There is a case at the supreme court right now, Phelps v. Snyder in which the family of deceased marine lance corporal Matthew Snyder is suing Reverend Fred Phelps, leader of Westboro Baptist Church (I wrote about the development of this case here). In the lawsuit, Matt Snyder’s father is seeking damages from Phelps and members of his church for picketing the funeral of his son, and gleefully celebrating American casualties as God’s justice for America’s tolerance of homosexuals.
(*side note: how is this hateful position even factually accurate? Homosexuals do not have same rights as heterosexuals, so maybe the idea is that as we refrain from burning their house, we count as tolerating them? The whole thing is really too insane to grace with much more commentary.)
This case is extremely aggravating to me because I fear that Phelps and his gang are legally correct though obviously morally blind. The district court awarded damages to the Snyder family but the appeals court reversed the 11 million dollar verdict on free speech grounds. Sure enough, it seems that Phelps’ speech is protected by the first amendment, disgusting as it is. The protesters are not doing anything importantly different than Nazis and KKK members who have had no trouble winning first amendment protection for their hateful activities.
You wonder though, what is the grounds for these examples of toleration> It becomes very hard to resist being very angry: why do the right, good, and tolerant people have to put up with the hateful speech of these lunatics? Sure, all voices should be heard, but why does it always feel like free speech is shielding people who have no right to be talking. The common response is that my previous sentence, which speaks in terms of who and who does not have a right to talk, is itself a risk any dangerous pronouncement.
The idea is simple. In a democracy or any highly organized society, speech must be protected without asking any questions, because once you start asking questions, you open the door to abuse and majority tyranny. The majority finds many things offensive, and allowing it to question speech will always result in the erosion of political discourse of all flavors.
And this is right I guess, but it’s entirely dependent on the exigencies of a slow and decrepit national discourse. I mean, logically, the argument is just fallacious or at least appeals to laziness: we can’t restrict anything anyone says because then we won’t know where to stop and we’ll end up hurting political dynamism that a democracy requires. But really? Do we not know where to stop? How about this rule: no naziism and no white supremacy. They don’t get free speech protections.
Then there are questions like “how do you know what counts as white supremacy and naziism,” and these are real questions I guess, but look at Germany, which bans many free speech acts related to Naziism. Holocaust denying is illegal and so is displaying Nazi paraphernalia. I haven’t read up on this law, but Germany has not lapsed into dictatorship and in fact their democracy seems to be doing fine.
So maybe the courts should just slap reverend Phelps with a big ole settlement and shut his whole church down. Boy that would make me happy, but I don’t think it’s the best course of action, and the reason is that a democratic society cannot exist without citizens who are willing to make sacrifices. People who join the military sacrifice to defend us. People who into public service sacrifice to run our government. Even ordinary citizens, under most views of democracy, must compromise and accept something less in order to keep the government moving and so that all parties get something.
The moral ideal is not meant to be winner take all, in which two wolves out vote a lamb on what should be for dinner. Rather, democracy’s moral ideal stems from the dispersion of power and sharing a balance of ideological orientation.
By asking to silence the KKK and reverend Phelps, we are trying to feel better (and as I said, it would feel great to know this reverend never got to keep another dime he made because he was paying it out to this family) by seeking vengeance, but the cost of a good government and healthy polity is taking the high road and forswearing vengeance as another cost of having a strong country. We have to simply look away from Phelps and his clan and try to keep the limelight off them, and this I think, is what the supreme court will rule.
The connection all this has to the sex boat scandal is that we have to swear off satisfaction of a primal desire to see stupid people humiliated. In this scandal, some reporter, god knows why, thought he would lure a CNN reporter on to a boat tricked out for sexy time, to ’embarrass her.’ Doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it seems that Salon.com has run something like four articles just mocking this guy and somehow blaming fox news.
Something I repeat on this website a million times is that the politics of gotcha is ineffective and harmful. CNN, Fox, liberals and conservatives alike get angry about things, and its hard not to see why when you see people on both sides of the political divide saying such stupid things. People want nothing more than to humiliate the ‘other side’ and in fact our press is fast becoming saturated with such stories, depicting tea partyers, environmentalists, and conservatives and liberals of all stripes making fools of themselves. When will we learn that it is in the nature of humankind to sustain legions of idiots, but that this fact IN NO WAY changes what we must do as defenders of democracy and liberalism, which is to courageously, day in and day out, IGNORE those who spew garbage and to FOCUS on those who preach ideas.
While salon.com and no doubt Huffington Post are criticizing this obviously immature and deranged conservative reporter, our democracy is facing a vexing problem of how to limit the power of those who REALLY DO profess hatred and who REALLY DO want to poison our entire political culture. These are serious questions: how do we value our political participation (do we value it at all anymore) and should we legislate on the side of decency as Germany as done? The question is not who’s up and who’s down on the scoreboard of partisan silliness, but one about a man whose son died protecting this country, and what he died to protect.
The Question Beggar 