Federal court protects Westboro Baptist Church's right to free speech

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.

As vile and disgusting as the Rev Fred Phelps and his congregation (which seems to be mostly family and in-laws) are, this is the right way to deal with differences of opinion.

Let it all out into the open.

Unfortunately outside of America we are increasingly seeing the State effectively strip away our right to express our opinions and views if they are not deemed to be the "right" views.

The very notion of hate crimes - a kind of Orwellian "thought crime" - and the like is a poison to freedom that is slowly killing it. That the poison is comprised chiefly of good intentions only serves to make it even more dangerous.

The fact that various human rights and equal opportunity commissions increasingly decide what is or is not acceptable speech and then, acting as Star Chambers or kangaroo courts, punish those they have decided have crossed a boundary they have set.

Canada sadly is one of the worst examples, where its commissions exercise quasi-judicial power and always find the accused guilty of the charges they had brought against them.

Mr Phelps, while obviously causing distress to the families of dead soldiers, (briefly, his schtick is that America is such a "fag loving" nation that it is offensive to God and deserves to be condemned and punished blah, blah, blah), ultimately does his own cause no good by these protests.

Ordinary and decent people are repelled by them and him.

Let him cut off his nose to spite his own face I say.

But more than that, he has a right to be heard. Saying you agree with free speech is meaningless unless you are prepared to defend that right even for those who you despise.

As Doug Mataconis from Below the Beltway observes:

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:

SnyderWestboroOrder

Posted via email from Garth's posterous