Hate Speech

By Jessica Vetter……………………… Tweet

.“God hates America, and God demonstrated that hatred to some modest degree,” Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, is credited as saying during a sermon following the attacks on September 11. “It was a glorious sight. You need to see in those flames a little preview of the flames of Hell that are going to soon engulf you, my friend. Burn your soul forever!”

Constitutionally, one of the many rights we are granted as Americans is the right to say whatever we’d like. Normally this is considered one of the facets that makes our country great, but (and this is where we run into problems), there are no exceptions built in to limit hate speech. Unless the speech can be classified as obscenity, libel, or fighting words, it is given the same protection as any other speech.

But is it necessarily good to allow hateful words to run rampant in our society, especially with the multitude of racial and religious tensions we face?

The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), founded by Fred Phelps and composed mostly of his family, is most known for their pickets at funerals for soldiers and gay victims of hate crimes, churches, sporting events and concerts. On average, they protest at six locations a day and 15 on Sundays. Since 1991, the church has participated in protests over 41,000 times in 650 cities in all 50 states. Some of their most used signs include “God hates fags,” “God hates America,” “Thank God for 9/11” and my personal favorite, “Pray for more dead soldiers.” As expected, they have not been well received by the general population and have been sued several times.

Another questions remains: when do words become actions? Hate crime is much more serious than hate speech. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2009 Hate Crime report, the number of victims (victims being individuals, businesses, or institutions) reported in 2009 was 8,336. As far as breaking down that number, the clear leader was racial crimes with 4,057 reported incidents. Coming in second was religion at 1,575 and sexual orientation a close third at 1,482. 62.4% of offenders were white. Of the crimes committed, 40.3% were assaults, 23.5% were aggravated assaults and 1.2% were murders and rapes.

For all of their blustering, the WBC practices a nonviolent form of protest.  Their messages may be filled with hate and their signs may offend, but besides picketing and chanting, they engage in no other types of protest or violence. It can be argued that this behavior is inappropriate and tasteless, especially at funerals where it infringes on the sacredness of ritual and grief, but who are they hurting?

Many have questioned Phelps and his family about his techniques, wondering if they put off potential converts. But conversion is not Phelps’ intent. “You think our job is to win souls to Christ,” said Phelps in the BBC documentary The Most Hated Family in America. “All we do, by getting in their face and putting these signs in front of them and these plain words, is make what’s already in their heart come out of their mouth.”

We only feed hate groups like the WBC by listening to them, reacting, and giving them publicity. The problem, Martin Luther King Jr. points out in Letters to Birmingham Jail, is that we operate under the assumption that time will somehow solve everything. If we don’t do anything about hate speech, it will eventually go away. But time itself is neutral – it is how people use time that can smooth relationships or strain them. The WBC uses time negatively, cramming as much in as possible to get as much exposure as possible. Every moment of hate wasted on them is a moment that could be spent counteracting their message with love. Not only are they using their own time constructively (to their interests) but they are also causing us to waste ours.

So are hate speech laws unconstitutional? Should people be allowed to spew hatred? Would limiting what is said undermine the very values of democracy?

To be honest, hate speech does little and banning would barely scratch the surface on the issues of hate and injustice. There is also the tricky area of what is defined as hate speech and who decides what is classified as hate speech.

In the end, the church has the right to protest, a right that we granted them. They have a right to spread whatever message they see as truth, just as we have the right to not listen to them. But their story shows us exactly how powerful our voices are. If people like the Westboro Baptist Church can gain coverage parading around signs that say “9/11, Gift from God” then imagine what compassionate voices can accomplish banded together? And in a way, we can even take comfort in the lack of exceptions in the first amendment, because we know we will never be censored either. So the most we can do is try to ignore the hate and counter it with love.

This provides a framework for my next blog, where I will expand this issue of hate speech into the global stage.