The bad guys win, and that's ... good...

This is what it means to have a nation of laws, not men¹. A nation in which the rules protect even those who espouse different viewpoints. There may not be a more unlikeable, loathsome group than Fred Phelps and his "flock" at the Westboro (KA) Baptist (not really, because Baptists are Christians and these people aren't) (not-really-a) Church but free speech is free speech. As the SCOTUS ruled...

The First Amendment protects hateful protests at military funerals, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in an 8-to-1 decision.

“Speech is powerful,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain.”

But under the First Amendment, he went on, “we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.” Instead, the national commitment to free speech, he said, requires protection of “even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

If the first amendment doesn't serve to protect unpopular (in this case, utterly loathsome) speech from unpopular (despicable, heinous, irresponsible, vile) people, then it really doesn't serve much of a purpose. There's no cost to protecting, or even need to protect, popular speech. The Fred Phelps traveling road show is obviously an abomination, but as long as it sticks to speech, it's a constitutionally protected abomination. The court got this one right, even if no one likes this outcome.


¹ - A title that we, unfortunately, far too seldom live up to.

Where was Phelps?

We were braced for unpleasant company this morning. For some reason, the Westboro Baptist Church had announced their plans to picket outside Park Street Church this morning. I understand that we're only 100 yards from the Massachusetts State House, but there is no reason I'm aware of for them to single out Park Street among the churches of Massachusetts. That's neither here nor there - for whatever reason, they were expected outside our doors at 8:00 this morning, to be followed by visits to two other churches in downtown Boston.

They didn't show up.

It was there on their website - I checked it earlier in the week (though I'll never link to it). But on Wednesday, a jury awarded $11 million to the family of a slain US marine on the grounds that "the family's privacy had been invaded by a Kansas church whose members waved anti-gay signs at the funeral."

And I'm wondering - did that put a damper on their activities? Not only did they not show up in Massachusetts this morning where they had announced that they would be (or anywhere else, at least not that I can see), but the website itself is down this afternoon. Has the family of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder put this loathesome group out of business?

Probably not, but it would be wonderful if it had...