People all over Missoula stopped what they were doing for a few minutes Tuesday to show respect for Riekena, a 22-year-old Army sergeant killed in Iraq. A Missoula native in his second combat tour in Iraq, Riekena died Jan. 14 in Baghdad from wounds suffered when a bomb planted by insurgents blasted his Humvee. That's one more promising young man killed in this awful war, one more extended family dealt a devastating blow, one more debt the people of our country never can repay in full.
Maybe you're for this war. Maybe you're against it. Maybe you think it's time to get our men and women the heck out of there. Maybe you're with the president and don't want to quit trying, for fear something worse would follow. We're all entitled to an opinion. Frankly, though, I don't think any of the hundreds of Missoulians who lined the route to Riekena's final resting place at Sunset Memorial Gardens were thinking about politics and foreign policy. I wasn't. I know how traumatic a death in the family is. I was trying to imagine how much greater the sense of loss is when a child, a parent, a spouse, a friend marches off in a crisp uniform in service to his or her country and returns in a box.
Well, almost everybody.
Clustered near the beginning of the funeral procession route Tuesday was a taunting group of sign-wielding zealots bent on rubbing salt in emotional wounds - determined to add to the pain so many Missoulians, so many Americans, share with Riekena's family and friends. These cruel, twisted ghouls are among the followers of the Topeka, Kan.,-based Westboro Baptist Church, a perverse cult incomprehensively dedicating itself to disrupting military funerals nationwide. Their funeral protests badly abuse the freedoms Riekena and so many other Americans have died defending.
They have no right to do this. Nobody does. They're wrong, and so are all the equivocating people who put up with their outrageous acts of hatred.
You may have heard about the Westboro Baptist Church, but perhaps not much. Subdued coverage isn't an accident. Although Westboro Baptists have disrupted hundreds of military funerals since the beginning of the Iraq war, news coverage of the incidents has been measured. No one particularly wants to give them the attention they seek. They're so over-the-top hateful that ignoring their obscene message seems a public service. Unfortunately, ignoring them isn't making them go away. They invade community after community, lashing out with venomous taunts aimed at grief-stricken people who want nothing more than a chance to bury their loved ones with dignity.
As James Riekena's body was en route to Missoula for burial, Westboro Baptist Church posted a press release on its Web site: “Thank God for IEDs,” was the headline. It announced plans to stage a demonstration outside the Missoula Alliance Church to rejoice in the fallen soldier's death. That's right - to rejoice. “God Almighty killed Army Spc. James Riekena,” the press release declared. “He died in shame, not honor - for a fag nation cursed by God.”
That's the most offensive thing I've ever read.
Their cause is bizarre. Westboro Baptist Church abhors homosexuality. Its leader and followers are suspiciously obsessed by it. They say terrorism and the Iraq war are their god's “retaliatory wrath” against an America that tolerates homosexuality.
Just so you understand, they don't hate just homosexuals; they also hate you, all Americans and the country itself because homosexuals exist.
“God himself has now become America's terrorist,” these wingnuts say.
No, that doesn't make any sense to me, either.
We don't need to make sense of them. That isn't our responsibility. Neither is it our responsibility to provide them with a forum for their nonsense. They're entitled to think whatever they wish. They're free to spread their vile ideas to anyone who's interested. That's the free-speech right guaranteed them under the same Constitution James Riekena swore, before his death in combat, to uphold. But the First Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to say anything anywhere at any time, no matter the consequences. They have no right to rub our noses in their filth.
This issue is timely because Montana is talking about restricting disruptive protests at funerals. Senate Bill 15, introduced by state Sen. Joe Tropila, D-Great Falls, doesn't try to ban demonstrations altogether, but it would ban picketing within 1,500 feet of funerals. Similar legislation is pending or has passed in at least 30 other states. Civil libertarians, the Montana Newspaper Association and at least a couple of Montana newspapers - the Billings Gazette and Helena Independent-Record - have sided with the Westboro Baptists, saying their message is repulsive but their right to speak repulsively is worth defending. They're wrong, of course.
