Dear editor,
Your column about the faithless father suing our church for religious picketing is off target because you got the facts wrong.
It might be relevant to talk about whether a private funeral should be protected from disruption if the funeral in this case was private, or there had been any disruption.
Our seven picketers standing over a thousand feet away, on a public easement, leaving when the funeral started, was not disruptive. (Maybe the two OTHER groups of picketers, up on the church property, including right outside the front door, were.) No one going in saw or heard our picketers. 100% of the evidence at trial showed zero disruption by us.
And the funeral was NOT private. When this father spread the details of the dead soldier’s life, death and funeral all over the public airwaves and invited the media, he forfeited privacy. When the media, military, veterans, and politicians turned the funerals into noisy pep rallies, they made these events public.
No one watching this case cares about privacy of soldiers’ funerals. What you care about are the WORDS. You don’t want us saying the soldiers died for your sins. You see these parents in trauma, and turn it into media fodder. You couldn’t care less about the dead soldier or the parents. You think if you can pressure us into shutting up, you can get relief from the great woes you have brought on yourselves and your fellow man, by your proud grievous sin. Stop sinning; make priests stop raping children; they’ll stop dying! How selfish are you, pursuing your lust at all costs!
Don’t pretend this is a close question. The SCOTUS has never required a buffer zone bigger than a thousand feet, or allowed words to be the basis for liability just because someone doesn’t like the words. You want fundamental law uprooted – just so you can keep sinning.
It’s too late for the dead soldier. It’ll soon be too late for this nation. Your doom is imminent. You should have obeyed.
Answering:
A compelling interest for dignified funerals (Appearing in the Republican American dated April 18, 2010)
Come fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that began when Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder was killed in Iraq. He died March 3, 2006, when the Humvee he was riding in overturned. Military funerals honor the fallen and help survivors cope with these ultimate sacrifices. By design, they are occasions of dignity and solemnity. Lance Cpl. Snyder’s was not, thanks to the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. Westboro Baptist opposes homosexuality and any attempt to tolerate it. Members believe letting so blatant and horrendous an iniquity as homosexuality persist unchallenged must inevitably provoke an outpouring of divine wrath upon us all.
A harbinger of that wrath, they believe, has been the deaths of police officers, and soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accordingly, members of Westboro Baptist have besieged police and military funerals, accosting the mourners with signs: “Thank God for dead soldiers”; “God hates fags”; “YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!”
[The rest of this blather is heavy on the whining so we’re cutting it off. Give all the whining a rest, you big freakin american babies. You remind me of the last two verses of Jeremiah Chapter 6: “29 The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. 30 Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the LORD hath rejected them.”]