I first heard of the Westboro Baptist Church about two years ago. A neighboring high school was putting on a production of the Laramie Project, a play about a gay man’s murder. The Church decided to protest outside the school on Saturday night. However the community came together to stand against them.
The Westboro Baptist Church is now awaiting a Supreme Court decision. The group was used after demonstrating at a Marine’s funeral. They had a legal right to be there and a constitutional right to say whatever they wanted. But does the grieving father have a right to mourn in peace? With rights come responsibilities. Human decency should be one of these responsibilities. We all have the right to share our opinion but we should think about when and how we do it.
2 comments:
A difficult challenge for the Court. Free speech of harassment?
Its an interesting case. How far do the constitutional boundaries of free speech go? It feels insensitive for these people to ruin this soldier's funeral, and I certainly don't approve of their actions. But at the same time, if the court rules against the "harassing" party, isn't it a violation of the first amendment? Does the constitution protect all types of free speech, or is there a moral code on what can be said, and by whom? Where is the line drawn in future cases?
This could raise even bigger issues in the future. If the Government has the right to play the moral police and to silence those who say anything offensive, intolerant, or discriminatory, then our civil rights are in danger. George Orwell's 1984 illustrates this problem: if the government can control what is spoken, they can easily take control of virtually any other aspect of citizen’s lives. Opponents of gay marriage, abortion or gun control, for example, could be easily silenced by a liberal president, so that drastic laws may be set in place over a short period of time. Obviously this is not what democracy should be, as it is not representative of what the nation as a whole wants at the time.
This is more of a theoretical argument than a practical one, as this shift in censorship most likely wouldn’t happen overnight as a result of this one case, but it should be considered. Once we open the “Pandora’s Box” that gives the government the right to censor speech, it will be extremely difficult to reverse the trend.
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