Last week, Paris prosecutors pressed charges against John Galliano after a video of the former Christian Dior designer spewing racial insults went viral.
"I love Hitler," Galliano told a woman at a Paris bar, "and people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would be…gassed and… dead."
Dior swiftly fired its popular designer, Galliano went reliably into rehab and the French police went into overdrive, charging the devilish-looking dandy with making "public insults based on the origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity." Those convicted face up to six months in prison and $31,000 in fines.
Galliano’s implosion came just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, ruled that even vile, insensitive speech spewed at military funerals is protected under the First Amendment. The case involved members of the tiny but toxic Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for barking antigay epithets at family members gathered at funeral sites. Venom, no matter how repulsive or merciless, is protected under our First Amendment.
Conceding that the church’s picketing of military funerals fallen soldiers' funerals "is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "as a nation we have chosen … to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."
We will not, in other words, go the way of France and more Draconian countries, which squelch speech from the heinous to the hopeful, even speech as repulsive and cruel as "God hates fags, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," and "You're Going to Hell."
The Westboro Baptist Church has bleated such statements during families’ most sacred and vulnerable moments. This flock of profane parrots has got it into their bird brains that God is punishing the U.S. for its increasingly tolerant attitude toward gays. As its spokesman told The New York Times after the Supreme Court decision, "God is punishing this nation with a grievous, smiting blow, killing our children, sending them home dead, to help you connect the dots."
Connecting the dots is what Rep. Peter King (R-NY), insists he is trying to do with his investigation of the "self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community." King was responding to the discomfiting but undeniable fact that a bunch of homicidal fanatics have latched on to radical Islam and twisted it to support their embrace of slaughter.
The Westboro Baptist Church has not yet slaughtered anything but the souls of the grieving, but at some point, a decent Christian has got to ask: what serpent has slithered its way through scripture and surfaced as hatred?
For the first time this week, as a devout Christian, I began to get a sense of what it must be like for a devout Muslim to endure the transgressions of a fraction of its members. While most Christians easily dismiss Fred Phelps and his Westboro mob as a bunch of fringe lunatics, others consider these sanctimonious, scathing scolds as typical Christians.
The Westboro Baptist Church is not Baptist. It is not even Christian. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has called the Westboro church "blasphemous" and "verbal terrorism." That is because the Phelps and their like wound Christianity at its heart. This religion, with its insistence on plumbing beneath divine law to the love and mercy that is its source, has no room for hate. None. In 1999, Southern Baptists denounced the idea that "God hates any person," as it condemned "all violent acts upon homosexuals."
Does this country need to muzzle the hate-spewing, merciless frauds? It must not. It cannot. But free speech works both ways. Since 2005, a loose gang of motorcycle riders called the Patriot Guard Riders has shielded grieving family members from protesters. They are not Christian crusaders. But they can be. And they should be.
If hate is not a Christian value, it will take Christians to ensure it does not become one.
Contact: Tosh[AT]Rep-am.com
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