Distasteful as their message is, I believe in free speech, so they have a right to voice their opinion. I also have the right to passively prevent them from disrupting a fallen soldier’s funeral. I may even apply a passive fist here and there in that circumstance. At heart, I am against war, and violence, but I do feel that the right of families to grieve for a lost relative is of greater importance as a representation of our humanity than my trivial hope for a peaceful world.

Bottom line: Go ahead and open your pie hole, but be prepared for whatever I decide to stick into it.

I mostly agree: sick as these fucks are, we can’t claim to support freedom of speech and then say that it only applies to certain types of speech.

If Westboro is planning to desecrate a funeral in your area, gather your friends and neighbors to attend, and show your support for those who grieve and your disdain for this repugnant church. Without violence, of course. We are / should be / have to be better than these vile asswipes, soup to nuts.

Not all speech is protected. Mnay jurisdictions including the U.S., have Stare Decisis that hate speechis not necessarily protected under Fredom of Expression

R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul “As explained earlier ... the reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey. ... [St. Paul] has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas. That possibility would alone be enough to render the ordinance presumptively invalid, but St. Paul’s comments and concessions in this case elevate the possibility to a certainty.”

The decision was not an absolute win as the Westboro clan must stay a precribed distance from the ceremony.  Of course private cememtaries absolutely control speech on their property.  In the case of the military funerals I beleive the cemetaries are Federal or State lands/parks i.e. public lands.

Reading the opinions of the Supreme Court is frequently enlightening. Here I learned, as Tap refers to above, that the Westboro protestors are 1,000 feet away from the ceremony. Only the tops of their signs are visible to the funeral attendees, and then only as they drive into and out of the cemetery. The victims in this case only saw the protestors later on TV.

On the other hand, as Alito points out, the S.C. majority’s reasoning is largely based on their assertion that the protest was directed at a public (not a private) concern.

Roberts wrote, “And even if a few of the signs — such as ‘You’re Going to Hell’ and ‘God Hates You’ — were viewed as containing messages related to Matthew Snyder or the Snyders specifically, that would not change the fact that the overall thrust and dominant theme of Westboro’s demonstration spoke to broader public issues.” So does that mean a protest group has license to carry one or two offensive signs that cause a person severe distress as long as most of their other signs pertain to some public issue? And how do you define “overall thrust and dominant theme”? Can 70% of the signs be benign and 30% offensive? Or is the split 80-20? How about 60-40?

I guess I kind of see Alito’s point.