Defending Evil

"You see, that's the whole point of being the government. If you don't like something you simply make up a new law that makes it illegal"
                            -Minister Dormandy in Pirate Radio

Just today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a bunch of despicable people at the Westboro Baptist Church.  For anyone living under a rock for the past few years, the people at Westboro do awesome things like protest at soldiers' funerals.  Their logic is this:


1) God hates gays.
2) America is far too tolerant to gays.
3) God wants to punish America for being too tolerant of gays.
4) God kills soldiers as punishment for America's tolerance of gay people.

Yeah, they're juuuuuust a little goofy.

Back to the Supreme Court ruling.  A family member of one of these soldiers sued Westboro and it eventually ended up at the Supreme Court who ruled 8-1 in favor of the protesters.  It's my opinion that the only bad thing about this ruling is that it wasn't unanimous.

In America we like to talk about our "rights" "liberties" and "freedom".  Those are all noble ideas and concepts that we all embrace... when it's easy.  This is one of those cases where it's not easy.  A family in mourning had to bury a man while a group of hateful assholes celebrated it.  But their celebration occurred 1,000 feet away (far enough away that those at the funeral couldn't see them, and in compliance with city ordinance) and on public land.  In my opinion those are all reasonable conditions to limit speech so that it doesn't interfere with the right of other people to be left alone.


But in a case like this it's far too easy to get caught up in the emotion and lunacy of the whole thing and look for ways to keep people from saying things that we disagree with.  Any reasonable person would recognize Westboro's actions as something that is not desirable.  But that should not give us the right to make it illegal or further limit it in some way.  I fear that the opposite ruling of the Supreme Court, had it occurred, would not have elicited much outrage among American's who claim to embrace free speech.  The reason is simple: because it's difficult to defend such horrible speech. Shouldn't the right to speak freely be defended the most when the speech is outside of our comfort zone since that's when it's most likely to be attacked?

If we only defend free speech (or any other "right" for that matter) when it's easy and when we agree with the speech, then we don't really defend speech at all.  We simply defend speech that we agree with, or isn't offensive, or isn't controversial.  Free speech should not have an asterisk next to it.

I think you can tell a lot about a man's character based on whether or not he is willing to, based on principle, defend something with which he fervently disagrees.  I don't think American's would have rushed to the defense of Westboro Baptist if the Court ruled the other way, and hopefully I'm wrong about that.  Thankfully they got this one right.