Good for him!

In a follow-up to the post below...

The father of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder is suing members of the Westboro Baptist Church for disrupting the funeral for his son, who was killed in Iraq.

I don't really support laws to make protests of funerals illegal. I suppose they could be written properly- with the definitions and tolerances tight enough that free speech rights aren't damaged. I think that in the rush to deal with this outrageous behavior, however, such careful calculations are unlikely to be written into the code.

In this case, however, Mr. Snyder is suing the protestors for the invasion of his privacy. I think that a civil remedy is the right approach. Penalizing this group financially may cause them to rethink their decision to intrude upon people's pain, and then add to it.

I've done a little looking into this church since the earlier post. They are even worse than I thought before. Apparently their church runs a site named "godhatesfags.com" (there's no way I'm going to link to that site). That would, by definition, qualify them as a hate group in my estimation.

I surely wish I could support a law making virtually anything such a group does, including protesting at funerals, illegal. I just think we need to be very careful when it comes to dealing with a right so fundamental to democracy as the freedom of speech. Given the excesses of the Patriot Act, the NSA wiretapping, the allegations of secret CIA detention centers, and GITMO, I'm not real confident that such care is likely to be taken in Washington, DC right now.

I sure hope Mr. Snyder wins his case, though.

GP