Funerals are No Place for Protests

Apr 4, 2010 | 0 comments

Columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. recently did an opinion piece about the despicable actions of a so-called church that puts on protests at soldiers’ funerals, claiming their deaths are punishment from God because America is a “fag-loving nation.”

Pitts warns the reader right off the bat that you will be furious when you finish reading this column, and he’s absolutely correct. Click here to read his column.

No matter what you think about our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, the freedom to hold a noisy, hateful protest at a soldier’s funeral to draw attention to someone’s twisted notion of how to live one’s life is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Funerals are public events. Families list the details in paid classified obituaries to inform the community as widely as possible. But that doesn’t mean that those who have their own agendas can show up and do whatever rude, outrageous acts they want outside the funeral.

Our military men and women die to defend our freedom of speech. It is appalling that the members of this anti-homosexuality “church” dance on graves while the families of the fallen are grieving the death of their loved ones.

As Pitts said in his column, “To use one of my mother’s favorite expressions, these ‘Christians’ are going to knock the bottom out of hell.”

A Good Goodbye