[ed: re-titled, and re-posted. this was showing on my aggregator, but not appearing on the blog. it was mistakenly labelled “draft.”]

This is not about free speech; it’s about pure, simple hatred. It’s about supposing that one can be the arbiter-of-God-on-Earth (which I might mention, is a sin itself.) He who is without sin, and such-and-such.

“The Rev. Fred Phelps and members of his Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., have protested three times in Michigan at such funerals and at dozens of other military funerals nationwide. As the family mourns, Phelps and his followers shout — typically from just outside the cemetery — that the soldier is in hell and that his or her death is a judgment from a God angered over acceptance in the United States of homosexuality, promiscuity and adultery.”
“”This nation has gone the way of Sodom,” Phelps said Thursday after a protest near the Capitol. “This is ‘Brokeback Mountain’ country now,” he added, a reference to the movie about gay cowboys.”

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There is a time, and there is a place. And I know this might come across as “anti-first-amendment,” or “anti-libertarian,” but the right to protest, the right to speech is not generally considered an unfettered right. I cannot make death threats against you. I cannot harass you. I cannot default on a contract and refer to my freedom of speech. I can’t slander or defame you publicly. I cannot put an Air-Raid-Siren on my roof and use it as my alarm clock. I can’t talk on my cell-phone with a bullhorn in my backyard, despite the first amendment’s protections.

An aside: the majority of these protesters are or were taxpaying United States Citizens – whose taxes built the bombs and trained the soldiers who protect our domestic gays. They are at the very least, complicit in the “plague of homosexuality,” the threatens (LOL!!!!) the nation. But of course, dogmatic ideologues will not tolerate any degree of rationality.

A soldier’s funeral may be a fine (albeit inappropriate) place to stage an anti-war demonstration. But it is not the place to stage an anti-gay demonstration. Why do they protest at soldiers funerals? Publicity. It’s not about the soldiers, and it’s not about the war.

It’s about spreading hate.