With a lone dissenting vote from Sen. Becky Lourey, the Senate approved restrictions Thursday on funeral protests such as one that marred the burial of a fallen soldier last month in Anoka.(…)
Lourey, DFL-Kerrick, a candidate for governor and the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq last year, said she opposes the bill as an infringement of the free-speech right her son died to protect. No protesters showed up for the burial of Army helicopter pilot Matthew Lourey last June at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, but the senator said even that would not have changed her mind.
“If it had happened, I would have had to endure that,” she said. “This is very emotional because the speech we’re addressing is very ugly, but we can’t repeal the Bill of Rights because of it.”
Exactly. As I stated in a post last month, freedom of speech quite often means the freedom to say things that are very offensive to others. This is as true of these protestors spreading their offensive messages as it is of someone who wants to write a book questioning the truth of the Holocaust. We may not like what they say, but they have the right to say it.
Captain Ed puts it best:
These protests embarrass and outrage every community where they occur, as the should. Those who give their lives in defense of our country deserve a respectful farewell, and their families deserve peace and space to mourn. These ghouls use their right to free speech to act like mindless hyenas.
However, they do have the same right to free speech, a small technicality that both houses of the state legislature appears to have forgotten in their eagerness to provide a legal solution to a poverty of the soul.
Technorati Tags: Freedom of Speech, Hate Speech
