Originally posted on July 5, 2013 at 5:00 PM

I’d been meaning to write this entry on something else but felt I needed to clear this topic first. The Westboro Baptist Church has been in the news again of late; first for their predictably reprehensible attempts to disrupt the funerals for the 19 heroes who recently gave their lives fighting fire in Arizona, then for a predictably cowardly response from the White House. The WBC, we are given to understand, isn’t a hate group? My response is “why the hell not?!” I’ve got a feeling that if NAACP conventions or memorials for Dr. Martin Luther King were being invaded by spiritually diseased bigots, said bigots and the church they hide behind would quickly become a hate group.

I want to be very clear in saying that no, I don’t want NAACP meetings or King memorials to be invaded by diseased bigots, in the same way that I don’t want somebody burning flags, whether it be mine or someone else’s. There are just some things that honorable people don’t do. No one’s memorial should be a venue for picketing and castigation.

Freedom of speech? Horse droppings! We’ve never truly had absolute freedom of speech in the days of the founders (When a man was dragged out of a tavern and jailed for saying he didn’t care if they fired a cannon ball through John Adams’s ass, he wouldn’t watch the presidential parade), or now when persons who threaten the President are rounded up prior to a visit by the Chief Executive. We also can’t run through a building yelling “fire!” And racial slurs are fast on their way to becoming illegal.

There is no biblical justification whatever for the activities of the Westboro Baptist Church does and as far as I can see, it’s not truly a church. Religious Freedom? Road apples! We don’t allow human sacrifice in America even with the First Amendment, even though human sacrifice has a venerable history. With George W. Bush’s Faith-based Initiative, Wicca was excluded as a religion even though it clearly is; and I heard very little protest except from Wiccan folks. If our president and Federal law-keeping agencies haven’t the grit to put the Westboro Baptist Church on a par with people who hurl racial invective let’s at least deny them tax-exempt status. Perhaps that will cut down on travel funds.