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Westboro Baptist Church, founded by its spiritual leader, Fred Phelps, and run mostly by family members, did not respond to a request for an interview in time for this article. But a flier released by the church about the picket targets the Roman Catholic Church because Christina and her family were members.
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I dont know what's worse. These guys or those using these murders to attack their political opponents.
Do they still have tax exmept status?
I expect that they do an no politician has the balls to take on a church.
Do they still have tax exmept status?
I expect that they do as no politician has the balls to take on a church.
Being an atheist has it's disadvantages. I cannot enjoy the thoughts of the Westboro bunch burning in hell for all eternity.
Do they still have tax exmept status?
I expect that they do as no politician has the balls to take on a church.
Being an atheist has it's disadvantages. I cannot enjoy the thoughts of the Westboro bunch burning in hell for all eternity.
Where should the nation draw the line on free speech? For Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the defense of First Amendment rights expressed by today's majority ruling in the Westboro Baptist Church case goes too far. The 8-1 decision found that the fringe church's hate-filled picketing at the funeral of a Marine corporal killed in Iraq qualified as public discourse protected by the First Amendment. Church members claim soldiers' deaths are God's punishment for U.S. tolerance of homosexuality.
However hurtful and abhorrent, the church members' railings against "dead soldiers," gays, the Catholic Church and the nation as a whole addressed public matters, the ruling found. And to allow Albert Snyder, father of slain Marine Matthew Snyder, to sue them for intentional infliction of emotional distress would open the door to the stifling of public debate, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. But in staking out his lone dissent, Alito suggested that when publicly offensive speech is also -- and perhaps primarily -- personally painful, the Constitution doesn't protect it.
"Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case," Alito wrote. "Mr. Snyder wanted what is surely the right of any parent who experiences such an incalculable loss: to bury his son in peace," he added. "But respondents, members of the Westboro Baptist Church, deprived him of that elementary right." Alito's thinking in Snyder v. Phelps breaks from the majority, including Roberts and other conservatives usually among his allies, on several finer legal points.
But the dissent stands out most because it's one of the most fully developed expressions of Alito's own First Amendment views in his five years on the high court, and because he tackles what the justices have long referred to as the slippery slope of restraining political speech. "If you start defining and banning offensive speech because someone doesn't like it, it's hard to draw the line, and one day you wake up and find you don't have much protected speech," said Stephen Wermiel, associate director of the Summer Institute on Law and Government at the American University Washington College of Law.
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