The Supreme Court has ruled, by a rare 8-1 decision, that the Westboro Baptist Church can continue to protest at military funerals.
I hate Fred Phelps and everything he and his hate-filled family of homophobic asshats stand for. I wouldn't shed a single tear or spare an ounce of sympathy for anything bad that happens to them, and I almost wish I weren't an agnostic just so I could be assured that they'd all rot in hell.
But any decision that would allow their protests to be curtailed would also allow other forms of protest to be blocked (including many of the ones going in in Wisconsin, as well as the Tea Party protests, the WTO protests in 1999, and others on various sides of the political spectrum). We offer this as a fundamental right in the First Amendment, and there is no exclusion made for blocking assholes.
These people are hate-filled scum, but if we allow the Constitution to be curtailed because of them, we're actually playing into their hands, and creating exactly the sort of environment where anyone who has an outsider opinion -- something that historically has come from the progressive side of the spectrum a lot more than from the neanderthal atavistic side that Westboro represents -- can be silenced.
That said, of course, I'll be the first to admit that I've cheered the various attacks by Anonymous against them.
(Also, this continues to convince me that Alito was one of the worst decisions Bush made.)
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