WASHINGTON — The First Amendment protects hateful protests at military funerals, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in an 8-to-1 decision.Read the rest here.
“Speech is powerful,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain.”
But under the First Amendment, he went on, “we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.” Instead, the national commitment to free speech, he said, requires protection of “even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
The decision was the latest in a series of muscular First Amendment rulings from the Roberts court. Last year, the court struck down laws limiting speech about politics and making it a crime to distribute depictions of cruelty to animals. In the current term’s other major First Amendment case, the court seems likely, based on the justices’ questioning, to strike down a law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. Only the interest in national security has in the recent run of decisions been ruled substantial enough to overcome free speech interests.
Chief Justice Roberts used sweeping language culled from the First Amendment canon of foundational decisions in setting out the central place free speech plays in the constitutional structure. “Debate on public issues should be robust, uninhibited and wide-open,” he wrote, because “speech on public issues occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.” The case decided Wednesday arose from a protest at the funeral of a Marine who had died in Iraq, Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder. As they had at hundreds of other funerals, members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., appeared with signs bearing messages like “America is Doomed” and “God Hates Fags.”
Purely on the basis of the law I disagree. The court's ruling has effectively eliminated the so called "fighting words" exception to the First Amendment. I think this is a bridge too far and an unnecessary expansion of an already well established right.
1 comment:
Beat these Bozos at their own game. Start holding mass protests outside of their "Church". The Baptist are America's most successful cult. They are like the Taliban of Christianity and just as looney. 1st Amendment rights baloney. Let me say something equal to this about Blacks, Muslims or Jews in modern America and see what happens to me. Let me protest outside Palin's house and see what happens too !!
Post a Comment