Listening to his dad right now. The Phelps kooks sent out fliers calling his son an "ass", and they also put out press releases to advertise the fact that they were going to protest the funeral. Sick ****s.
Apparently, O'Reilly is raising money to help pay for the court costs/fine.
Thinking outside the box here, this Phelps is pastor of a Baptist Church or so he claims right .?
Does he only pick on Baptists or is he interrupting funeral services for people of other beliefs.?
Has this man picketted the funerals of those of other faiths such as the Unitarian Church that has Gay Pastors.?
Seems to me a good case can be made for them committing a hate crime by interfearing in a religious service of another faith.
What are the laws about inciting to riot using lies and indunendo.?
What are our laws about calling people names because of Age, Nationality, Race, sexual identity, or religion.?
So say Grand Pop is Jewish and a small church of some Christian demonation come crawling out of the woodwork and procede to Picket the cemetery yelling that the Jews killed Jesus.
Or local Baptist churches picket the Catholic Churches calling all the priests child molesters.?
Or the local Catholic churches picket the funerals of health care workers that were involved in abortions.?
This is a freaking sticky wicket, darn, the door is open for just anyone to raise Hell with another religious ceremony's and when caught sue everyone including the town for nonprotection by the police to exercise their rights to free speech.
We forget that the Funeral of family members in all cultures is a most faith based event in the lives of the family members. Outside the Baptism or marriage of a person of faith this is the most final, people can convert to another faith or divorce and remarry. One can not come back from the dead.
I do not know what happend to those 4 idiots up in Maine that thought it would be amusing after 2 cases of beer to roll the head of a dead hog into a Muslim temple at prayer time but these Phelps people are doing akin to what those good old boys did.
Free speech does not involve intruding a solemn rite of anthers faith and speaking out against it to disturbs the rite unless that faith is feeding virgins into some volcano against their will.
The fact that Funerals are usually religious events, not public events, should cover the right of the family and guests to a peacefull observance.