Funeral Pickets

On March 10, 2006, the St. John’s Catholic Church in Westminster, Maryland, held a funeral service for Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, who was killed in the line of duty in Iraq. Nearby, members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, displayed signs of protest which included the following: God Hates the USA, Pope in hell, Fag troops, and Thank God for dead soldiers. After the funeral, the church continued to fulminate on its website, including condemning the dead Marine’s parents’ raising him “for the devil” --- that is, as a Catholic.

Eventually, Matthew Snyder’s father filed a lawsuit against the Westboro Church for, among other things, invasion of privacy and defamation. A jury found the church liable for several million dollars in damages, which the trial judge reduced. The church then appealed the entire judgment, on the ground that it contravened the First Amendment. On September 24 of last year, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that both the church’s initial protest and subsequent website screed, though “distasteful and repugnant,” were nevertheless protected by the First Amendment‘s guarantee of free speech.

As one who has been wondering for months about this suit, and about what happened in it to the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religious expression along with its protection of free speech, I am gratified to learn that the United States Supreme Court recently agreed to review the Appelate decision in its next session. Hopefully, the justices will find a way to cut through the many legal technicalities upon which this case has so far turned to address a matter seemingly lost sight of by the Fourth Circuit, peoples’ right to protection from being assaulted by outrageous speech and comment during a time of bereavement.

Sadly, the Westboro Baptist folk are by no means the only Christians across the land who appear to believe that God hates America for tolerating homosexuality, particularly in the military, and is punishing this nation by allowing its soldiers to be killed on the battlefield, whether they are homosexual or not. Neither are they the only ones who talk as if God has it in for Catholics as well. Most certainly everyone who espouses such views has the right to express them, even in a manner that may be offensive or outrageous to others, e.g., in a website with an address that I am too embarrassed to quote in this column. But I question self-proclaimed God-fearing funeral picketers’ scurrying for justification under the Constitution to intrude upon other peoples’experiencing the comfort that it is one major purpose of funeral services to provide.

It may well be that the protection I would like to see for grieving families against these kinds of protests is not something that, in the last analysis, the Constitution can provide. As long as funeral picketers confine their rhetoric to what a reasonable person would understand as hyperbolically expressed personal opinion, and not descend to asserting something factual and therefore disproveable about specific individuals, their excesses will be tolerated, because under the Constitution as interpreted by the Courts, they must and should be. I for one think that the Westboro website contains enough factual assertions about the Snyder family to warrant its writers getting sued out of their socks --- e.g., that they taught their son to defy his Creator, to divorce, and to commit adultery. But the Fourth Circuit did not think so, and neither may the Supreme Court.

One thing that I find hopeful in the Circuit Court’s judgment is a statement on its final page, recognizing “the sanctity of solemn occasions such as funerals and memorials,” and the permissibility of governmental bodies to place reasonable restrictions on activities that are otherwise constitutionally protected. So long, that is, as “breathing space” is left for contentious speech. Unfortunately, the Court appears to have seen no need to assess whether the Snyder family was allowed sufficient breathing room from such speech when they and their fellow worshippers needed it most.

Some years ago I assisted in a funeral of a young man who died of AIDS. At the reception following, a family member took hold of my arm and led me outside, to tell me tearfully that he had just been accosted by another church member who offered the following words of “comfort“: You don‘t have to worry anymore. God has finished punishing him for his sins. This parishioner should have known better, not in this instance than to believe what he believed about homosexuality, but not to use another’s grieving process as an occasion for driving home a point of much disputed theology. Christians deserve more from one another than this. And our judicial system should not be expected to make us better Christians than we should be capable of making ourselves.