Protesting Military Funerals
The First Amendment and the Right to Privacy
On March 10, 2006, in Westminster, Maryland, Albert Snyder gathered with friends and family in St. John’s Catholic Church to bury his son, Matthew, who had been killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) while serving in Iraq. Roughly 1,000 yards away from the church, seven members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas, had gathered for another purpose: to use Snyder’s funeral to demonstrate against the United States, the U.S. military, and the Catholic Church. Starting in the 1990s, the WBC began holding public protests across the country against what it identified as America’s “sins,” such as…
