Hasn’t it been held that there can be reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech? For example, I am allowed to talk about how much I love the Obama health care plan, but I can’t stand in the middle of I-95 and say it. Nor can I stand on the public sidewalk at shout it at your home at 3am.
In this case, why can’t it be ruled that Phelps has a right to say these things, but saying them near a funeral is improper?
Well, for one thing, the rules against yelling your message from the middle of I-95 or outside someone’s house at 3 in the morning are content-neutral. That is, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, because the content of the speech does not form the basis for those rules. Instead, the rules are based very specifically on issues of safety and noise ordinances. If we’re going to restrict people’s speech in any way related to content, the bar has to be set really high.
Can you really not see the difference here? It’s as obvious as dogs’ balls.
For another thing, the protest under review in this trial was made in accordance with all local laws and ordinances, and was so far away from the funeral that the dead soldier’s father—the plaintiff in the lawsuit—never actually even saw the protesters and their signs on the day of the funeral itself.
The Court of Appeals ruling, which overturned the original award to Snyder, noted very specifically:
Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F. 3d 206 - Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit 2009
Thanks for the answer. I understand what you are saying, but it seems that we do this in respect to the nature of the message as well. One thing that immediately comes to my is anti-abortion protesting. You have the right to say whatever you want against abortion, however doing so near a clinic is illegal but it interferes with the legal functions that are taking place there.
^Any such rules can’t be based on the content of the speech. Pro-choice protesters are also forbidden to interfere with people entering a clinic.
That’s a neat trick. I suppose that the law also forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges.
And there’s also the fact that abortion protesters are not actually prevented from protesting near clinics. I see them all the time.
Right. The so-called bubble zones near abortion clinics are actually pretty small, and don’t prevent the patient from seeing and hearing the protesters. For the most part, the laws simply prevent the protesters from getting right up in the face of the patients.
For example, in Madsen v. Women’s Health Center, a 1994 Supreme Court case, the Florida law under consideration prohibited protests within 36 feet of a clinic, and also prohibited loud noises within earshot of the clinic and images that could be seen from the clinic. It also prohibited protesters from approaching patients within 300 of the clinic. The Supreme Court upheld the 36-foot rule, and the loud noises rule, but struck down the displaying images rule and the 300-foot rule.
In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled against a New York law providing a 15-foot moving bubble around patients going to and from abortion clinics, but upheld the part of the law that adopted a 15-foot fixed bubble around the clinic itself. The court opposed the moving bubble on the grounds of difficult enforcement, and on the grounds that it interfered too much with rights of peaceful protest on public property.
When the Supreme Court did uphold a floating buffer zone, in Hill v. Colorado, it was only to prevent protesters from coming within 8 feet of a patient when the patient is within 100 feet of a clinic. So it’s not exactly a law that prevents abortion patients from hearing the anti-abortion message. In fact, it’s main purpose was to prevent physical obstruction of access to the clinic.
Hill v. Colorado was a 6-3 decision, and the dissenters in that case included justices from both sides of the political spectrum, with Scalia and Thomas, but also Kennedy opposing the ruling.
(The First Amendment Center has a short summary of these cases.)
So the whole abortion clinic example is, i think, a bad one for this case, because while the Court has found that certain limitations on speech can be applied to protests at abortion clinics, none of those limitations are so strict as to actually prevent the people who enter and leave the clinic from hearing or seeing the anti-abortion message.
Not one of the abortion cases prohibits protesters from standing hundreds of feet away and peacefully holding up signs, which is what the Westboro group was doing in their protest of the Snyder funeral. As has already been discussed, the protesters were so far away that Snyder’s father never even saw or heard them on the day of the funeral.
I read an interesting article in the NY Times today. It mentioned that 11 of his children are lawyers. Phelps himself was disbarred in 79.
Can I ask a bit of a hijacky Q from a GQ perspective?
Does anyone have a serious, factual explanation for why Phelps et al. think this is an effective way (the most effective way) of making their point? I get it, America is being punished for tolerance of homosexuality.
So we’ll gain converts by disrupting the funerals of . . . overwhelmingly non-homosexual soldiers, who don’t have any role in making or enforcing domestic policy (more than any other voter), thereby sending an f-u to the military (one of the most conservative organizations in the country, and one that is still not particularly accommodating of “fags”) and to military families (again, often a conservative group probably otherwise sympathetic to social-conservative arguments). How did they think this was going to work, and how does this amount to speaking truth to power or whatever? Aren’t there an infinitude of bathhouses or liberal courthouses or San Francisco City Council members’ houses that would be a much more apt/sympathetic/effective way to stick it to (see what I did there?) the “fags?”
The only other possibility I can imagine is that it’s some sort of performance art/attention whoring, but they don’t seem sophisticated enough to get such meta concepts. Their whole performance approaches . . . camp.
[/hijack]
My wag: They don’t really care whether they change minds they mostly want to demonstrate their faith and prove to their god that they’re the only people worth saving n
I think acsenray is right. If you watch interviews with them and documentaries like the Louis Theroux one, you’ll see that they’re quite upfront that they’re not protesting to win converts.
If you go to this website, you can read all about Phelps, and the whole sordid story about what it was like growing up in the family. Four of his kids left – unfortunately one of his daughters ended up committing suicide.
As other people have sort of said, their purpose is not to convert others. Their purpose is to strengthen their internal ties, to show each other that they can only trust each other, that they are against the whole world. That is how cults work.
Well, there are plenty of cults that do all that, and do a lot of proselytizing also. Scientology comes to mind.