People are more than happy to support the things they like.

When it comes to things they don’t like, the best we can usually hope for is ambivalence, but usually people want to stamp out things they don’t like.

But that’s why here in the USA we have the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The precise goal is to allow people to live free, which understands that living free isn’t the same as living popular. Much of what those documents are about is protecting that which is unpopular.

Take the beloved “freedom of speech”. I know there are people right now upset at the SCOTUS ruling regarding the Westboro Baptist Church, but folks… they ruled the correct way. Even tho I think Fred Phelps and his crew are distasteful assholes of the highest order that in no way are doing God’s work, we cannot deny them the ability to be the assholes they were born to be merely because we find them to be such great assholes. If there’s any speech these days that’s unpopular, they’d be it, and that’s what 1A is all about protecting.

Sure, Albert Snyder got hurt, bad. I can’t imagine what he went through nor would I want to be in his shoes; I have only compassion for the man. But when you step back from it all, he just has a big case of his feeling getting hurt. I mean, there are lots of other behaviors in this world that could elicit a similar situation, yet are we going to outlaw hurting people’s feelings? Don’t construe this as minimizing Mr. Snyder’s situation, but we have to consider the slippery slope.

What makes this more difficult is the best way to deal with assholes is to ignore them, but Phelps makes a living out of making himself and his group impossible to ignore; it’s hard to ignore someone being so ugly right in your face. But part of what is supposed to make America great isn’t that we try to abridge others because we don’t like them or what they do (tho, you’d think these days we’ve lost sight of that), but rather we allow people to freely act and react. So one of those free reactions is groups like the Patriot Guard Riders.

Yes, I wish Fred Phelps and crew would shut up and go away; actually do God’s work and quit standing on the streetcorner. But if he wants to continue being an asshole and letting the world know what an asshole he is well… he’s got that right and we cannot abridge it, else we don’t really understand what freedom means.