Group tries to silence Christian 1st Amendment Rights

How dare these commie atheist pigs try to silence these poor persecuted Christians' right to freely express their religion! All true Christians should rise up and smite these Godless heathens.

Foes of Phelps fight ire with ire
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star

SOUTH HAVEN, Kan. — The Phelps family hoisted the same old laminated gay-bashing placards.

They made their same tired chants taking glee in a soldier’s death.

Another funeral, another round of pickets from the minichurch fixated on homosexuality.

Yet now that the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. has moved on to flinging epithets at military martyrs, a few politicians have begun trying to silence him. Their success will depend on how carefully they mind free speech as they write their laws.

In the meantime, noise is met with noise.

Whenever the few protesters from Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church shouted or sang Wednesday in South Haven, the earth trembled.

Any time they spoke up, the wrists of biker veterans twisted on dozens of throttles to strike the thundering chords of Honda and Harley-Davidson.

More than 200 bikers had made themselves into a chrome-and-black leather barrier. The 10 anti-gay picketers stood on one side, drowned out by the noise. Mourners arriving for the funeral of Army Sgt. Evan Parker passed on the other side.

“We’re supporting the family of a fallen soldier,” yelled Don Barr of American Legion Post 138 of Caney. “And we’re telling these jokers” — he jutted a thumb in the direction of Phelps’ picketers — “to get lost.”

Were the protesters concerned that the spectacle might upset a grieving family?

“No,” Fred Phelps Jr., said. His 75-year-old father is increasingly absent from the picketing. “The (soldier’s) family has made a public spectacle of things. There’s nothing private here.”

People have hoped for years that the obsessively anti-gay protesters would go away. Yet the Phelps clan travels the country, and even overseas, to protest anything it deems not hostile enough to homosexuality. (The Kansas City Star, and the funerals of former employees, have been picketed at times.)

Most recently, the peculiar Phelps logic has shifted the pickets to funerals of Americans killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Phelps’ church says the deaths are the penance of a nation too accommodating of homosexuality or, alternatively, that the deaths of U.S. servicemen and woman are divine retaliation for a small bomb that caused about $1,800 damage in 1995 outside the Topeka home of one of Phelps’ daughters.

Legislators in two states are pushing laws to bar protests at funerals. At least one Tennessee county has adopted a resolution to keep picketers away from mourners.

That has triggered warnings of a First Amendment showdown. While Phelps family’s message strikes many people as offensive (one of their signs reads “Thank God For Dead Soldiers”), it is decidedly political.

In 1995, a federal judge threw out a Kansas law that prohibited picketing outside funerals because it was too vague. With Phelps in mind, legislators quickly adopted a law specifically barring pickets an hour before and two hours after a funeral. (Missouri has no law regulating picketing at funerals.)

The Kansas law bars pickets only near a funeral, and in planning for Wednesday’s demonstration, Sumner County Attorney Shawn DeJarnett looked at lower-court rulings that said the state law effectively allows people to protest from across the street.

“We came to the conclusion to avoid confrontation” and decided against arrests, DeJarnett said. Officials elsewhere have taken the same approach.

The U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has upheld laws that establish protest-free buffer zones around abortion clinics — laws that specify the distances and apply to everyone.

Before memorial services in 1998 for Matthew Shepard, a man singled out for a brutal robbery and murder because he was gay, officials in Casper, Wyo., adopted a 50-foot no-protest zone. The action earned them a letter from Phelps that described it as an “ideal arrangement.”

But in September 1998, the city of Lincoln, Neb., passed an ordinance in response to protesters who staked out a church attended by a doctor who provides abortions. The courts tossed out the law saying that in protecting children from upsetting messages the ordinance also kept those messages away from adults.

Tim Butz, a Vietnam veteran and executive director of the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he thinks similar efforts to muzzle the Phelps protests will be doomed.

“It may be obnoxious as can be,” said Butz. But “we don’t just protect popular speech in this country.”

One legal argument, however, holds that the right law could keep Phelps from tossing insults at funeral processions.

“The regulation has to be content-neutral,” said Michael Fenner, a First Amendment expert at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.

Fenner said a law might stand up if it is related only to time and place of funeral pickets — limiting protests to within so many feet from a service or so many hours before or after a service begins. Even if lawmakers obviously intend to push away Phelps, Fenner said, the law might survive. He noted a 1960s law aimed at stopping protesters from burning their draft cards by requiring young men to always carry the cards.

“Everybody understood this was a way to jail people who burned their draft card,” Fenner said. “It didn’t matter. It stood up.”

Likewise, Fenner said laws aimed at Phelps might withstand court challenges precisely because of whom they are intended to control.

“Judges are humans,” he said. “They’re not going to have any sympathy for this guy.”

Oklahoma Rep. Paul Wesselhoft makes clear his sympathies lie with military families. A retired Army chaplain, Wesselhoft has introduced a bill that would ban any protest within 500 feet of a funeral site from two hours before the service starts until two hours after it is over. Violators would face a mandatory 30 days in jail.

“This comes when a family is in its most vulnerable state,” Wesselhoft said of the protests. “We can protect them a little without trampling free speech.”

Clay County, Tenn., adopted a ban on picketing funerals, and Indiana state Sen. Brent Steele has drafted similar legislation.

“In my family, if somebody had done that at one of our services, it wouldn’t have been pretty,” Steele said. “No family at their lowest emotional ebb should be put into this trick box of (being provoked into) clocking these guys and then getting sued.”

For years, the Phelps protesters stuck to waving placards at the funerals of people who died of AIDS or harassing public officials in Topeka and elsewhere who dared condemn them.

“For our folks, the shock value has mostly worn off,” said Ron Schlittler, deputy executive director of Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. “The answer to abuse of freedom of speech is for other people to speak up more vigorously.”

Vanda Neely, a doughnut shop employee who lives in South Haven, said of Phelps, “I think this bunch needs to go home. They’re not making any friends.”

Rather, they draw regular confrontations with American Legion bikers.

Bill Logan of Wichita was at his fourth funeral to counter the picketing. Each time, the veterans check with police and the family of the deceased to make sure they are welcome, Logan said.

“It’s the least we can do,” he said.

Inside the South Haven High School gymnasium, Sgt. Parker’s family and friends recalled an energetic and competitive 25-year-old father of two who died in Germany a few days after a roadside bomb went off near Balad, Iraq.

“He was not a victim,” Brig. Gen. Vern Miyagi said. “He was an American hero.”

Outside, men such as “Grizzly” Bob Jeter, a 51-year-old Army veteran from Wichita, stood vigil.

“If those losers are going to be somewhere,” Jeter said of the protesters, “there will be a whole lot more of us.”