One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Earlier today, a Philadelphia court awarded the parents of a Marine who died in Iraq $2.9M in damages. Not from the feds, but rather, from the Westboro Baptist Church, who you probably know as those “God Hates Fags” cocksuckers. They protested his funeral.

I got this news (pathetically, I know) from the Something Awful forums, where a rather spirited discussion (that’s goon for “slapfight”) has broken out over this issue. The debate is, in a nutshell, whether the Phelps’ family’s ability to protest should fall under free speech grounds.

The court’s decision was that the Church couldn’t hide behind their right to protest given the circumstances - mainly, the inflammatory and outrageous nature of their protest got them into this trouble.

A couple weeks back I had occasion to watch Louis Theroux’ BBC show, The Most Hated Family In America, about Phelps and Westboro. (Watch the whole thing here.) I’m actually not that impressed with Theroux as a documentarian, but he does a fairly decent job, and the thing that really surprised me so much was that even though Louis really didn’t come off as that hostile (he came off a little stupid, if anything), Phelps treated him like total shit. I guess that really shouldn’t surprise me, but I guess I figured that if they were willing to give Theroux the free reign they did inside their ‘compound’ that Phelps might be willing to at least talk in a civil manner to him.

One thing that was clear after watching the BBC docu was the absolute brainwashing that has taken place inside the WBC. I mean, this tiny church with a few dozen people really believes that they have some sort of exclusive license to Heaven. It’s so mindbending, so utterly fucked up that you really have to see it to believe it. Even after seeing it, it still feels like TV. Doesn’t seem real. But it does illustrate how easy it is to convince people of anything once you can somehow manage to convince them that they are special, better than everybody else.

At work the standard management line is that we can’t do X, because if we do X for you, we’ll have to do it for everyone. But sometimes, on rare occasions, a decision should be made regardless of whether it is in conflict with the letter of the law.

And as my friend Jeff has been known to say, there are times, albeit rare ones, when “he just needed killin’” should be a valid defense. And while it does bother me, in part, to hear that the Phelps family has finally discovered that it isn’t always possible to hide behind the letter of the law while blatantly violating its spirit, that same realization gives me faith in the law (as well as a little bit of hope) at the same time.