Nobody has an absolute right. None of my freedoms trumps other people's freedoms. Individual rights are strong, but they're also subject to rational limitation.
“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a 1919 opinion that drew a line almost everyone understands and can respect.
That case involved a socialist named Charles Schenck, who mailed thousands of fliers to men recently drafted to fight in World War I. The flier denounced the war, declared the draft an unconstitutional form of “involuntary servitude” and urged the recipients to resist the draft. Authorities arrested Schenck and convicted him of violations of the federal Espionage Act. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction, saying an individual's right to free speech must withstand a balancing test that considers public interests.
“The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent,” Holmes wrote.
Holmes, patron saint of the marketplace of ideas, later argued for a somewhat stricter standard for limiting speech - one that gives individuals greater latitude than he gave Schenck. Yet he maintained that the government - that would be we, the people - may constitutionally restrict “speech that produces or is intended to produce clear and imminent danger that it will bring about forthwith Š substantive evils.” In 1969, the Supreme Court tweaked the standard some more, saying that only words that “incite” or are intended to incite violence or other illicit actions fall outside the First Amendment.
Remember: All anybody's talking about restricting is speech intended or likely to incite “substantive evils.” People in my business are quick to talk about the “slippery slope” - how moving one inch will send us sliding helplessly into an abyss full of trampled rights. But when it comes to these irrational funeral disruptions, the slope doesn't seem all that slippery. We're talking about behavior that's so far outside social norms, so far removed from political discourse, that it seems crazy to discuss it in the same sentence as “First Amendment.” The First Amendment doesn't protect obscenity, and what the Westboro Baptists do is grotesquely obscene.
Especially noteworthy, at least in regard to the Westboro Baptists, is a Supreme Court case involving a Jehovah's Witness named Walter Chaplinsky.
Chaplinsky was foisting religious literature on ungrateful pedestrians in Rochester, N.H., one busy Saturday afternoon. People complained to police, who explained that Chaplinsky had a constitutional right to proselytize. As he persisted, however, one thing led to another, and an uproar ensued. A policeman tried to escort Chaplinsky away, not to arrest him but to diffuse the situation. Chaplinsky turned to the arriving town marshal and said, “You are a God-damned racketeer Š a damned fascist - and the whole government of Rochester are fascists or agents of fascists.” He spewed this venom, by the way, in 1942, when millions of Americans were busy fighting and dying in a war against fascists.
A local jury convicted Chaplinsky of violating a New Hampshire law barring hateful, offensive speech. Claiming he had a First Amendment right to curse the cop, Chaplinsky took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
He lost. The Supreme Court said that the First Amendment doesn't protect “fighting words.”
“These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or ‘fighting words' - those which, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace Š Such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”
The “fighting words” standard isn't commonly applied by legislators or judges these days, but that doesn't mean it can't be - or shouldn't. If those aren't fighting words the Westboro Baptists hurl at mourners gathered around the coffins of soldiers, what are?
Nothing coming from the Westboro Baptists could be construed as an “essential part of any exposition of ideas,” and none of it has even the slightest social value - other than, perhaps, to serve as a reminder that religious zealotry threatens America from within as well as from without our borders. We don't need to subject grieving families to abuse to know that.
Nobody has to explain to me the importance of the First Amendment. I make my living through free speech and freedom of the press. These freedoms are too important - to me, to you, to the country - to trivialize and debase. The preferred remedies for wrong ideas and offensive speech are better ideas and constructive speech, but exceptions exist. How can I effectively counter the hate and harm from the Westboro Baptists without creating a riotous scene that further disrupts funerals, further upsets people for no good reason? I can address them after the fact, as I am today, but they've already moved on to torment another grieving family. Anyway, I don't want to argue with their nonsense. I want my freedom. I want people to have the freedom to bury their dead in peace.
I didn't know young James Riekena and cannot know what drove him to join the military or why he thought this war was worth fighting. I'm sure, though, it wasn't to defend the “freedom” of thugs who worship at the altar of hate.
Steve Woodruff is opinion page editor of the Missoulian.
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