Military Funeral Picketing partially banned, WBC are tools.

[Use_Imagination_here]

You may not like it but it does , freedom of speech doesn?t stop whenever you start to feel uncomfortable and the first amendment doesn?t disappear when a funeral is in session . they have the right to say whatever they want regardless of whether it offends you or not, because if first amendment means anything then it means the right to tell people what they don?t want to hear, even if it?s wrong .

What if the situation was flipped what if a law was passed that said you are no longer allowed to critic the WBC to their face , you can do it anywhere else but you aren?t allowed to say anything to them while they are picketing funerals, what then?
I?d imagine you?d be outraged, and rightfully so . what makes it ok to do it to them ?

Yeah what they do is fucked up and you should call them out on it but censorship only makes them feel more like heroic underdogs fighting for justice.

This law does also mean you can't go and picket WBC funerals with highly offensive placards.

Personally am pretty ok with this - freedom of speech is a good thing, but upholding it when it is used to grossly violate another's rights is somewhat short-sighted.

True, but let?s not pretend that this law was passed to protect them or to stop other people from doing the same this was clearly passed as a way to sensor them . Because what they were doing was completely legal , fucked up , but legal. But because people didn?t like what they had to say so they decided to pass a law banned it. and im sorry but if first amendment means anything then it means the right to tell people what they don?t want to hear, even if it?s wrong .

If I got a megaphone and went to the street 20 feet from your house, and proceeded to call you a noob ass ****** for the entire night because you beat me at call of duty, you'd call the police and have me arrested because there are laws against that and there should be laws against that. If I went to the internet and used an entire blog entry for calling you a noob fag asshole you'd probably never find out about it and probably barely care if you did. This isn't censoring people's opinions, this is telling people to express their opinions about 250 yards in that direction without disturbing private events (in case you want to argue against the words private event, I wasn't using it as an official or legal term, just to describe an event that is private).

 

[Zoe Castillo]

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[Kargathia]

Spoiler: snip snap

Laws can and should change all the time, based on the changes in the society they are meant to protect. It's already quite idiotic - and completely contrary to the wishes of the ones who drafted it - that your constitution hasn't had an update in the last 150 years, even though parts of it are hopelessly outdated.

Errr...what you said is laughably wrong.

Our Constitution has been updated 27 times, and as recently as 1992.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States

It was intended to be static except when changes are obviously needed and agreed upon by a super-majority of the states. Aside from the first ten, which were passed as a set and were intended to limit the power of the federal government to prevent federal abuse, few changes were made while the founding fathers were still alive until after the Civil War 60 years later.

What constitutes a basic right is not something that Congress should be able to vote on from day-to-day, it belongs under a Constitutional protection that would require said super-majority state approval to eliminate. This was done on purpose to prevent corruption and to prevent Congress from taking power from the states illegally.

If it was really such an obviously needed change, then it should be incredibly easy to get an amendment passed to limit free speech in this way. That is what the founding fathers would have intended. They would not have intended for us to ignore the Supreme Law of the Land when there is a perfectly legal method of fixing this 'hole.' It took an amendment to give women the right to vote, and to make 18 the legal voting age, and those were in recent years, so it shouldn't be too hard to amend the constitution once again to allow states to decide for themselves how to treat funerals. If such a change were made, THEN it would cease to be an unconstitutional infringement of Phelp's free speech to bar him from protesting.

You don't even seem to recognize that the Constitution by itself does not give a large amount of power to the federal government, because most of the power was supposed to be left to the states, somewhat like the UN today, collaborating only for military action and for money. Unfortunately, today's government has no problem with violating the Constitution, and so our federal government has far more power than the founding fathers intended.

It's pretty clear that you don't know much at all about United States history or even how the United States government functions.

It was not against the wishes of the founding fathers to not amend the constitution often (despite the fact that it IS amended quite often for what was meant to be a primarily static document).

My apologies: it appears this time my fact checking on constitutional amendments was not exactly up to snuff.

Beyond that I'm afraid you charged past the entire point of my post, and quite wrongly assumed and extrapolated based on an unrelated factual mistake.
For this discussion I'm entirely uncaring as to how much relative power state and federal governments have, nor am I implying that there needs to be a constitutional amendment to bar hate speech at funerals.

For the sake of clarity I'll rephrase my original post.

Currently the WBC is in the somewhat unique position of threading on very unregulated terrain while being obvious cunts - to the best of my knowledge they are the first to picket random funerals with semi-unrelated hate speech.
If the WBC's actions are found not conflicting with any laws - because, once again, they are the first of this kind - then that leaves society in general, and lawmakers in specific, with two options:
- Do nothing about it.
Or, if they feel their actions are sufficiently detrimental to society as a whole,
- Change the law.

