Priorities
January 30th, 2006
The WaPo reports today that there are bills pending in 5 states to enact buffer zones and prohibit disruptive demonstrations near funeral services, in response to the disruptive and offensive screaming with which Fred Phelps and his family advertise their hatred for gays.
I sympathize with the desire to ameliorate this repulsive behavior - though questions of freedom of speech and assembly are at issue as well. I was pleased, also, to detect in this movement some glimmer of concern for gay rights and the sensibilities of the families of gay people. But it’s clear I jumped to a too-optimistic conclusion.
For one thing, the motivation for the crackdown on Phelps seems to have nothing to do with gays. Phelps has found that nobody pays attention when he harrasses gays - there’s too much competition, apparently - and in the last year or so has branched out to harassing completely unrelated groups of people in the name of harassing gays. In particular, Phelps has been on a kick for some time of making controversial statements about the military - such as that he approves of the deaths of US forces, that the military is a gay-affiliated organization, and so forth - on the grounds that the military’s partial acceptance of homosexual enlistees makes them just as “guilty” as gays themselves. He often expands that claim to encompass the entire United States, which is doomed, he believes, because gays reside in its midst unpersecuted. For this reason, US troop losses in combat are God’s will as punishment for gayness, as was Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters.
Rev. Fred Phelps and members of his Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church . . . have been protesting at funerals of Iraq war casualties because they say the deaths are God’s punishment for U.S. tolerance toward gays.
Though the soldiers were not gay, the protesters say the deaths, as well as Hurricane Katrina, recent mining disasters and other tragedies are God’s signs of displeasure. They also protested at the memorial service for the 12 West Virginia miners who died in the Sago Mine. . . .
Shirley Phelps-Roper, Phelps’s daughter and an attorney for the church, said . . . “Our goal is to call America an abomination, to help the nation connect the dots. You turn this nation over to the fags and our soldiers come home in body bags.”
Phelps’s strategy is as clear as it is pathetic: to attach himself to any high-profile event in the hope of having his hateful spew reiterated by the media (as the Post obligingly did, above). But the states’ response is equally revealing.
Phelps turned to protesting unrelated events when his disruption of gay people’s funerals failed to spark enough outraged media coverage. By disrupting events toward which citizens are obliged to hold warmhearted feelings - funerals of soldiers and high-profile disaster victims - he forces a reaction that was lacking when the public could choose to ignore the harassment of people it had already chosen not to care about anyway. And state legislatures are obligingly falling in line with Phelps’s strategy - elevating his obscenities to the level of Constitution issues of free speech when soldiers are involved, in a way they never seemed concerned to do when it was only gay people.
No laws banning disruptions of funerals were passed when Phelps was only persecuting gays - even though he has been reported doing since at least 1999. A similar indifference reigns when he targets other non-approved groups. There are currently 16 states with state laws protecting reproductive-health-services clinics from disruption by outside protesters. Only two of them are among the five states banning disruption of funerals. The proposed buffer zone around soldiers’ funerals is 300 feet; around women entering healthcare clinics it is typically 15 feet, 8 feet, or less. Of the five states that are enacting anti-protest laws protecting soldiers’ funerals - after years of official indifference to protests disrupting gay people’s funerals - all have anti-same-sex marriage laws.
In other words, protection is extended in these five states only to favored classes of people. Repulsive hatefulness and bigoted invective is OK when directed at gays, and mostly OK when directed at women making their own healthcare decisions, but not OK if directed at soldiers or nationally-known tragedy victims. It is hard to see how these state legislators are different from Phelps in any way other than the matter of decorum. Phelps is a public embarrassment to the right wing, and an annoyance when he targets their favored groups, but otherwise, it seems, very much a brother in arms.
