# Mississippi hands Westboro it's ass. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 28, 2011, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986 "2011-04-28T01:43:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Number](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/number/32/242_2.png) [@Number](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Number)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/141 "2011-05-01T00:33:39Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > Just curious, have the Phelps ever protested in NYC or Chicago? Well there are certain sections of New York, Reverend, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/142 "2011-05-01T02:56:38Z")
> [@Number](#): > > Well there are certain sections of New York, Reverend, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade. That I wouldn’t advise _anyone_ to invade. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/143 "2011-05-01T05:06:25Z")
The Illinois Nazis _won_ their lawsuit. If the WBC had its own political party, would there still be this debate here? In case someone doesn’t know what I’m talking about: [_National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie) essentially held that the First Amendment allows a bunch of Nazis to hold a rally, swastikas, literature, costumes, and all, through a suburb of Chicago that was, and likely still is, home to a large number of Holocaust survivors. (As it turns out, the Nazis _didn’t_ march through Skokie after all, but that isn’t entirely relevant to the precedent that court case set.) How political is a bunch of Nazis parading through a neighborhood full of old Jews? The NSPA wasn’t doing it to get votes: They did it because the City of Chicago banned all political rallies in Marquette Park, where they had rallied before, due to their rallies. It was a calculated and spiteful publicity stunt from a group that has no political power in this country, and certainly didn’t have any power back then. So, is it political speech? Is it hate speech? If Fred Phelps attaches a political party to the WBC, and enters candidates to represent that party in elections, but otherwise keeps doing what he’s been doing, would that change anyone’s position here? ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/144 "2011-05-01T05:30:32Z")
As there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, there is Good, Evil, and the Law. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/145 "2011-05-01T06:50:30Z")
I support the laws that protect Phelps but I’ve also been known to drive 70 in a 65 zone. If he wants to incite people to riot then may his god welcome the parts of his body in the order of their arrival. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/146 "2011-05-01T08:28:24Z")
> [@Magiver](#): > > If he wants to incite people to riot He doesn’t. He wants to incite people to feed his martyr complex, isolate his family to increase his power over them, and do things he can sue them over and make money from. It’s also vaguely possible he wants to go out in a blaze of (what he’d consider) glory when he provokes someone into killing him. It would validate his whole philosophy and give the people who agree with him a martyr to rally around. Fighting him short of going in, putting him in prison or the graveyard, and forcibly destroying his entire family is only going to make him stronger, and doing _that_ isn’t worth it. He isn’t worth it. Our principles are more valuable than one sad little man and his abused\* family. \*(I doubt we could prove child abuse here. It would be a very neat way to take him out if we could, but, again, bending or breaking our rules just to crush that little insect is not a good compromise.) Why? Because it’s precedent. Both law and morality work on precedent. If we create precedent that says ‘We will bend or break our own laws if you annoy us enough, even if you do not do anything worse than annoy us’, we’ve just given all of our political enemies precisely the weapon they need to shut down our favorite groups. We’ve seen what happens when that weapon is in play. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/147 "2011-05-01T14:18:46Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > How political is a bunch of Nazis parading through a neighborhood full of old Jews? Well, it would certainly be illegal for a few thousand Jews to rush any protection they might have and beat the crap out of the Nazis or worse. But would it be morally justified? Yeah. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/148 "2011-05-01T19:39:13Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Well, I figured that’s what _you’d_ say, but you’re punching at a much higher weight than the person I was talking to. > > Well, in theory, it’s “redeeming value” would be that it would convince people to turn away from homosexuality, and support laws criminalizing homosexual activities. In practice, I suspect it largely has the opposite effect, but simply because the speaker is incompetent at achieving his goals does not justify removing his ability to speak. > > I think this is a slight bit of topic drift here, because the issue is not protesting at the funerals of dead homosexuals, it’s the protesting of funerals of dead soldiers. As I noted up thread, Phelps spent years and years protesting at the funerals of dead gays, and there were no supreme court trials or debates on the floor of congress about it. It’s only when Phelps started targeting military funerals that it suddenly became a national issue. This strongly suggests to me that the problem is not the action itself, but the target. It was socially acceptable for Phelps to show up at Matthew Sheppard’s funeral with a “God hates fags” sign - or at least, not so far outside of the mainstream that anyone outside of the gay community and its allies was willing to do anything about it. This says to me that the objection to Phelps’ actions is ultimately content-based: it’s okay to say that a dead queer is burning in hell, but it’s not okay to say a dead soldier is burning in hell, or, worse, that a dead soldier might be queer. The thing is, funerals for soldiers are more often national events. I don’t think that, if they were protesting at heterosexual civilian graves for some reason, that it would have invoked ire, either. I never even heard about these guys until they started doing soldiers funerals, true. But, at the same time, what I heard about them was that they were saying “God hates Fags.” I didn’t even know they were anti-military for a long time (relatively speaking). I don’t doubt that the higher number of homophobes to anti-military people in this county played a significant part, but I don’t think it is the be all end all. BTW, my local area actually did something when there was a funeral nearby–they created a law saying you had to be X feet away from the site of a funeral when protesting. Why? Because the people demanded it. And the site wasn’t visited. It wasn’t a fakeout, either–it wasn’t even on their online agenda. The whole problem started completely from rumor. That’s a hell of a lot of power. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/149 "2011-05-01T20:30:21Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > He doesn’t. He wants to incite people to feed his martyr complex, isolate his family to increase his power over them, and do things he can sue them over and make money from. It’s also vaguely possible he wants to go out in a blaze of (what he’d consider) glory when he provokes someone into killing him. It would validate his whole philosophy and give the people who agree with him a martyr to rally around. I laughed out loud reading this. He is a force of one with a cowering brainwashed family surrounding him. He’s an embarrassment to the community his “Church” is in. He will never be a martyr anymore than any thug who dies in a bar fight after poking the wrong guy. He does incite people to riot and has been attacked before. It’s just a matter of time before he shows up at a military funeral and someone kills the lot of em. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2011, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986/150 "2011-05-01T22:34:24Z")
If someone does kill the lot of them I hope they’d throw the book at them. No offense of speech justifies murder, legally or morally, but particularly the patently ridiculous and meaningless speech of the Phelpses. Anyone who seriously contemTes killing them based on their shenanigans doesn’t belong in a civilized society. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-hands-westboro-its-ass/579986.md?page=7)