We can probably debate all day on whether their actions should be banned by law, but the mere act of drawing up a law banning activities that are previously proven legal in court is nothing backhanded or even uncommon: it's how laws evolve.

NB. It's slightly unrelated to this discussion, but wouldn't you say it's somewhat weird to be considering what statesmen in 1800 would think about the power balance of states and federal governments, without even stopping to notice that in 1800 -everywhere- was unimaginably more isolated than it is now? The argument for individual states having more power is a bit stronger when it takes days or weeks to communicate with a central government.

 

[Faladorian]

Well, they have the right to protest as much as they want, just not near a funeral. Some "freedoms" are conditional like that.


I have the "freedom" to set off fireworks, but not late at night when it would disturb other people. I think that's fair, and it's also fair that the WBC can protest all they want, just not near a funeral where it would disturb people.

Protesting without annoying people , docent that kind of defeat the point of a protest?
But your example doesn?t work because setting off fireworks in the middle of the night physically inconveniences people while a protest is only there to spread an idea.

The reason why the definition of freedom of speech in first amendment is so broad is because words while powerful don?t actually hurt , at least not physically . these people are being actively targeted by legislators and that?s wrong no matter who they are .
being offended or inconvenienced is not a good enough reason to restrict peoples freedom of speech because there are plenty of things the WBC finds offensive and you don?t see anyone trying to ban that .[/quote]

I'm not saying they can't say what they want to, they just can't say it WHEN they want to. I'll try another example:

You can bash Obama as much as you like in your home, in public, or on the internet. However, if you go to one of his press conferences and start yelling insults at him, security will escort you out. You can say whatever you want, just not always when you want.

 

[Promethax]

Either way, there's no way lawmakers deal with it that won't cause anger.

Ban the protests? "They're ruining the first amendment!!"

Don't ban the protests? "They're perpetuating hate speech!!"

It's a lose/lose situation.

 

[Zoe Castillo]

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[senordesol]

ok this might come across as ignorant... but...

Do u not have quiet trains. or rules at cinema's allowing the patron to be kicked out? what about noise pollution from a party? can i just throw a party in the states all night long screaming faggots will go to hell or something full of hate like the wbc and not be taken to jail... if i am taken to jail is that not then against the first?

Trains are not that quiet here (and thus rent is waaay lower in those areas). The thing with a movie theater is that those are private establishments who can invoke their right to refuse to serve you at any time, and as for parties; yes there are noise ordinances after a certain time of night - but usually no such ordinance during the day (when most funerals are held).

Generally, you will not be taken to jail for violating a noise ordinance; just warned, then a minor fine of maybe $200-$300.

 

[Dangit2019]

Well, yeah, the last part was obvious.

So this happened. For those of you not able to load that up for some reason, Obama put restrictions on the way that military funeral protesters could protest, i.e. staying back 300 ft. and other restrictions. OK, let's just get it out of the way that WBC are pretty much the only people we're talking about because no one else has reached their level of scum to protest dead soldiers.

Now, not too many people are standing up for the underdogs in this case due to the underdogs being swine that the KKK considers too rash and bigoted, but there is discussion on whether or not we should bend the rules of the 1st amendment (freedom of speech for you European people who hate liberty and apple pies) even if those rules allow douchebags to do what they do best by desecrating every inch of space they take up.

So, Escapists, should America let the people who I'm running out of insulting names for protest lest we invalidate the 1st amendment? Should I be taking my meds more often? And why is there a floating piece of garlic bread levitating in the corner of my room trying to convince me that OJ didn't do it? Let me know below. Quickly.

For starters, a little bit of info about WBC that you might not have known is that it's actually one huge scam. All the top people in the church (the Phelps family) are actually lawyers. They hold such controversial protests in the hopes that someone flips out and assaults one of them or something, in which case they immediately sue the pants off the assaulter.

Now beyond that, their free speech is not being violated. They're not being told they can't protest, but there's just restrictions being placed on their protest in order to keep the piece. This isn't an uncommon practice, as most cities require you to get a permit for certain mass-rallies (i.e. a public march or rally), particularly controversial ones so that the authorities can make the necesssary arrangements to keep the peace. A few years back I saw one of those Real Police Videos shows that talked about a city in which the KKK had gotten a permit to hold a march and a rally and as such extra police were required to ensure that a riot didn't break out.

So yeah, placing that restriction upon protesting military funerals isn't a violation of their right to free speech since they are not being censored. They're just being told they can't get up into people's faces.

And the talking garlic bread isn't a problem until it evolves into a full-blown meatball sub that tells you to burn down all your furniture and kill all the phonies.

