Fred Phelps' freedom

We love a lot of things in this country — guns and cheeseburgers come to mind — but few things are as universally beloved as freedom of speech.

Free speech is something of a secular religion in the United States, which can be a good thing. Our five First Amendment freedoms (speech, press, religion, peaceable assembly and petition, in case you’re keeping score at home) are what allow me to write this column.

I can criticize how we try too hard to uphold them.

But that’s only because I have lived my entire life with the luxury of such freedoms.

I know that. But like any religion, our secular devotion to free speech sometimes goes too far. When the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the Westboro Baptist Church has the right to protest soldiers’ funerals if they like, they took the commitment to free speech too far.

First of all, there is absolutely nothing morally redeemable about the so-called Westboro Baptist Church. The group is fairly well-known for its extreme anti-Semitism, homophobia and, particularly, picketing at soldiers’ funerals.

Members’ protest signs are legendary for their vileness (two of the most popular seem to be “God loves dead soldiers” and the handy catchall “God hates you”).

So the repugnance of the group is not really in question. Indeed, even Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion of the Court supporting Westboro’s rights to unrestrained speech, admitted that the group’s picketing is “certainly hurtful.”

If we’ve agreed that the group is awful, then why did eight of the nine justices defend the letter of the Constitution against the plaintiff? Why did they overturn a lower court’s ruling in favor of the Snyder family, a family who lost their son to the Iraq war and sued Westboro for emotional pain after the group protested their son’s funeral?

It comes back to our often irrational devotion to free speech, of course. If people have a message, the law says they have every right to share it. But even in America we have judicial precedent that limits speech in certain situations, like the Miller test, which determines through a series of criteria if something can be considered “obscene,” and thus not protected by free speech.

Westboro’s actions may not be legally considered obscene, but I believe the spirit of the Miller test is the idea that there are lines that should not be crossed, not even in the name of free speech. This is one of those lines.

The Court may have already ruled, but if nothing else, perhaps this is an opportunity to consider if free speech is really sacred, and if free speech for the sake of free speech is always worth defending.


E-mail: mebinder@indiana.edu