I wish they would stop calling these people a “church.”  It’s this nutcase and his family.

Thanks, Catholic Mom. Let’s use ‘mob’ or ‘gang’.

or cult

Problem with “cult”  is that it implies that he’s managed to convince anybody.  I think everybody in this “church” is within one or two degrees of blood or marriage to the leader.

But you don’t address the First Amendment issue. Crackpot or not, are these people protected? Or is this hate speech (whatever this is) and therefore not protected? If there are limits to the first Amendment, what can they possibly be? I can’t call a homosexual a faggot but he can call himself that. And the difference is? Can we sell anything we want to adolescents - but not cigarettes? Limits? No limits? Can burn Korans and American flags, but can’t light op a cigarette?  Larry

I believe that free speech ends just where freedom of action ends—where your fist reaches my nose.  You can call homosexuals faggots, you can call soldiers murderers, you can call anybody anything.  What you can’t do is follow them around and get into their face and scream it, because that’s where “free speech” ends and “harassment” begins. 

As far as minors are concerned, we can limit sales of virtually anything we like to them.  If their parents want them to smoke cigarettes or watch violent videos or do whatever else it is they want, they can buy the stuff.  Legally minors can’t enter into business transactions anyway.  If they bought something and signed a promise to come back and next day and pay for it, they couldn’t be held to it.

Nio, #6, I CAN"T call anybody anything. I cannot call a black a nigger publicly without becoming liable to a felony - if I understand federal law correctly in the matter of hate speech (and I may not). Certainly in Maine I cannot. But a black can call himself that. And as to harassment, then all the placard carriers are harassing?  but we note that the placard bearers in the matter of abortion clinics, in your face as they are, are permitted as long as they stay back a certain distance.  Larry

Well, it depends what you mean by “call” somebody something.  No, you can not walk up to a black guy on the street and say “you’re a nigger.”  You also cannot walk up to somebody on the street and say “f$% you.”  Totally leaving out the “hate speech” aspect of it, this is simple harassment.  [Laws on what two people who know each other can say to each other are somewhat different.]  On the other hand, the British sometimes say “f*&* me!!” —meaning “what an effing moron I am, I just did something unbelievably stupid!”  Obviously you can direct speach against YOURSELF without it being harassment.

On the other hand, you are perfectly welcome to begin producing your own newspaper in which you announce publically that, as far as you’re concerned, blacks are a bunch of niggers.  If you want to publish a book in which you argue that blacks (or Jews) are an inferior race, you can do that in America (though not in Germany.)  It becomes “hate speech” (in America) when it becomes incitement to violence or discrimination against blacks or Jews.  And obviously, as we’ve seen in Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Laws first and the concentration camps later were proceeded by a great deal of hate speech and writing psyching up the populations against the Jews.  When you’re bombarded with people telling you daily that you have to remove the Jewish infection from the healthy body of Germany, you start to think maybe that’s a good idea.