The Reverend Fred Phelps' God-Hates-Faggetry that plays out outside military funerals, political conventions and Rent productions at Corona del Mar High School won U.S. Supreme Court protection this morning.
Justices voted 8-1 to uphold an appeals-court ruling that threw out
a $5 million judgment to the father of a dead Marine who sued Westboro Baptist Church
members who picketed his son's funeral. The court ruled the First Amendment protects
fundamentalist-church members, including those from the Topeka, Kansas, hate-gregation who mount attention-getting, anti-gay
protests outside military funerals.
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Westboro picketers follow The Laramie Project, a play about the murder
of Matthew Shepard and subsequent funeral picketing by Phelps' cult, around the country. But after threatening to send members to downtown Santa Ana for Grand Central Theater's November production, no one showed.
In April 2009, Westboro's hate target was Corona del Mar High School, whose theater department premiered Rent, a hugely popular musical that follows impoverished young
artists and musicians, some of whom are gay and HIV-infected, struggling
to live in
New York City's Lower East Side.
Ten members of Phelps' church participated in a mini-tour of Orange County in March 2000, showing up outside Laguna Beach City Hall to protest the police chief's then-new policy of documenting
complaints of violence-laced hate speech, Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove for not being sufficiently anti-gay, and El Modena High School in Orange for allowing the creation of a Gay-Straight Alliance club.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.