Written by Joshua Patton

When Westboro Baptist Church burst onto the national scene in the nineties, I didn’t quite know what to make of them.  They gave the media access into their church, inner sanctum, and were not shy in the interview.  Of course, they made the news because of their decision to picket the funeral of a gay man who had died of AIDS.  Even to my vulgar teenage sensibilities this seemed distasteful, but I admit that I did give them the benefit of the doubt.  I assumed that, while hateful and crazy, the motivation behind the protest was that of religious conviction.  When they picketed the funeral of Specialist Carrie French, a young woman whom I served with in Iraq, I was outraged and that outrage has not diminished with each subsequent military funeral they have protested.  Still they had a flimsy justification for their actions: the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy allowed homosexuals to serve in the ranks of the military thus incurring the wrath of Fred Phelps’s homophobic god.
 
Only, when it was announced that the WBC was planning to picket the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards, this paper-thin façade of religious conviction began to tear away to reveal a much more understandable motivation.  Edwards, while supportive of gay marriage in comments to the media, did not exactly champion gay rights.  So what drew the ire of Phelps’s anti-homosexual zealots?  A statement released by the church only mentions that she meddled “with matters of the womb,”  through the use of fertility treatments and makes vague assertions of her sinfulness.  When these vituperous hicks announced that they would protest the funeral of Christina Taylor-Green (killed in the Arizona shooting, she was a girl merely two weeks older than my own nine year-old daughter), that religious conviction had little to do with this became markedly clear.  They hunger only for headlines and controversy.
 
Arizona responded by enacting legislation making it illegal for them to protest, as have a number of other states, but these laws never make it passed judicial review because such laws both limit their free speech and violates the establishment clause, because these WBC swine wrap their hate under the cloak of religion.  They will most likely keep winning these lawsuits, until one of their cases makes it to the US Supreme Court.  In fact, the WBC has made quite a bit of money through damages from lawsuits filed because of these laws.  As they win legal victory after legal victory, they train their sights on different targets, in the hope of generating new news coverage and new lawsuits and legal fees for their in-house Phelps Chartered Law Firm. 
 
It seems that the battle against these lunatic degenerates is not one that can be won legally.  While none of the founders of our nation ever dreamed that Free Speech would include blatant disrespect for the dead and those grieving him or her, it seems that, so far, the courts disagree.  According to an article by Mara Gay, Doug Herzog a law professor at the University of Michigan says that “the First Amendment does not confer the right to speak anywhere at any time.”  Yet, that is only speculation. 
 
While not a law professor, if I were allowed to indulge in a little speculation, I wonder if perhaps we are going about this the wrong way.  When their protests and the subsequent lawsuits, their own and those against them such as the lawsuit filed against them by Albert Snyder, are covered in the media – we are giving them exactly what they want.  Like schoolyard bullies, I wonder if we merely ignored them if they might not just lose interest and go away.  It may be unrealistic – considering the sensational nature of the media and the raw emotions felt by the communities in which they protest. 
 
Don’t believe me?  Consider this; WBC has announced that it will not protest the little girl’s funeral, because it has been given airtime in Phoenix and Tucson to spread their message over the airwaves.  That is all they want.  Monetary gains from lawsuits aside, it has always been about publicity and the vanity of Phelps and his ilk.  Like most human beings, they just want to be heard, be on TV, and like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, they can feel your hate and it only makes them stronger. 
 
* The opinions expressed with in this article are those of Joshua Patton and do not necessarily reflect those of the rest of the staff here at Veteran Journal