The News & Observer reports that Attorney General Roy Cooper will join AGs in 47 other states and the District of Columbia in a lawsuit against Westboro Baptist Church and its execrable founder, Fred Phelps.
The lawsuit seeks to prevent Phelps and his church, whose membership the N&O notes largely consists of his family members, from picketing military funerals. The Phelps gang’s protests claim that the deaths of U.S. soldiers represent divine punishment for America’s “sinful ways.” (Presumably, God means to punish us because our laws frown on the stoning to death of homosexuals and adulterers and fornicators and abortion providers.)
Phelps and his ilk are reprehensible and deserve every form of private condemnation imaginable. But they also are protected by the First Amendment.
Cooper has no business getting involved in a lawsuit advocating censorship.
But if the AG has time to join in multistate lawsuits, he would be better served defending individual rights by, say, joining the dozen-plus states challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare.
