Is Phelps a role model on free speech issues?
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-to-1 that the "Thank God for
Dead Soldiers" protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas have
First Amendment rights to protest military funerals, the question being
asked is: What's ahead?
More protests from religious groups? Or more efforts to limit them?
The
court majority determined March 2 that minister Fred Phelps and members
of his small, independent Baptist church in Topeka had free-speech
rights to picket within 300 feet of the funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew
Snyder, who was killed in Iraq in 2006.
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The court's lone
dissenter, Justice Samuel Alito, argued that it was wrong for protesters
to continue "inflicting severe and lasting emotional injury on an
ever-growing list of innocent victims."
Legal experts differ on
whether Westboro will now be a role model for other religious groups
with strong views deemed offensive. John Whitehead, president of the
Rutherford Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of
Westboro's right to protest, said the decision could provide more room
to air unpopular religious views.
Whitehead is already defending a
street preacher who was ordered by police to stop using a handheld
microphone on a public sidewalk outside last year's Apple Blossom
Festival in Winchester, Virginia. "I think it's going to protect those
kinds of people," said Whitehead, who is based in Charlottesville,
Virginia.
But Ira Lupu, a church-state expert at George Washington
University Law School, said there are probably few groups comparable to
Westboro that would seize on this case because the group's "God Hates
Fags" signs are just too extreme.
"People just don't do that," Lupu said. "Everybody hates you if you do that. That's the inhibitor, not the law."
Westboro,
however, stands ready to "quadruple" its protests at military funerals,
Margie J. Phelps, the lead attorney for the church, told reporters,
according to ABC News.
The high court's ruling protected Westboro
from a claim by Snyder's father that he deserved financial compensation
for emotional distress, defamation and "intentional infliction of
emotional distress" caused by the church members' appearance at his time
of grief.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority,
said even "hurtful speech" on public matters cannot be stifled. "Speech
is powerful," he wrote. "It can stir people to action, move them to
tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On
the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the
speaker."
Roberts pointed out that Westboro members never entered
the church property where the funeral occurred, weren't violent and
didn't yell. Lupu and Whitehead agreed that if Phelps's protesters had
been more physically disruptive, the decision could have been different.
"Simply put, the church members had the right to be where they were,"
Roberts said.
Alito, however, forcefully disagreed. "In order to
have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously
debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent
victims," he wrote. —RNS
