Seen in the Courant:
Prompted by an incident at services last December for a soldier killed in Iraq, the state House of Representatives voted unanimously Wednesday to ban protesters from picketing funerals.[...]
Lawmakers started discussing the ban after reading press reports last December about eight members of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., who traveled to East Lyme to protest the funeral of Army Capt. Jason R. Hamill. Hamill was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
Some members of the church could be seen holding signs that read “Thank God for IEDS [improvised explosive devices],” “America is Doomed,” and “God is America’s Terror.”
Westboro, of course, points out the First Amendment concerns about laws like this one, which prohibits protests from 60 minutes before a funeral/burial/memorial service until 60 minutes after.
As vile as such protests are, I suspect that the intent of the First Amendment is to protect unpopular speech like Westboro’s. However, that doesn’t mean that the state can’t legislate that such protests be quiet or that they stay a reasonable distance away.