KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A Kansas church group that protests at military funerals nationwide filed suit in federal court, saying a Missouri law banning such picketing infringes on religious freedom and free speech.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on behalf of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, which has outraged mourning communities by picketing service members' funerals with signs condemning homosexuality.
The church and the Rev. Fred Phelps say God is allowing troops, coal miners and others to be killed because the United States tolerates gay men and lesbians.
Missouri lawmakers were spurred to action after members of the church protested in St. Joseph, Mo., last August at the funeral of Army Spec. Edward L. Myers.
The law bans picketing and protests "in front of or about" any location where a funeral is held, from an hour before it begins until an hour after it ends. Offenders can face fines and jail time.
A number of other state laws and a federal law, signed in May by President Bush, bar such protests within a certain distance of a cemetery or funeral.
In the lawsuit, the ACLU says the Missouri law tries to limit protesters' free speech based on the content of their message. It is asking the court to declare the ban unconstitutional and to issue an injunction to keep it from being enforced, which would allow the group to resume picketing.
The execrable Fred Phelps and the equally despicable ACLU together might well be considered a match made in heaven... that is if the ACLU personnel actually believed in such a thing as heaven in the first place.
Needless to say, there is nothing whatsoever in any of the subject statutes, including Missouri's that in any way addresses "content" of the protests, as claimed by the ACLU and Phelps.
Instead of taking this action seriously, we should regard it as the ACLU's obligatory once-in-a-blue-moon action on behalf of a truly rightwing extremist group, so as to justify their continued leftwing assault on the American way of life. Missouri, part of the traditional American heartland, is hardly a hotbed of liberal radicalism, judicial or otherwise. If this was a serious effort by the ACLU, rather than a litigational publicity stunt, I would expect they might have gone after the federal statute rather than a Missouri state law, and done so in a more firendly judicial environment.