Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Now, THAT's how to honor our war dead

Millions of people who took an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic," and who died meaning to do so, are being honored today.

How did George Walker Bush, who also took this oath, including for his current abominable performance in a temp job, observe the day? By doing another skinning and gutting of the First Amendment.
I am loath in the extreme to ever agree with a walking, talking moral sewer such as Fred Phelps, but goddamn it, when he's right, he's right.

Unfortunately, those at Free Republic are among those Bush-bots who blindly support this dictator and those who aid and abet him in Congress. It's easy to make yourself impervious to irony, ain't it?

Where are the freedoms that nearly 3,000 men and women have been slaughtered, in Iraq and Afghanistan, to supposedly uphold? What's left that hasn't been leached away?

Support our troops. Get them out of those hell-hole outposts of Empire and back to their families.

How could anyone or anything make me agree with the loathsome Fred Phelps? God, I need to go take a shower.

It's odd, feeling the way I do after reading this.

Some part of you (I mean me, but I think others experience this) makes you want to say "You're free to protest, but only that which I agree with,"

But then we are no better. I understand that, as frustrating as it is.

But protesters have to understand that the same right that gives them the ability to believe something gives all of us the right to believe what we believe in just as vocally and proudly.

ugh.

You have the right to do as we damn well tell you.

Thats right. You too have the right to go to the funeral of a slain soldier and shout "god hates fags!"

You too have the right to take the anguish and grief of a family that lost a son or daughter or father or mother or grandmother or grandfather and shatter it just a little more with hate america speech, cause, by god, thats what free speech was intended for.

Cause dammit, common decency isn't for people that have given their lives in the line of duty, its for vomitous, reprehensible anal sphincter voids spewing venom at the top of their lungs.

Let me ask one question. What about the first amendment rights of the families of the slain soldiers?

Who protects their rights to bury their dead in peace?

Nobody. Because no matter the lip service about "bring our boys and girls home", you don't really mean it. One of my best friends from childhood just returned on a medical discharge/honorable from his second tour in Iraq. He is a decent person. I know that to many, his belief in God, his being a sunday school teacher before going to Iraq means his is the imbodiment of evil, but he is a decent man.

We had a long talk the other day. And dispite the popular picture by Murtha and others, he isn't some raving kill-crazy asshole with a gun looking to rape and murder, coming home to beat his wife and children. He painted quite a different picture from what i hear from most of the talking heads and the people that spout off without having actually served.

Hate Bush all you like. But actually show some of the respect that you claim to have for the soldiers.

Far too often the soldiers are portrayed as either killcrazy nutcases or poor deluded children that don't know any better. Show them some real respect and let them be human, rather than caricatures.

Actually, I think Sunday School teachers are right up there with grannies and Santa Claus as being fairly untouched by evil.

[rickshaw1]
{[...] Because no matter the lip service about "bring our boys and girls home", you don't really mean it. }

Don't you DARE tell me what I do and don't mean. I want every one of them home NOW, and our consuming folly of policing the planet shut down NOW. Before the blowback from it all destroys anyone else, here or abroad, from taxation-gutted futures, to a Hezbollah nuke behind the Hollywood sign, to IED roadside bombs.

You suggest that I'm casting aspersions and making "caricatures" on people like your close friend, and I am not. Nearly all of them are sound, peaceful, productive people who are doing a job that has never been rationally explained. And, apart from naked justification for power-seeking, cannot be explained.

What's more, those who are in the National Guard are not doing their job by being in Iraq. Have Kid Prime ask a few Katrina victims.

What your friends are coming back to is a country where whatever liberties are left have been gutted, in their absence, by domestic enemies. This latest law, by design, and like the "PATRIOT" Act and other atrocities, stomps on half of the Bill of Rights. What is left for your friends to have been supposedly defending, by pouring their blood into the Iraqi sand?

And that same First Amendment that you seem so ready to discard -- for a nonexistent right of not being disturbed at a funeral -- exists, as unsavory as that is, precisely to protect brain-addled cases such as Phelps. Because a "right" to only state what the majority agrees with is no "right" at all.