I'm going to consider the scam argument as plausible, and the only reason I'm not calling it fact is because I really don't want to believe that these people are so evil that they would do all this for compensation money.

It's like what foreverpandering said about iJustine:

"Right now, you have two choices: either she's being stupid and getting money, or she's being stupid for the money. I really don't want to believe that she's being this stupid on purpose." That might not be exact, but I don't want to load up the video.

As for the garlic bread, it's calming down now. I think it was just mad because its entire family got turned into a pizza.

 

[Zoe Castillo]

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[Zoe Castillo]

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[DrRockor]

I didn't know people actually did that. Wow, these people are truly despicable and have no respect for the dead or the grieving families. Not only had I not heard this happens but it happens so often that a law was needed. I'm depressed now

 

[Zaik]

They're not really preventing them from picketing, just moving them far enough away that you don't need counter portesters to block them out.

 

[Faladorian]

yes they would kick me out but for completely different reasons, it would be for Civil disturbance . but the WBC weren?t doing anything illegal a US court already said that TWICE !

Spoiler

http://journalism.about.com/b/2011/03/02/supreme-court-rules-that-first-amendment-protects-churchs-right-to-stage-anti-gay-protests-at-military-funerals.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/02/AR2011030202548.html

What they were doing was completely legal

they aren?t standing 2 meters way from the dead soldier trying to spit into his grave ( through im sure they?d love to) they are on the street at the exit to the graveyard and are doing it with the protection of the cops .

I'm not talking about what's illegal right now, obviously. I didn't say it was illegal, I was giving you the reasons why it's basically the same as things that already are subject to punishment to show that the law is similarly justified.

 

[Zoe Castillo]

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[Hero in a half shell]

I don?t like America, oh sure it started off with some very noble intentions but it?s now become the crazy capital of the modern world .
but with that said their bill of rights is one of the few things I do like about them , I hold freedom of speech as one of the most important rights people should have . I don?t even mind hate speech as long as it's not suggesting harming other people or their property , and while I don?t like it the WBC did not violate The First amendment and should be allowed to do what they do if only to show the world America is still the land of the free .

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"-Voltaire

Well, they have the right to protest as much as they want, just not near a funeral. Some "freedoms" are conditional like that.


I have the "freedom" to set off fireworks, but not late at night when it would disturb other people. I think that's fair, and it's also fair that the WBC can protest all they want, just not near a funeral where it would disturb people.

Protesting without annoying people , docent that kind of defeat the point of a protest?
But your example doesn?t work because setting off fireworks in the middle of the night physically inconveniences people while a protest is only there to spread an idea.

The reason why the definition of freedom of speech in first amendment is so broad is because words while powerful don?t actually hurt , at least not physically . these people are being actively targeted by legislators and that?s wrong no matter who they are .
being offended or inconvenienced is not a good enough reason to restrict peoples freedom of speech because there are plenty of things the WBC finds offensive and you don?t see anyone trying to ban that .

But doesn't the family of the deceased have the right to bury their loved one without psychological harassment? Shouldn't they have the right to, during a very intimate and emotional and vulnerable time, be left in peace by political and religious protesters?

As you stated a public protest is an action meant to deliberately annoy people. It's meant to provoke and stir up strong emotions. A funeral, a situation which contains people who are vulnerable and emotionally charged, is not a suitable place to allow a public protest, hence the use of exclusion zones [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusion_zone], an already established part of the constitution created for situations such as this.

You have to balance one person's freedom of Speech with another's freedom to not be harassed or damaged by it. I think this is a perfectly acceptable case where the rights to picket beside a funeral cross the line into unnecessary harassment, and should be curtailed to protect the rights of those at the funeral.

 

[Faladorian]

And I explained why they aren?t , holding a peaceful protest (with a permit ) is not the same as braking into a building and insulting people or blowing up fireworks in the middle of the night . your examples have nothing to do with freedom of speech .

First of all, I'm talking about disturbances, not freedom of speech. I already said at least twice that the WBC (or anyone for that matter) is allowed to express any opinion they want and to spread their opinion across the world with the internet and such.


However, there are some instances in which it is harassment. Which is not the same thing as freedom of speech. If the WBC just says "god hates fags" on their website or on TV, then they can spew that bile as much as they like. However, saying the same thing at a gay person's funeral is harassment.

Just like any other person saying something similar. If somebody just says "I dont like gay people," that's worlds apart from actually saying "I'm glad that ****** is dead," to a family member of a dead loved one.

One of them is just being a loudmouth, the other can cause psychological damage. There's a difference, it's called tact.

 

[Zoe Castillo]

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[Zoe Castillo]

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