Westboro Baptist Church, at a typical protest.
The Kansas church that travels the country to protest at soldiers' funerals has won another victory. The Kansas Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down -- on technical grounds -- a law that prohibits such demonstrations.
To be constitutional, even a limited content-neutral no-picketing zone must be defined with sufficient precision. A Kansas funeral-picketing law, for instance, was struck down in 1995 because it banned picketing "before" and "after" funerals without defining those terms. (It has since been reenacted with more precise terms and struck down again.)
I'm not sure what legislatures should do about funeral picketing. I strongly sympathize with the desire to shield the grieving, especially given how cruel and contemptible many of the funeral picketers have been; I also think little would be lost to public debate if funeral picketing is banned. On the other hand, I do worry about the slippery-slope risks from any new exception to free-speech principles. In any case, though, I've tried to explain what First Amendment law is now, whether or not that's the way it should be.
Decency respects the dead, whereas the First Amendment respects freedom. Which kind of respect should prevail when the two collide?
Specifically, can funeral protests be outlawed without abridging the First Amendment? That question is being widely ignored in the rush to enact federal and state laws to ban such forms of free expression.
It is a simple truth: The highest respect we can pay to our fallen war dead is to respect the principles for which they made the supreme sacrifice. We honor them by honoring those principles of freedom — even when a callous few vainly attempt to demean the dignity rightfully due them.
President Bush, who is in Africa this week, is pushing Congress to renew his AIDS initiative.
President Bush this week implored Congress to renew his five-year, $30 billion global plan for AIDS relief -- including a core provision requiring that one-third of government spending go toward abstinence education.
Congress strongly supports the program generally, but many Democrats oppose the abstinence education requirement, saying it doesn't work. But the administration points to successes in stemming the spread of AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa.
Is abstinence enough? Should U.S. taxpayers be funding controversial abstinence education programs abroad? Does spending billions of dollars on AIDS prevention undermine other medical research and health care programs?
“Compassionate conservatism” has been justly maligned, but it may yet leave one lasting and worthy legacy.
That would be the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), begun in 2003, which George W. Bush asked Congress to extend for another five years. Funding for AIDS prevention and treatment has seen a spectacular rise under PEPFAR. While spending on global AIDS relief hovered just short of $1 billion annually during Bill Clinton’s last years in office, the Bush administration has tripled that amount, spending an average of $3 billion per year since PEPFAR began. Under the proposal announced last Wednesday, that figure would double to $6 billion per year from 2008 to 2012. This is, as the president noted Wednesday, “unprecedented -- the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.”
The late Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who until his recent death was chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lambasted the PEPFAR opponents a short time before he died. He cited studies that "found that the abstinence-only earmark has forced a reduction in programs preventing transmission of the virus that causes AIDS from mother to child, has reduced prevention efforts with high-risk groups, and has undermined efforts to implement [prevention] programs."
With regard to the opposition to the integration of HIV/AIDS and birth control services, Lantos added, "this provision will ensure contraceptive assistance to HIV-positive women who wish to delay or prevent a subsequent pregnancy. Do the people objecting to this provision want to stand in the way of a sick woman trying to avoid getting pregnant?"
