Protests at Soldiers' Funerals

Kansas, New Hampshire, and Maine (and who knows who else) have all been moving to outlaw protests at funerals, motivated mostly by disgust at protests being staged at funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. (The protests cut both ways -- protests against the war, and protests against homosexuality (go figure).)

Once again, it is a story so frustrating we are left snarkless.

It's just never the right way to go to try to limit the First Amendment. Tastelessness can always be called out for being tasteless; that's the real answer.

But honestly -- protesting outside soldiers' funerals? The tragedy is that those lives were lost because they were thrown into a system that treats them not as individual human lives but as disembodied tokens to be moved around on a game board for political purposes. Protests outside their funerals replicate that same tragedy -- taking the service which is supposed to honor their lives and bring closure for their survivors and sucking the meaning out of it so that it can be used as a backdrop for a political show.