Rev Phelps and Free Speech
I'm sure everyone has heard of Rev Phelps and his minions who like to protest gay funerals.
Recently, he has ratched up the loathsome factor by ten. He is now protesting funerals of servicemembers saying that their deaths are due to God's displeasure.
According to The Washington Post, 5 states are considering bills that will put limits on the protests; including 300-500 feet zones around the funeral to keep protestors away.
While I am sympathetic to such bills, I am uncomfortable with the limiting of free speech that the bills result in. I have a feeling most Americans look upon Phelps with disdain and I'm not too afraid of his extremism.
Now, If I could do the legislation, I would just make it legal to respond to Phelps' protest by kicking his ass. Seems fair to me.
3 Comments:
Phelps of course being the same guy who claims to "hate fags" and yet displays an inordinate fascination with "drippings from the Devil's own penis. Which of course opens up a whole 'nother can of theological worms which damn Phelps, but that's another subject for another day.
Personally, I don't see how the right to free speech guarantees that one has a right to speak anywhere they wish. Especially if exercizing it in that manner infringes on another's rights.
I think that a common sense approach would be to say that one has the right to speak freely without *undue* hardship being consigned as a condition.
Phelps has a perfect right to protest publically against dead soldiers. Denying him the opportunity to invade and disrupt a funeral does not prevent him from publically speaking freely. It simply prevents him from doing it in the slight fraction of 1% of the available public land on which to stage such a protest. Which of course leaves him with more than 99% of the public land in which to protest without constraint.
So what you are saying is that it isn't a good thing to pound his head with a baseball bat?
I wonder IF Rev Phelps of Westboro church might be a closet queer ?
That is just curiosity . Whether Rev Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church is a latent homosexual queer has not yet been proven either way (as far as I know) .
However the bizarre, cultish, cretinous, crass and un-patriotic character of him in his followers is apparently well noted .
And if he is an anti-Semite maybe sombody ought to quote to him John 4:22 where Jesus says 'slavation is of the Jews '. Perhaps Rev Philips is to busy reading tracts from the followers of John Calvin to have time to read John 4:22
Rev Phelps is an embarassment to more conscientious homophobes .
Cretins like Phelps are a sign of how degenerate this present weird, media-saturated decade has become .
If it isn't Phelps and those of that loutish ilk it is the trendy/yuppie-minded postmodernists who want to respect every opinion --regardless of how unfounded it is --including the riff-raff opinions of people like Rev Phelps --merely for the sake of respecting opinions or balance . If it isn't one form of culture garbage it is another ..
Somehwere there's got to be noble, beautiful events going on ...but with the deluge of ugly coarse , crass, earthy Garbage --it's hard not to feel like they really have paved paradise and put up a parking lot .
All that said, pray for Rev Phelps that he and his scripture -twisting followers repent soon .
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