Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, best known for their practice of protesting at funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, won a major Court victory earlier this week:
RICHMOND, Va. — A federal appeals court on Thursday tossed out a $5 million verdict against protesters who carried signs with inflammatory messages like “Thank God for dead soldiers” outside the Maryland funeral of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq.
A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the signs contained “imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric” protected by the First Amendment. Such messages are intended to spark debate and cannot be reasonably read as factual assertions about an individual, the court said.
A jury in Baltimore had awarded Albert Snyder damages for emotional distress and invasion of privacy. The 2006 funeral of Snyder’s son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in Westminster, Md., was among many military funerals that have been picketed by members of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas.
(…)
Members of the Topeka, Kan.-based church have used protests at military funerals to spread their belief that U.S. deaths in the Iraq war are punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality. One of the signs at Snyder’s funeral combined the U.S. Marine Corps motto with a slur against gay men.
Other signs included “America is Doomed,” “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “Priests Rape Boys” and “Thank God for IEDs,” a reference to the roadside bombs that have killed many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“As a threshold matter, as utterly distasteful as these signs are, they involve matters of public concern, including the issue of homosexuals in the military, the sex-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, and the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens,” Judge Robert King wrote in the appeals court’s opinion.
“Additionally, no reasonable reader could interpret any of these signs as asserting actual and objectively verifiable facts about Snyder or his son,” he wrote.
The court also said a written piece about Snyder’s funeral on the Westboro Web site was protected by the First Amendment. Unlike the signs, the Web site piece specifically named the Snyders. Even so, the court said, the missive was “primarily concerned with the Defendants’ strongly held views on matters of public concern.”
This is, I think, a completely correct decision. As I stated in a post on this issue more than three years ago, freedom of speech quite often means the freedom to say things that are very offensive to others. This is as true of these protesters 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.
Ezra at Popehat makes the excellent point that, even though the revulsion at what men like Phelps say is near universal, we still have to protect it:
[T]he jury was correct. Fred Phelps should be bankrupt. Fred Phelps should live the rest of his days as a pauper, or better still in debtor’s prison. The problem is that the judge should have dismissed this case before it ever got to a jury. The problem is that if we’re going to do that to Phelps, we’ll have to pauperize or imprison other people whose ideas and speech upset their neighbors. Those who blaspheme against the Prophet Muhammad for instance, a direction to which much of Europe and Canada are trending though they’re supposedly secular. Or perhaps those who say cruel things about Republicans or Democrats. Since I don’t want to live in a country where blaspheming against Muhammad, or insulting Republicans or Democrats is a crime, I’m willing to accord Fred Phelps the right to be a non-violent monster, even when he insults dead soldiers.
Exactly. Once you go down the road of punishing people for “offensive” speech, it’s hard to turn back before you reach the point where free speech itself is gone.
Fred Phelps is an offensive dumbass, but he has the right to be an offensive dumbass.
The full opinion, which is worth reading is embedded below:
I can’t stand these people but I do agree with the Court’s decision. As much as it pains me to do so.
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[...] In the U.S., of course, it would be much harder for the state to do something like this thanks to the First Amendment and a strong tradition of religious liberty. That’s the reason why even the Westboro Baptist Church is constitutionally permitted to hold beliefs that most of us find … [...]