Ban on funeral protests passes

03/17/2006

Mom of soldier killed in Iraq casts sole ‘no’ vote

BY PATRICK SWEENEY
Pioneer Press

State Sen. Becky Lourey, whose son was killed in the war in Iraq, cast the only vote Thursday against a Minnesota Senate bill to ban protests and picketing at funerals and memorial services.

Lourey, a Democrat from Kerrick who is running for governor, did not speak out during the Senate debate on the protest ban, which stemmed from a series of demonstrations at military funerals across the country.

But in a later interview, Lourey said she believed her son fought and died for American freedoms that include free speech for protesters, even when the protesters’ speech is hateful and ugly to most people exposed to it.

“He always said that freedom of speech, our Bill of Rights, our way of life — that’s what he wanted to protect,” Lourey said of her son. Army Chief Warrant Officer Matthew Lourey, 40, was killed when his helicopter was shot down in Iraq in May.

In a 58-1 vote, the Senate joined the Minnesota House in banning protests aimed at disrupting funerals, burials and memorial services.

But the two bills are somewhat different, so they will have to be reconciled by the House adopting the Senate language or by a compromise in a House-Senate conference committee.

The House bill, approved unanimously March 9, requires that protesters stay at least 1,000 feet from funerals. The Senate bill does not spell out a distance.

The bills also have another difference: The Senate version explicitly includes gay partners among the grieving family members the bill strives to distance from protesters at funerals.

Both Minnesota bills, and similar protest bans already enacted in Wisconsin and several other states, were prompted by recent protests at military funerals across the country by a tiny church congregation from Topeka, Kan.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a group with a long history of picketing at the funerals of AIDS victims, say God now is using casualties in the Iraq war to punish the United States for a culture that condones homosexuality.

At the protests — including funerals in Anoka and Hudson, Wis., and a memorial service in Princeton, Minn. — members of the family of church founder Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. have carried signs asserting that soldiers and
Marines killed in Iraq are condemned to hell for their service in the military.

Both the House and Senate bills provide that the first offense of disrupting a funeral would be a misdemeanor, and the second would be a gross misdemeanor. Before approving the Senate legislation Thursday, senators defeated, on a 42-16 vote, an amendment that would have made a second offense a felony punishable by up to two years in prison.

Opponents of the amendment argued that making any part of the law a felony would require a lengthy review of the bill’s potential cost, in terms of prison beds and prison guards, that would delay enactment.

But Sen. Paul Koering, a gay Republican from Fort Ripley who offered the amendment, argued that the conduct of the Westboro Baptist protesters was egregious enough to be labeled a felony.

“We’re sending a message to these people that their actions are not welcome at funerals,” Koering said.
After the votes, Lourey said she had agonized over the position she took — both its potential impact on her campaign for governor and its impact on other parents of slain soldiers and Marines.

“I know this vote could well cause pain to other mothers,” she said. “I don’t like that.”