March 07, 2011
Reverend Fred Phelps
The WBC’s numerous and twice-as-obnoxious counter-protesters are assholes, too. Watch as the “anti-hate” contingent smashes in their van windows. Observe the compassionate, tolerant, and highly literate comments beneath that video…
we should kill all the members of this church and say it was gods judgement
WBC + Well aimed 21 gun salute = Problem solved
Next time the come to my terf… I’ll kill them, most likely be found no guilty, get a metal, then gather millions of americans to picked each of their funerals..
someone should really just drive by and shoot these cunts…they’d picket less and they do need to die!
If I were in the crowd, you can bet a few razor-sharp axes would be thrown at them.
They should’ve molotov cocktailed the van and burnt those fucking parasites alive.
A brick? How ‘bout a Glock!
…etc., on and on forever. There are over 5,000 comments, mostly of a similarly restrained and civil tone.
Both sides of this conflict”the Phelps clan and the people who throw bricks at them”are acting like assholes. The brick-throwing constitutes assault, but I”m glad the law allows both parties to be assholes.
I consider myself a free-speech absolutist, and I”m confident I could sit in a room with Stanley Fish for days on end with him spitting out everything that popped into his sick, lonely mind without me ever once saying, “Stop”nobody should ever say that.” Nothing any one of you could ever say would be beyond my “Pale.” All I ever care about is whether it’s true.
In cases where someone maliciously and falsely accuses someone of, say, stealing wooden nickels from five-year-old Hasidic children, there are libel and slander laws against that, and for good reason. The “right” to free speech never included a “right” to falsely accuse.
Nor should anyone have the right to foist their opinions on me. No one should be able to bust into my kitchen at 3AM to express their views about banking fraud. One should always be free to speak, but one should always have the option not to listen.
And that’s why the Supreme Court, even that new pair of female middle linebackers, ruled correctly in the Phelps case. The “God Hates Fags” gang obeyed all laws and were never closer than 1,000 feet to the funeral. The grieving father who sued them said he only noticed “the tops of the picketers” signs when driving to the funeral, but did not learn what was written on the signs until watching a news broadcast later that night.” Ironically, if the media hadn”t blown up the protest into a news story, Mr. Snyder never would have known what the signs said. So at least in this case, the Phelpses were not getting up in people’s faces and did not disrupt the funeral. They were exercising their speech rights without being coercive about it. Case closed.
The chief battering ram being used to peck away at free speech since the 1960s has been a pretense of civil rights”a sweet-sounding concept which in practice has meant “protecting the easily bruised feelings of everyone except heterosexual white males.” Again and again, the paid agents of social re-jiggering remind us that “speech has limits” and that the Founding Fathers didn”t intend for the First Amendment to allow us to say “nigger.” The problem with that charming hypothesis is that the Founding Fathers probably said “nigger” all the time. We”d all get along far better if we didn”t care about one another’s feelings nor what others felt about us. So everyone, for the sake of our collective sanity, get over your feelings, drop the picket signs, quit the griping, lighten up, pull the 2×4 out of your ass, and get a sense of humor. The moment you do, all this wretched, despicable “hate” will seem funnier than you ever imagined it could be.
