Washington, USA - The Supreme Court has agreed to take a new and difficult look at free speech, saying it will decide whether a serviceman's family can collect damages from religious fundamentalists who used the soldier's funeral to promote virulent anti-gay views.
The court agreed Monday to take the case, one of many growing out of the charged activism of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan.
Its eventual ruling could be "one of the most significant First Amendment, free speech decisions in quite some time," said David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington.
The case calls on the high court to balance the Constitution's protection of "vigorous, challenging speech ... no matter how distasteful" against the rights of individuals and families to carry on private activities without harassment, said Gene Policinski, the First Amendment Center's director.
Members of the church, most of them relatives of founder Fred Phelps, have shown up at dozens of military memorial services in recent years, bearing signs with slogans like "God Hates the USA" and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."
The tiny sect holds that soldiers' deaths are God's way of punishing America for its tolerance of homosexuals. The church's Web site also refers to President Barack Obama as the "Antichrist Bloody Beast" and calls Israel a "savage hypocritical nation of filthy sinners."
After a 2006 demonstration at the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, Snyder's father sued the church for emotional distress. Albert Snyder eventually won a $5 million award from a federal court in Maryland.
But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va., overturned the award last year. Though the church members' signs contained hateful rhetoric, "no reasonable reader could interpret any of these signs as asserting actual and objectively verifiable facts about Snyder or his son," the court said.
Instead, the court said, the signs were directed at subjects of public concern, including military service by gays and sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. The First Amendment was designed to protect free debate on such issues, the court asserted.
Georgetown University's Jeffrey I. Shulman, who filed a friend of the court brief in the 4th Circuit in support of Snyder, said the Supreme Court accepted the case "to say there's a line here we must draw."
The high court has passed on other opportunities to consider limits on funeral demonstrations.
Those cases hinged on the propriety of state and federal laws passed or altered in response to the church's demonstrations. The laws generally create buffer zones around funerals, requiring protesters to maintain a minimum distance and limiting their use of loudspeakers that might intrude on a funeral service. In some states, violations are considered felonies.
Shulman said the Snyder case is different because it involves a private lawsuit for damages caused by emotional distress rather than a governmental attempt to criminalize free speech.
"If the church wants to protest the state of our military, the moral fiber of our military, it can do so," he said. But the signs carried by Westboro members at the Snyder funeral were "a personal assault and a matter of private concern."