Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that it has come to this. After the Supreme Court ruled that the hate-filled Westboro Baptist Church clique has the right to protest at funerals, the folks in Rankin County, Mississippi, took justice into their own hands.
Rather than abide by the court's ruling and make a local ordinance requiring protesters to stay a minimum distance away from funerals, the locals got a little creative in keeping the creeps away from a procession. Specifically, they beat them up, wouldn't let them out of a parking lot, and detained them for questioning for a mythical crime until the funeral was over.
According to one unconfirmed but widely circulating account of the April
14 funeral for USMC Staff Sgt. Jason Rogers, who died while serving in
Afghanistan earlier this month, the county's citizens seem to have
worked together to prevent the WBC from showing up along the route. From
a University of Mississippi message board:
They [WBC members] did show up, a few showed up a couple of
days early.
A couple of days before, one of them ran his mouth at a Brandon gas
station and got his ass waxed. Police were called and the beaten man
could not give much of a description of who beat him. When they
canvassed the station and spoke to the large crowd that had gathered
around, no one seemed to remember anything about what had happened.
Rankin County handled this thing perfectly. There were many things
that were put into place that most will never know about and at great
expense to the county. Most of the morons never made it out of their
hotel parking lot. It seems that certain Rankin County pickup trucks
were parked directly behind any car that had Kansas plates in the hotel
parking lot and the drivers mysteriously disappeared until after the
funeral was over.
Police were called but their wrecker service was running behind and
it was going to be a few hours before they could tow the trucks so the
Kansas plated cars could get out. A few made it to the funeral but were
ushered away to be questioned about a crime they might have possibly
been involved in. Turns out, after a few hours of questioning, that they
were not involved and they were allowed to go on about their business.
Rankin deserves a hand in how they handled this situation.
Nobody wins in the battle of hideous but constitutionally protected speech vs. vigilante justice.
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