RICHMOND (ABP) — A federal appeals court has thrown out a $5 million judgment against members of a controversial Baptist church who picketed the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq with inflammatory signs including "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."
In 2007 a Maryland jury awarded $10 million in compensatory and punitive damages to Albert Snyder of York, Pa., father of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a 20-year-old Marine killed in Iraq. Snyder had sued members of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., for intrusion upon seclusion, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy after they showed up outside his son's funeral at a Catholic church in Westminster, Md., in March 2006 to protest — as they have at several funerals of American soliders killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Westboro Baptist Church member Shirley Phelps-Roper at a funeral protest in 2005 in Smyrna, Tenn
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The protesters from the notoriously anti-gay church held placards with messages including "America is Doomed," "Pope in Hell," "Fag Troops," "Thank God for IEDs," "Priests Rape Boys" and "God Hates Fags."
A judge later reduced the amount of damages to $5 million. On Sept. 24, however, three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond ruled that while "distasteful and repugnant," the church's signs are protected as free speech by the Constitution.
They said the Maryland court erred in letting a jury decide what a federal judge should have ruled on as a point of law. Namely, the appeals court said, the question in the case was whether the language used by the protestors could be interpreted as "objectively verifiable facts" about Snyder or his son or rather "imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric intended to spark debate."
The judges said even an article posted on a Westboro website alleging that Snyder taught his son to be an "idolator" by raising him as a Catholic was not a subject of "purely private concern," but rather an issue "of social, political or other interest to the community."
Paraphrasing a ruling in another case invoking the First Amendment, the court said judges defending the Constitution "must sometimes share their foxhole with scoundrels of every sort, but to abandon the post because of the poor company is to sell freedom cheaply."
Westboro Baptist Church has about 60 or 70 members. Fifty of them are children, grandchildren or in-laws of Fred Phelps, who founded the independent Baptist congregation and has been its only pastor for 52 years.
Members of the church practice a "fire-and-brimstone" religion with beliefs including that God hates homosexuality and punishes America for its toleration of gays.
Starting with a 1991 demonstration at a Topeka park known to be frequented by gay men, church members began staging anti-homosexual protests across the country. The group gained national prominence in 1998, when it picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student who was tortured and murdered allegedly because he was gay.
The church still remained in relative obscurity until 2005, when it moved beyond picketing gay-rights events and pro-gay politicians to demonstrating at funerals of fallen soldiers. Their message was that military casualties are God's judgment on the United States for, in their view, allowing gay rights to advance.
A number of states passed laws limiting demonstrations at funerals, all aimed at the Kansas group. Church members, several who are lawyers, carefully abide by the provisions and defend their right to free speech under the First Amendment.
Phelps, a disbarred lawyer who briefly attended Bob Jones University, was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1947, but his church is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. In fact church members have picketed SBC annual meetings, claiming the convention's anti-gay position of "hate the sin but love the sinner" sends a false message to homosexuals that it's OK to be gay.
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.