Eugene Volokh has an extensive analysis up at the Conspiracy (see Nov. 2). For some flavor of the Phelps group’s extreme forays into picketing and public abuse of hapless Topeka residents, and intensive lawsuit-filing against countless defendants, see SPLC’s “A City Held Hostage” and “Halting Abusive Lawyers“.
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The SPLC is a fine one to talk about “abusive lawyers” and lawsuits. This is part and parcel of their very own operation, whereby they target and shut down groups and organizations they don’t like politically with colorable personal injury cases. For instance, they were behind a lawsuit in which Hispanic individuals sued a rancher for “assault,” I think it was, and ended up forcing a hand-over of the rancher’s property to the plaintiffs. Clearly, whatever personal injuries MAY have been suffered by the individual/s involved was not the motivation for the lawsuit. It was instead the politics of the ranchers, and had the effect of silencing the ranchers’ speech/cause. Here they are bragging about it:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=60
The SPLC also targets individuals with a racialist viewpoint for “outing” and firing by their employers, as in the case of Kevin Lamb:
http://www.vdare.com/misc/050922_lamb_events.htm
And dispatches its “investigators” to “investigate” others with forbidden interests:
http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/061114_splc.htm
The SPLC went on to boast that this professor had been reassigned as a result of their doings.
So, for it to tut-tut about personalizing political attacks is pretty outrageous. It is an incredibly well-funded operation treated by the MSM and others as a “civil rights group” or “watchdog group”, when its real agenda is to do its own bullying and harassing of its political enemies, to the point of frightening them into silence or submission. It well knows its own power, as one phone call can utterly destroy a person tagged as a “racist.” Fred Phelps and his freako band can’t imagine this kind of power. Nobody is destroyed by what Fred Phelps might call them.
There are indeed some abusive lawsuit-filers on the right to far right. But to some, Brown v. Board, Roe v. Wade and other cases are just as abusive, if not more so, to law and common sense, but because they have the blessing of the left, the powers that be call them “fighting for justice” instead of abusive legal maneuvering.
The SPLC article states that WBC is “tax-exempt”.
Just what qualifies as a church? Too bad the IRS doesn’t put them under a microscope.
I’m all for First Amendment protections but getting into someone’s face (especially a child) and screaming WBC filth is criminal. I don’t think the Founding Fathers had WBC in mind. It’s not free speech, it’s intimidation.
The Shame of Kansas.