I think we can all agree to refrain from telling others what they do or do not think or mean. Let's debate words, not what we percieve to be thoughts or intentions.

Other than that, this is very interesting. Does freedom of speech extend to Fred Phelps's venomous ravings at the graveside services of our military's honored dead?

Is a barrier of a few hundred feet really hurting anyone, or infringing on his freedom of speech?

Conversely, should the bereaved have the right to mourn their dead in peace without a maniac destroying their solemnity? Is not their grief protected as a form of public expression as well?

Is this limitation on public demonstration going to domino until the very right to public assembly is threatened?

Interesting questions to ponder. Let's ponder them civilly.

this is just bizarre, let me get this straight, this Rev. is protesting random military funerals to protest america's tolerance of gay people (which is debatable but lets just table that for a while) and bush actually passes a law saying this guy can't protest within "so" many feet.

am i missing something?!??

Why can't he practice that speech away from the mourning; find a park or a pub out of shouting distance of the family lowering the casket. All the time we tell people they cannot be loud or vulgar in public. Extend it to include a temporary area around funerals.

What bothers me most about this law isn't that it curtails freedom of speech, but its impetus.

Phelps has been carting out this same dog-and-pony show since Matthew Shepard's funeral, but now that he's broadened it to military funerals, there's this sudden mass outrage. I absolutely think military families should be free to grieve in peace, but why can't that same courtesy be extended to the families of gay people? How come only military funerals get this special treatment?

I'm so lucky I've never been to a funeral protested by Phelps, but as a gay man with several gay friends, it's always a possibility looming in the future. Where are the outrage and laws to protect me?

It's not politically prudent. Notice this law wasn't passed last year when these military funeral protests started. It was passed in an election year.

You said this Grey...

"And that same First Amendment that you seem so ready to discard -- for a nonexistent right of not being disturbed at a funeral -- exists, as unsavory as that is, precisely to protect brain-addled cases such as Phelps. Because a "right" to only state what the majority agrees with is no "right" at all."

And this is my awnser. Life. Liberty. The Pursuit of Happiness. And sometimes, happiness in nothing more than BURYING YOUR DEAD IN PEACE!

YOU want them home now. YOU are the only decider. YOU know what is best for everyone apparantly. Fortunately, YOU live in a democratic republic, where not only YOU, but other people get a say as well.

In my country, where all the liberties have supposedly been lost, I can still walk down the street without having to show papers, without having tatoos on me designating what race, religion or sex, I can marry who i choose, live where i can afford...your hyperbolie ill suits.

I did, however, notice you took great umbrage at my calling into question your lip service, and i do consider it that, and i do dare, cause somehow, everyone else always comes out on the stupid, losing end of that talk. You may be worried about blowback, but i have a problem with the cowardice that led up to this in the first place, and the problems that would come with the cowardice of running. You don't run from bullies, you stand and fight, because if you don't, you'll be running all your life, and hating yourselves and everyone else because of your cowardice.

As usual, we get the "because the majority decides it, it's gotta be wrong". No, it doesn't. It can be, and sometimes is, but your blind prejudice against something because a majority decides it sets you up as an elitist, whose only concern is apparantly for the Law, your new religion.

Screw the LAW. I believe in justice and what is right, not ink scribbled onto paper.

Phelps isnt a crackpot, and he is free to protest. He is a cunning, vicious, conniving...i really cant think of the words for his particular brand of insidious scum. He should also be free to inherit the consequences of his vomitous hatespeech. He isn't protesting for religion, he's protesting for the talking head elitist aholes that buy into his "rights" to put the boot to others.

I've had my say. Most of you may disagree, and thats fine, because dispite what is put out there, you still can in this democratic Republic.

What is the world coming to when I actually agree with what rickshaw1 is saying?

"Hey Beelzebub, it's startin' to get a bit chilly around here ..."
Just joking rick.

If you were burying your own father / brother / lover etc. wouldn't you want peace and quiet and a bit of respect? No matter what your friend / family may have done in life death is the great leveller. We're all going there some day. Don't we want that respect for our own passing?

