First Amendment?
Who knows: Protest At Marine’s Funeral Costs Church
(AP) A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.
Albert Snyder of York, Pa., sued the Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified damages after members demonstrated at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq.
The federal jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress.
The whackos will appeal based on free speech, and possibly religious freedom, and it will probably hinge on whether a funeral is a private or public event. Another question that may enter into it is whether a funeral is a religious service, most are, and entitled to greater protection.
The WBC doesn’t have much in the way of known assets, but they seem to travel around the country a lot for poor people.
This is going to be a tough one for the conservative judges that the Hedgemony has been appointing to the appeals courts.
8 comments
i’m all for free speech, and protests, and the right to be obnoxious about it, but those wbc-ers are just jerks.
it will be interesting to see which way the conservatives go on this one.
I thought the judgment was a bit on the high side since there is no way the idiots will be able to pay it. I do think they needed to whacked so hard they cannot recover. There should be serious consequences for being such pigs. I hope they can master the phrase “You want fires with that?”
…it’s actually a charming little bit of karma for Phelps and his gang. They have been accused of making a cottage industry out of suing anyone who tries to deter them from their obscene protest as a means of fund raising…
My guess is that since this was a civil case and there have been acceptable restraints on the freedom of speech before — i.e. yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre, slander, and “fighting words” — the verdict may stand but the judgment will be knocked down to a million or something.
The Snyder family may end up getting nothing, and Fred got his publicity, but it does make you smile a little nonetheless.
You hit the core of the problem, Hipparchia, those “terrible, activist” liberal judges and the “commies” at the ACLU would have a very broad interpretation of freedom of expression which would tend to lean towards the “Kansas Kristianist Koalition”, but the reasonable conservative judges are faced with people disrupting a religious service for one of the “troops” that have to be supported. The Westboro homophobes don’t support the troops.
The point is to ensure that they never have the ability to do this again, and a huge court decision ensures that, Fallenmonk. This is the main technique used by Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center to nail the haters and keep them out of business.
That practice just took a major hit with this court decision, Jack. I suspect at some point this is going to haunt the Supremes, as it should. There have always been people in this country who have felt that their rights trump everyone else’s, and there needs to be clarity on the issue. This is a Federal case, so it applies everywhere.
I think “fighting words” is probably the strongest argument against Fred, MB. That is why I don’t want to see him locally, because it is highly probable that there would be violence.
Not that I support violence but I remain astonished that the Westboros haven’t had the living crap beaten out of them.
It’s come close at times, Jams. But the Patriot Guard Riders and sympathetic cops have been pretty good at keeping the Westboros marginalized to the point where they can’t really disrupt the funerals. Most states now have laws outlawing protests within N yards of funerals (something allowed by earlier Supreme Court decisions regarding protests near abortion clinics), and the cops enforce those laws gleefully. Even the Phelps clan backs down when faced with grinning cops slapping their batons in their hands saying “C’mon, punk, make my day, I feel like beating down an asshole today.”
As with the others, though, I doubt that anybody will ever collect a dime from the Phelps clan (Westboro is Fred Phelps and his many, many offspring of multiple generations). But the Phelps clan will be too busy running from the cops (trying to arrest them for contempt of court for not complying with court orders regarding collection of this fine) to bother anybody else, hopefully…
They have been somewhat careful about their choice of locations, Jams, choosing the more law abiding areas.
It is certainly to be hoped, Badtux, that they will be discomforted by the decision and the loss of assets, but they live in Kansas, so who knows.