal precedent likely to govern future speech cases, it allows religious fanatics to picket the funerals of our fallen soldiers, with posters shouting hateful messages to the bereaved; and extremists in the Tea Party movement to hurl venomous slurs at members of the Congressional Black Cacaus and at Rep. Barney Frank, an openly gay member of Congress, just as they did at their eve-of-vote protest against health-care reform?
Unless the Supreme Court decides that the values of democracy trump the hate talk of extremists — an unlikey move any time soon, given the pending retirement of its leading “consequentialist” Justice John Paul Stevens, who criticized the Citizens United decision in an impassioned 90-page dissent weeks before his 90th birthday, the lessons of Auschwitz will have been lost on us, and the Bill of Rights, the guarantor of our most precious freedoms, will have failed to silence the voices of bigotry… the darkest irony imaginable.
(Gary Fry, a resident of Hereford, has been a member of the Arizona Bar since 1966 and practiced law in Phoenix for 40 years.)
I think about one good beating and they'd be ready to give it up.
What Westboro does io harassment - plain and simple. What they do is interfere with funeral goers firts amendment rights of paying their respects by in effect shouting them down. I have no problem with Westboro using their first amendment rights to redresss grievances with their government, but intentionally disrupting a funeral is not a first amendment right.
Having said that, the writer of this piece is an idiot!
There are ways to control Phelps. I think it would be smart to consider a funeral permit as having “rented” public space around the funeral site, to the point that those not invited could be asked to leave, or to stand at some distance from the cemetery area.
Governments are free to “rent” their property.
“Rent” in a funeral, could be $1.00 plus a funeral home application.
Anyway, that said, the ACLU has a real piece of work running for Congress in my area.
Rajeeve Goyle is an ACLU attorney, and was such when the ACLU filed a friend of the Court brief in support of Fred Phelps and his sicko “church” cult.
Then, Goyle moved to Kansas, and ran for the legislature, winning, in part, because he accused the Republican incumbent of not “doing enough” to silence Fred Phelps!
Free Speech is a sacred thing, very important to freedom.
Liberals, however, want it both ways on this issue.
They always do!
And to compare the Citizens United case to Phelps is simply absurd.
I’ve always liked the idea of getting the biggest Scots Band possible in full Kilts, with Pipes, Fifes, and Drums to be outside to play the old Scots Clan funeral tunes along with Amazing Grace. The Pipes will cut through and drown out anything.
For those that are not fans of the pipes they are like Holy Water on a Vampire.
hehehehehehe.....
I’m sooooo..... mean. hehehehehehehe....
If those attending a protested funeral decided it was worth facing the civil penalties for beating the everliving shit out of Phelps and family and then did so, I’m guessing Phelps would get out of the funeral protesting business.
I’d settle for thorough soaking of the Phelp’s protest Klan with Skunk Oil/Scent.
Load of horse-hockey. Pure propaganda. This guy ties Westburo, the Tea Party, racism, homo-bigotry (it ain’t a phobia), and Auschwitz (Nazism) all together; calling for a ban on hate speech KNOWING that it will be used to silence dissenters of the left-wing agenda.
Or do like they did at Altamonte in the ‘60s ... hire the Hell’s Angels as security. Heck, you could probably get by with a few cases of whiskey and some medical marijuana ;-)
heh heh heh
I would definitely say antagonizing a grieving family is fighting words..... and warrants an ass kicking or two.
Since this isn’t a direct political protest in that the act of burying dead soldiers isn’t part of the political process, I’d say these protests don’t really fall under the auspices of political speech and said protesters should be thrown in jail and shackled until they learn some manners.
And so right.
You are Soooo right!! Bring on the ‘Pipes’!! I’m a both ‘Blue Star’ and ‘Silver Star’
Mother and I was born and raised in Kansas, near ‘Home of the Big Red One’ and I’m also embarrassed by these Lame-o’s from the Phelp’s Clan....believe me they need to have their tax exemption and status as a Baptist Church taken away from them, IF at all possible!!
Former Member of the Big Red 1. My son was born at the Manhatten Kns Hospital.
“I think about one good beating and they’d be ready to give it up.”
I agree. I hate to advocate violence but Phelps and his band of losers are seriously in need of a massive butt-kicking.
I think that after a couple of emergency room visits, they’d be seriously inclined to hang it up.
Alas, for all SCOTUS has said on the matter the lower courts haven’t agreed and they continue to punish people who take action of any kind against the Phelps gang.
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