Kudos to My State of Birth, Part 1

While I no longer live in the state of Missouri, I was so proud over the weekend to have been from there.  But before I get into what made me so proud of my "Show Me State" roots, I want to re-visit an issue from more than a year ago to make sure this weekend's event is placed in the proper context.

SO . . . below is the republished text of an article I wrote well over a year ago when the issue first came to national attention . . .

The Church: The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS travels around the country to the funerals of US soldiers protesting gays in the military. They accomplish this by holding up signs that say "God Hates You" or "Your Son Is In Hell" and various other awful things. While they are protesting gays in the military, the funerals at which they protest are all for heterosexual individuals as under current law, military personnel are not allowed to disclose that they are homosexuals and remain in the military. So the heterosexual widows/widowers, surviving children and parents of heterosexual members of the US military have become the object of protests and hatred by this church that opposes homosexuals serving quietly in the military as they are not allowed, under current law, to serve openly.

The Missouri Law: Nearly every state has had to pass laws restricting the protests of the Westboro Baptist Church so that grieving families can bury their service members in peace. Ohio, for example, has a law that allows people to protest military funerals, but only a certain number of yards away from the funeral service and not for an hour before or an hour after the service time. This law is constitutional in that it allows for peaceful assembly, which is a constitutional right, but also rightfully restricts that assembly so as to allow families to be able to hold a funeral service in peace. Missouri, however, bungled up their law. The Missouri law simply says that you can't protest at funerals, which eliminates the constitutional right to protest peacefully. As state law cannot take away rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the law is unconstitutional.