The U.S. Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, upheld the First Amendment rights of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka Kansas to engage in a hateful protest at military funerals carrying signs with disgusting messages such as “America is Doomed,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and “God Hates #.”
As much as I despise what the Westboro Church stands for, I believe that the Supreme Court reached the right result. I see it as an important precedent to be used in the future against lawsuits from Islamist groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that are trying to use the courts to punish what they consider hate speech and defamation against Islam.
I confess that in reaching this conclusion, I have gone through an evolution in my own thinking and have reversed the position that I expressed on this case in an earlier column. The reasoning of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion was compelling.
The Supreme Court case arose from the Westboro Church’s protest at the funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew A. Snyder, who had died in Iraq. The protest followed what the church had done at hundreds of other funerals.
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