Lo, my heart is warmed this Sunday with excellent news from earlier this week: God doesn’t hate fags and the church of Fred Phelps lost a righteous $10.9 million lawsuit:
A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals in the belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.
Albert Snyder of York, Pennsylvania, sued the Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified damages after members demonstrated at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq.
The jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned later in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress.
U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett noted the size of the award for compensating damages “far exceeds the net worth of the defendants,” according to financial statements filed with the court.
Church members routinely picket funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying signs such as “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags.”
Considering the decision far exceeds the Phelps’ family’s net worth, I finally see the silver lining on America’s tighter bankruptcy laws.
Meanwhile, the Phelps family, who largely make up the membership of this “church”, maintain that this is a 1st Amendment issue. Forgive my elementary understanding of constitutional law, expressing one’s political opinion within the letter of the law, whether your opinion is stupid or not, largely depends on whether you protest a public or private event. The funeral of a fallen soldier, although she or he is a public servant, is still a private event in my opinion, and regardless of partisan views, many still believe a funerary event is a socially inappropriate time to protest the politics of the dead and their families.
Which reminds me — I finished Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” some weeks ago, a book on the Mormon religion in America, and specifically on some of its violent roots during its founding years. The book’s last chapter took an interesting rhetorical turn relating to the “just following my religious beliefs; how dare you oppress me” line that gets dragged out when religious beliefs tramp on the rights and autonomy of others, as it clearly does in the case of the Phelps family. The last portion of the book covers the trial of a “divinely inspired” murder, and in the legal arguments in defense of the murderers, the legal team could take two tacks: 1) the defendents’ religious beliefs make them legally insane, or 2) the defendent’s religious beliefs, by protection of the constitution, allow them to victimize others. Obviously neither of these defenses worked. Essentially arguing that one’s specific religiosity, especially one in which the individual personally communes with a god, makes one insane [regardless whether that god commands fundamentalist, unpopular and/or violent acts], damn near the entire world’s population fits the definition of insanity.
Which leads us to another interesting reality: because most of the world believes in some kind of higher power, our real beef is whether a religious organization fits a certain social authenticity. The good, authentic Samaritans can safely deny the rights of marriage, bodily autonomy, and privacy to average citizens, and the bad ones are forbidden from funeral protests and outright murder.
[picture by CNN/Getty Images]
[Cross-posted at Unsprung]
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