The right to protest has not been removed - merely restricted ever so slightly.


But, what Suddenly Seymour says makes a great deal of sense too - they should have made it a blanket rule, not just a military one.

Just my thoughts. K

My primary problem is that a law was needed when common decency should have sufficed.
I don't like needless laws. But I also don't disagree with the right to a peaceful funeral.
That's all.

PS Phelps sounds like a crackpot.

Phelps IS a crackpot. However, the issue is one of respect and common decency as noted above.

This isn't a violation of someone's Freedom of Speech, they are still free to spew their hatemongering whenever they please. They just cannot do it near a funeral.

Jamie

[rickshaw1]
{[...] YOU want them home now. YOU are the only decider. YOU know what is best for everyone apparently. }

Nice little switch of context. I was responding to your slander of me, asserting that my wanting the dismantling of Empire and the return of our troops -- to defend THIS country -- was mere "lip service," and thus was an act of lying on my part.

You are being fundamentally dishonest, at least on this topic, and that is where you have evicted yourself from a rational discussion. I will not respond further about this with you.

Greybird,

Were/are you also as upset about the no protest zones around abortion clinics?


To all:

I am not so worried about the First Amendment by erecting such a no protest zone around funerals.

But if this law starts a slippery slope, I blame Mr. Phelps more than I blame Pres. Bush (And I am no fan of Pres. Bush)

As for those who are still being civil and rational about this:

Every limit on human liberty begins this way, for the sake of punishing someone who is unsavory. If you don't stand against it then, when it puts you in the company of reptiles like a Phelps, you won't be able to push it back later.

The laws against "child porn" (itself notoriously ill-defined) are now being pushed to extend to banning anything vaguely "indecent" on Websites, or to having government become the arbiter of what is allowed. That's what is behind the feds' demands for records of Web traffic, which is what only Google has chosen to resist.

Laws against domestic surveillance are neatly given an end-run by the NSA's taking part in Echelon: the British spy on our phone calls, the Australians track the British, and we track the Australians. Nobody questions the propriety of the NSA, as such, which is the real problem.

The RICO laws, intended only against "organized crime," are used to persecute and jail anti-abortion demonstrators, alleging a "racket" or "conspiracy." It takes 20 years of litigation to even attempt to overturn this.

Bush and the liars in Congress who abet him can put any kind of "patriotic" label on this, can blithely override state and local laws, and can multiply federal crimes ad infinitum. That still means the First Amendment, and its recognizing of our rights to peaceful assembly, is taking another body blow.

When something then comes along that YOU want to resist or protest, especially if that would inconvenience the current rulers' motorcades or conventions (look up the oxymoron of "Free Speech Zones") ... what will be left to even begin to provide legal shelter for you?

[Quislet, Esq.]
{ Were/are you also as upset about the no protest zones around abortion clinics? }

Yes. Both the Left and the Right show no scruples in tossing out protections of human liberty, when it suits them to deal with a particular nuisance ... as they see a nuisance.

And I do disagree about a Phelps being the one who is responsible for such repression. It's the current imperial figure, Bush II, who called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper." He signs these laws.

"We," of course, or the board of directors of Diebold Election Systems, are the ones who chose him.

Greybird,

I did expect that would be your response to my question. And there is much truth in what you are saying. How you are expressing yourself can be off-putting though.

It'd be more helpful to me if you noted something specific about where and how I was putting you off, but we're then getting into what belongs in PMs, I'd say.

More generally, though, I don't see any point in softening this. We have rulers who want to expand into more of an Empire, slaughter more innocents, steal more money, and use more of the Constitution as toilet paper.

We always have, really, or at least for the last century and a half. It's far too late for using euphemisms.

hmmm this topic frustrates me greatly. passing laws against protesting? (makes my head hurt)....there's plenty of protests that are not legal. we are all still free to protest at any time, wether its legal or not.

Amendment I:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble , and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

As long as it doesn't disrupt the service, you can continue to protest the war at funereals. If they do arrest ya, give Quis a call. He'll gladly take your case to the Supreme Court.