How well do they work? What I mean is, have any been challenged in court, and is there a constitutional way to pull them off?
I can’t see how they’d be constitutional. It’s possible to keep protesters off the graveyard grounds if it were a private space, but they could just move to the street.
The current state of these laws is up in the air. The 4th Circuit ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church in the case of Snyder v. Phelps et al. This case will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall, and nobody knows where the chips will fall.
Personally, I think the laws can be constitutional if crafted properly, and I can easily find case law supporting this. However, I can’t predict what the Court will do in a case involving a balancing test of freedom of speech and religion - involving two different assemblies enjoying these rights. Where they will fall is anyone’s guess.
IMHO, any law that restricts your right to carry a sign or hand out pamphlets would be a violation of the first amendment. Plus any law that picks on certain (political/religious) viewpoints over others is also a violation.
However, the protesters must also be careful not to violate social norms laws about creating a disturbance, obstructing traffic or pedestrians, trespassing on private property, slander, libel, or anything else disruptive.
I was thinking that they might be able to have a certain distance that they couldn’t cross. I know that colleges can have designated free speech areas, so there is precedent.
There was a funeral for a soldier in my general area that had rumors that the WBC were going to come, and everyone was freaking out so much that they passed one of these laws. While I don’t think anyone from the WBC actually tested it*, I wondered if it would have held up.
*They’re apparently already testing it in one place, and that’s sufficient.
They could be constitutional if they limited protesters to a specific distance away from a funeral, AND if the distance was ‘reasonable’. Usually, courts have said the distance is way more than what would be reasonable (Judges tend to have a bias in favor of the First Amendment).
IMO, most of them are unconstitutional because they are intended to be – they want to forbid exactly what the First Amendment is intended to protect.
Their intent is specifically to prohibit speech that people find offensive, like protesting at a soldier’s funeral. If there were picketers in the same locations who were funeral home workers on strike, there would be nowhere near the same level of complaints, and the police would not arrest them, even if such a law was on the books.
Really? So, to your mind, a law that prohibits pamphleteering in a residential neighborhood at three in the morning violates the First Amendment?
Truthfully, the Westburo Baptist people have no concern with what is legal and what is not legal. For example, everyday they send my wife’s synagogue faxes about how all of us Jews are going to hell because God hates us. This is of course, completely illegal, but unless we want to press civil charges, there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve filed an FCC complete, but they’ll ignore that.
As for these laws, they can probably be constitutional. You do have freedom of speech, but the state can have some say of exactly when and where it can be practiced. For example, most cities require parade permits or hold that protests must be held in certain zones, but not others. As long as they are fairly reasonable, these regulations can stand.
There is nothing preventing the Westboro people from protesting, but there can be some regulation to allow those at the funeral the ability to hold the funeral in peace and dignity. Many rights are a careful balancing act between two different groups.
Rather pointless. Who would be wandering a residential neighborhood at 3am to take your pamphlet?
Huh? No, when there aren’t people around, pamphleteers tend to knock on doors, something that, by itself, is also not illegal. But I sure don’t want it happening at 3 in the morning.
There are plenty of laws that already exist that are designed to thwart offensive speech. The scope of the first amendment is not absolute.
And I would complain about funeral home protesters too, except that I wouldn’t be stupid enough to schedule something that requires the decorum of a funeral at a picket site. If they decided striking that day, I bet people would still be upset that they were ruining the funeral. They might avoid violence, but that’s only because protesters like that would realize it’s not in their best interest to provoke those people to violence in the first place.
IMO, there is a difference between being free to say what you want, and being free to harass people, which is what these people do. Their speech gets awfully close to fighting words, and their actions are often quite threatening.
Knocking on doors at 3AM could be construed as unreasonable enough to create a disturbance(“Disturbing the peace”). Walking down the street and handing out pamphlets to passing drunks at 3AM is your right. I don’t think any judge would suggest that the “invitation” of your walkway and door applies to unsolicited 3AM prosletyzing. 7AM on a weekend? Maybe. 10AM - pretty well legal. I bet the word “reasonable” comes up there sometimes.
Don’t also forget that the littering component may come into it, if you are handing out pamphlets that others immediately throw away, you are contributing to a nuisance.
No, sorry, but that’s been covered in courts many times: only the person who tosses the litter is guilty of littering. After all, they could have declined to take the pamphlet from you if they didn’t want it.
One of the main contributors to this case law has been fast food restaurants. Because their bags & boxes are frequently found littering the streets around their stores, they have often been charged with littering. But they always beat those charges, since they are not the ones tossing the litter.
Courts have upheld laws creating limited demonstrator-free zones around clinics providing abortions. I don’t have cases at hand, but something like 50-foot zones have been upheld, while larger ones have been held to be unduly restrictive. (I don’t remember the exact numbers off-hand. There were other details to the form of the zone as well.) A sufficiently narrow no-protest zone might hold up for funerals.
But I recall Toronto (admittedly unaffected by Free Speech issues) at one time required permits and would restrict pamphleteers whose products did produce a litter nuisance in the general area. Not sure how that bylaw would hold up under current Charter of Rights legisslation, but it would be reasonable to expect the pamphleteer to commit to some sort of cleanup and post a bond to that effect.
As for protests and distances… Since many abortion clinic protests do not limit themselves to simple free speech, it’s not unreasonable to end up with injunctions against individual offenders who descend to harassment, obstructing traffic, etc. But you can’t simply refuse to allow normal protest.
Couldn’t the city just offer to rent limited property rights to a reasonably large area around the site of the funeral for fifty bucks to anyone involved in a lawful burial and include within those property rights the right to prevent others from demonstrating against your funeral (and by prevent, I mean prevent in the same sense that you prevent it on your personal property, which is by calling th cops).
It could help raise a little bit of money for the cities, and considering the state of municipal budgeting, that probably isn’t a terrible thing.
Would that include renting out the public sidewalks & streets in the vicinity for private use only? Because I can see problems with that.
Many of the funeral homes & churches in my hometown are right in residential neighborhoods, with houses or other businesses right next to them. Wouldn’t they object if their access is restricted by this? The 2 largest funeral homes face each other, directly across a major street in town. Shutting that street down would certainly mess up traffic around town.
Normally, to shut down streets you need a parade permit. Those cost much more than $50 (and don’t include the sidewalks, etc.). Giving a permit so much cheaper to funerals seems legally questionable under “equal treatment under the laws”.
And again, what you are trying to do is to find some sneaky way of undercutting the freedoms that are guaranteed by our First Amendment. Aren’t you better off doing as my mother taught me as a child: just ignore those who are making fools of themself in public.
I like the current crop of ways to deal with Phelps and his lackeys; hilarious, mocking counter protesters. godhatesshrimp.com is a classic one. I love the pirate protesters! Another was the bus of queens that followed the WBC around on their protesting rounds. It’s a great way to tell them “You’re free to say what you want, but not only does it not bother us, but we don’t take you seriously”. Ignoring them completely would be better, but no one’s going to do that.
I think the best solution is to just have people beat the shit out of the protesters. What jury would convict?
I can’t help but be a little cynical about how it became a big deal for most people when the Phelpses started bringing their protests to the funerals of servicemembers.