Bill bans funeral protests

OLYMPIA – Appalled by a Kansas group’s picketing of military funerals – including one in Yakima – more than half the state House of Representatives has signed on to a bill banning “disruptive behavior” within 500 feet of a funeral.

“I think there’s a place for constructive discussion about public policy. But funerals are not the place,” said Rep. Chris Hurst, D-Enumclaw, whose nephew was killed in Iraq.

The bill was on a fast track to the House floor Wednesday night, being voted out of committee just minutes after a hearing. Only one lawmaker voted no, saying he was uncomfortable restricting free speech.

The bill targets the tactics of the Westboro Baptist Church, a virulently anti-gay group in Topeka, Kansas that publicizes its message by picketing high-profile funerals. The group maintains that troop deaths and natural disasters are evidence of God’s wrath at acceptance of gays and lesbians.

“Soldiers die, God laughs” reads one of their frequently-used signs.

At a Yakima soldier’s funeral two years ago, group members held neon signs reading “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “You’re going to hell.” They threatened to picket military funerals in Seattle, Renton, Bothell and Centralia.

“These people are sick,” said Chuck Lawrence, a Vietnam veteran from Bonney Lake. “It’s not civilized conduct.”

“This is disgraceful and un-American,” said Olympia’s Teresa La Bouff, whose brother was killed in Iraq a year ago.

Starting with Kansas, 28 states have passed similar bills, according to legislative researchers. They typically ban or limit protests around funerals. Some bar noisy, disruptive behavior or signs with “fighting words.” Some ban demonstrations at funeral times. Others make demonstrators stay 100 to 1,000 feet back.

In response to the pickets, a motorcyclist group called the Patriot Guard Riders formed in 2005. The group’s members use flag-waving crowds and a screen of cyclists and roaring engines to shield mourners from picketers and chants.

Church member Shirley L. Phelps-Roper, in an e-mail interview, said that Washington’s proposal will change nothing.

“We never stand within 500 feet as it is,” she said. But if the bill interferes with the pickets, she said, they’ll sue.

Critics, Phelps-Roper said, have only two options under America’s free-speech protections: either “drink a frosty mug of shut-the-hell-up and avert their eyes” or make their own signs and hold a counter-demonstration.

The bill’s prime sponsor, Rep. Dan Roach, R-Bonney Lake, says it’s carefully written to protect First Amendment rights.

The sole objection Wednesday came from freshman Rep. Jamie Pederson, D-Seattle. He noted that the group began its crusade by protesting at the funeral of murdered gay college student Matthew Shepard. The funeral pickets, he said, are “abhorrent.”

“As a gay man, I have enormous sympathy for all the folks who have been in that situation,” the Seattle attorney said. Nonetheless, he fears that restricting protests within 500 feet of funeral processions that could be miles long “exceeds the bounds of what we are allowed to do” under the Constitution. He voted no.

The bill now heads to the full House. An identical measure almost passed last year but died at the last minute in the Senate – over the livid protests of Republicans – in what Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, characterized as a miscommunication. Brown later said she and House Speaker Frank Chopp would make it one of the first bills passed in the Legislature in 2007. Its passage, she said, is “assured.”