Lately, those of us who claim to value free speech have really been put to the test.

First, of course, the controversial cartoons depicting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad have been published in the Northern Star and elsewhere throughout the world to a largely mixed reception. Editors have been forced to consider the balance between religious awareness and sensitivity to the audience and the civic and ethical responsibility to that audience to report the news.

To their great discredit, many mainstream media sources have failed to meet this responsibility and refused to print the cartoons, although this column and others across the nation argued the responsible thing to do was to print them. Newspapers, after all, exist not to entertain and appease, but to inform. And sometimes providing information makes people uncomfortable. It should. Sometimes information is unpleasant and ugly. The cartoons certainly were.

But the wake of the cartoon controversy has left a lot of non-Muslim Americans wondering just how much they’d be willing to endure in the name of free speech. Unfortunately, a church in Kansas is providing a lot of us with a difficult litmus test.

Enter the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka. Members of this “church” have some rather unorthodox beliefs. Chief among these, according to its Web site (whose URL is not appropriate for printing in a family newspaper) is the belief homosexuality is the “bottom rung” of “human depravity.” They also believe the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people and ravaged southeast Asia was God’s way of punishing the world for homosexuality — akin to Noah’s flood.

Lately, these people have traveled the country to spread their “message.” The chosen forums have been the funerals of American military personnel killed in Iraq. There,

members picket and chant the war in Iraq is God’s way of punishing America for being tolerant of homosexuality. They carry signs that say things like, “Thank God for dead soldiers.” The Web site says worse things.

Some states, including South Dakota and our neighbor to the north, Wisconsin, have passed laws forbidding protests at military funerals. Wisconsin’s law makes it illegal to protest within 500 feet of a funeral, one hour before or after it takes place. Last month, members of an Illinois House Committee voted unanimously in favor of similar legislation here.

But the constitutionality of these laws is under careful scrutiny. Constitutional law professor Richard Fallon of Harvard University told the Chicago Tribune it would be very difficult for the courts to uphold such laws.

Over the past two years, this column has argued for the right to free speech for everyone, from extreme liberals like Michael Moore and Ward Churchill to extreme conservatives like Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. But I’m not sure I can think of a more wrong-headed, hateful message, or of a more inappropriate forum than that used by this church. Like many of us in the DeKalb community, I have a friend who served in Iraq. The idea of a self-proclaimed church disrespecting him or any of his buddies, living or dead, in order to advance their ideological agenda makes my skin crawl.

But this is the real test for any of us who claim to support free speech under the First Amendment. Will we still support the right to say something, even when we despise every word that is being said?

No less of a military man than former National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell once said, “free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word, and not just comforting platitudes.” In a way, it is unfortunate our First Amendment applies not only to rational people, but to irrational ones, as well. But it’s even more unfortunate that it is the irrational ones, like the Westboro Baptist Church, who insist on testing the limits of free speech in order to advance a hateful, narrow-minded and disrespectful publicity stunt against the very people who died defending their right to speak freely.

Voices

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.