Sen. Lourey puts aside pain for principle

05/06/2006

She didn’t give a speech. Becky Lourey merely cast an eloquent vote: No.

Doug Grow, Star Tribune
Last update: May 05, 2006 – 9:50 PM

She didn’t give a speech. Becky Lourey merely cast an eloquent vote: No.

On Monday, she again was the only member of the Minnesota Senate to vote against a bill that will keep demonstrators 500 feet from funerals and funeral processions.

“I just hoped someone else would vote with me,” Lourey said.

66 to 1. But what power there was in her vote.

The push for the law was based on passion, not reason.

On Feb. 23, demonstrators from a church in Kansas showed up in Anoka at the funeral of Cpl. Andrew Kemple, who was killed in Iraq on Feb. 12. The chants of six followers of Fred Phelps were ugly. God, they said, is killing U.S. soldiers because the country tolerates homosexuality.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty and legislators were so offended they vowed to create a law to block similar demonstrations. Lourey was the only senator to oppose the Senate version of the bill in March. The law that came out of conference committee passed in the House 121-2.

Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, and Mike Jaros, DFL-Duluth, opposed the measure, which is expected to be signed by Pawlenty early next week.

Both representatives said that protecting free speech is the central issue, not the bleats of pathetic people like Phelps.

Then there was Lourey, the DFLer from tiny Kerrick, 40 miles south of Duluth, casting that lone Senate “no.”

What gives her so much depth in this issue is the fact she understands war’s agony. On May 27, 2005, her son Matthew, an Army pilot, was killed when his helicopter was shot down in Iraq.

Though she opposed the war, Lourey respected her son’s decision to fight.

Offended as she was by the vulgar behavior of the Phelps followers, Lourey not only voted her own conscience in rejecting the speech limits, but she believes it’s what her son would have wanted.

“He was honorable and he believed in the Constitution,” Lourey said.

Her colleagues were respectful but surprised. In fact, when legislators were scrambling to put together a law early in the session, Lourey said she was approached by a House member asking whether she’d like to be the Senate author of the bill.

“I told him, ‘Thank you for asking, but I just can’t do this; this is about freedom of speech,”’ she said.

The law is so restrictive that the American Civil Liberties Union isn’t going to get involved for the moment. The ACLU believes that before the ink dries on the governor’s signature, the well-lawyered Phelps will be in federal court to contest the law, which is vague, and, the ACLU believes, “facially unconstitutional.” Not to mention unnecessary.

The demonstrators, the ACLU’s Chuck Samuelson said, could have been arrested under a variety of public-nuisance laws.

“As it is,” Samuelson said, “the state of Minnesota will probably end up writing a check for about $100,000 to Fred Phelps for the privilege of writing an unconstitutional law.”

Maybe that’s not so much to pay for a lesson in free speech.