October 28, 2003
Why not the 10 commandments?
Remember all the flak over the 10 commandment statue? Why was such a little thing as that something to get the 'left' up in arms about?
Well, the Westboro Baptist Church, those fun people who run the www.godhatesfags.com website, want to put up a memorial celebrating the day Matthew Shepard went to hell - in Casper, Wyoming.
Why can they do this? Because in the park they want to use, Casper previously allowed a 10 commandment monument to be erected there.
Comments:legal experts say, the city unwittingly invited other monuments when it put up the Ten Commandments in a public park.
"By putting the Ten Commandments in the park, they created a sort of public forum for speech and debate," said Tom Goldstein, a First Amendment attorney and appellate court lawyer. "And once the city does that, it can't discriminate against other viewpoints, no matter how hateful."
Mike said (at October 29, 2003 07:06 AM):
I was gonna e-mail you -- the Westboro Baptist Church is up to their usual hijinks, this time over a Mepham High hazing incident:
http://www.blogrolling.com/br/sidebar.phtml?r=6c93ec60b4991cf23ebca8a4a7d0f10c&overridetarget=_main
The folks from Kansas were nice enough to come out to New York over this major issue -- photos are available here:
http://mepham.us/mepham_protest.htm
I'm sure that somewhere there's a snide but funny remark over this whole thing, but quite frankly I'm just not seeing it at the moment.
(I tried to embed the links to make this more readable, but for some reason it didn't like that and kept canning them....)
Henry said (at October 29, 2003 07:49 AM):
Yea, they're a fun group. You can tell by the 'God blew up the spaceshuttle' signs. I seem to recall another protest in NY they had signs saying 9-11 was god's punishment.
I'll have to see if I can find it.