More on freedom of speech, hatred, and the definition of violence.

My friend Walter Carlton pointed me to this article in the Washington Post today. It’s about the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, which is basically one family, that of pastor Fred Phelps, and their hateful protests at the funerals of soldiers and others, holding signs with slogans like “God hates fags” and “Thank God for dead soldiers.”

It creates an only-in-America quandary: whether the freedom of speech is so powerfully woven into the nation's fabric that it protects one family's right to vile and hurtful protest at the very moment of another family's most profound grief.

First of all, it should be clear to anyone that this family represents the worst kind of distortion of Christianity. I think the only people who would claim it doesn’t are militant atheists who cling to equally distorted portrayals of church and religion in general. The article starts with this:

A filmmaker several years ago tracked Shirley Phelps-Roper and her family members as they went about praising God for killing U.S. soldiers and picketing their funerals - their way of putting the nation on notice about the Almighty's wrath.

He called the documentary "The Most Hated Family in America," and Phelps-Roper had only one real regret.

"If he had just called it, 'The Most Hated Family in the World,' " she said. In the last hours of the last days, she explained, Jesus said his chosen will be "hated by all men."

It would seem that this family has embraced the kind of illogic that says the more they are denounced and hated, the more righteous they must necessarily be. They remind me of stories of ancient heretical monks who engaged in all manner of lewd and immoral behavior as a way of showing their faith in God’s forgiveness. Nuts.

This case seems to get at the very heart of the matter I posted about yesterday – that of the difficult balance between freedom of speech on the one hand, and some of the less-tangible but no-less-crucial freedoms implied by the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Does freedom of expression trump justice and equality for all?

Also, it brings up the question of the relationship between words and violence, and indeed what, ultimately, constitutes violence. How likely is the inflammatory language of the Phelps family to lead to physical violence? Do their protests alone constitute violence inasmuch as they cause real harm to their targets? “Snyder (the father of the soldier whose funeral is highlighted in the article) said the stress from the events made him physically sick, worsened his diabetes and deepened his depression.” Can that causality be proven? Would the speech still be protected?

But of course, free speech protections are specifically meant to protect speech that others find troubling, and deeply so. Snyder gets at the contradiction at the core of the debate:

"It is an insult to every American who has died for the freedom of speech," Snyder said in a recent interview. "No one in the history of the nation has ever protested like this. Don't tell me that my son died for that."

While of course we know what he means, and as challenging as the Phelps family makes it to suggest, might this not be exactly what freedom of speech is about? We allow Nazi groups to form and march and publicly state their views. How do WWII veterans who lost friends in Europe feel about that? Is there a line we can draw somewhere between a Nazi rally and a Westboro Baptist Church protest?

What’s ironic to me is that, while some ways I think this case really gets at the core of the debate on free speech, in other ways, it almost seems a no-brainer. It is perplexing to consider how the government and courts have come down on these issues in recent years. How is it at political events the government can now set up "free speech zones" and keep protesters (often protesting the same wars the Phelps family claim to be protesting) away from public figures and events, but at private funerals -- of US soldiers killed in war, even -- the courts have decided they can't keep these horrible idiots away from mourners?