First Amendment News

First Amendment News From AOL News

Dissenting Justice: Westboro Ruling Goes Too Far

Where should the nation draw the line on free speech? For Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the defense of First Amendment rights expressed by today's majority ruling in the Westboro Baptist Church case goes too far. The 8-1 decision found that the fringe church's hate-filled picketing at the funeral of a Marine...

Westboro's 'Church of Hate' Leader Once Championed Civil Rights

Fred Phelps has been testing America's laws -- and patience -- for years, long before the Supreme Court today gave his anti-gay church group the OK to protest its gospel of hate at military funerals. But in the beginning, Phelps, now the 80-year-old pastor of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, had a very different...

Westboro Court Decision Pits Free Speech Against Common Decency

WASHINGTON -- Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church may have won their case in the U.S. Supreme Court today, but not even the most ardent advocates of free speech are rejoicing. "On a personal level, I can't imagine a single person in this country who doesn't feel the pain of this father" whose Marine son's funeral...

Supreme Court Sides With Westboro Baptist Church; Twitter Reluctantly Agrees

Who ever said that free speech would be easy? Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church, a small group, made up mostly of members of the Phelps family, that stages protests at military funerals (and other places). The case, Snyder v. Phelps, was filed by the father of a...

11 California Students Charged for Heckling Israeli Ambassador

Eleven University of California students were charged on Friday with misdemeanors for disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States last year. Ambassador Michael Oren visited the UC Irvine campus on February 8, 2010. Students, believed to be members of the Muslim Student Union, repeatedly interrupted...

Background on First Amendment

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.

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