Anyway, it makes me sad when people say that the WBC' activities are not protests but advertising. It's the same bull**** many activists face -- "Who's paying you to do this?", "You're just doing this for YOURSELF!". Thus continues the torrent of slime that we all love to pour on people who stand by their convictions and do it in the public forum... You know, they're just communists, or angry at the world, or doing it for the money, or their actions somehow make people angry therefore we need to stop them. It gets really absurd whenever I see people try to explain the whole "they're doing it for the money" thing; they'll mention that WBC sues. Yeah, they sue people who try to infringe upon their right to protest. If people didn't try to suppress their activities, they wouldn't see a dime from the legal system. Anyway, this whole thing is a classic example of tyranny of the majority: The majority are patriots, WBC is not. WBC is oppressed.
"First they came..." is relevant here. Likewise is the quote "Freedom of speech is always the freedom of dissenters."
Difference is, activists actually
want something, whether that is some percieved 'wrong' righted, or some percieved 'evil' controlled, the WBC have no real terms to their protests, that is why I call it advertising. They have no real goal to achieve other than to present their views, they don't call for the Death of all homosexuals because that
would breach the equality laws, so all they really
can do is advertise their own existence.
If they were representing another, larger organisation then there might be some weight to your argument, but they are the very group they are representing and don't actually represent for
anything other the their own existence.