The Westboro Baptist Church

I was watching 20/20 on ABC Friday night and they were doing a thing on the Westboro Baptist Church. Now I did not know much about them before this other than they kinda hated everybody. Now I find them pretty disgusting.

There's a reason they can't enter Canada.

Because Canada has speech restriction.

You guys are lucky.

Why restrict them? If you let them speak they just alienate themselves even more from everyone else.

Yeah but if there was restrictions we wouldn't have to deal with the numerous "God hates Fags" signs they make.

If I ever saw them protesting I would follow them around and protest against homosexuality and the army in some kind of homoerotic army uniform.

while i in theory agree with you. i just want to point out that said the same about the nsdap, in the beginning.
Also if they would protest your sons funeral because he was gay/soldier/or whatever they hate would you still be so generous and grant them their unlimited right to speak/protest, or would you prefer to limit it in some form?

On the topic they are douchbags on that we probably all can agree on.

I have had a couple of personal experiences with them. On one occasion they made signs that said my mom and the rest of the school board (like they actually made signs for each of the board members) were going to burn in hell for allowing a gay-straight alliance club to be formed at my high school. On a few others they've picketed the funerals of soldiers from my town, one of which was someone I knew personally and for which I was present at the funeral.

While they're entitled to any kind of speech they want, I also think that their picketing of funerals constitutes 'fighting words.' However, I'd much rather have vile, probably illegal, speech protected by law than create another precedent which forbids expression. When it comes to speech I'd rather see all the guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished.

Hate speech is illegal here so they would be arrested pretty quickly. The last guy that was found guilty under our law got fined almost half a million dollars.

What??

Fixed it.

I think we all can agree that the Westboro Baptist Church is fucked up.

Hate speech is subjective and in constant flux. What is hateful 100 years ago is acceptable now, and vice versa. Even going back ten years you can see a completely different set of values. Thus we cannot begin to judge speech, lest we accept our own speech as hateful at one point or another.

Well we don't have that problem yet as the hate speech laws are relatively new and we haven't come across this problem.

Yea they are assholes, however I have had experience with people like these, and while I would be angry if they did something like protest at a funeral, it is still their right to say whatever retarted thing they want to say. That is the price of free speech, you can't just support it until someone says something you don't like, then turn around and say that they shouldn't be allowd to speak, it just hypocritical. Anyway it's kind of funny to see them waste all this time protesting gays and such, and believing that they will actually accomplish anything, when all they actually do is make everyone hate them even more, which is fine in my book.

One family kicked their daughter out of the house because she questioned their beliefs. When she came back to pick up her stuff one week later her little 3 your old sister was already taught to despise her.

Also this one guy beat the shit out of his son because they disagreed on certain views, and the kid was made retarded.
That was in someplace called Everywhere and Nowhere, U.S.

At least they're not popular, like Scientology.

Because Canada decided free speech was secondary to feeling good about yourself.