By John Martin

If members of the city council in Topeka, Kansas, are beginning to waver in their devotion to the First Amendment, people who serve in local government just about anywhere will sympathize. For years, the Topeka council and other local institutions have been the targets of a strident and relentless anti-homosexuality campaign by members of a local church who express their views with noisy and disruptive picketing. Westboro Baptist Church members have been in and out of court, fighting disorderly-conduct arrests or challenging local legal efforts to restrain their behavior. In one case, an ordinance restricting the group’s practice of picketing other churches’ religious services was invalidated in court, and the city had to pay $47,000 in legal fees.

The church members are true believers who care little for civility, much like a famous Kansan who lit some of the fires that consumed the country in civil war. Comparing Westboro Baptist Church’s noisy picketing to John Brown’s violent absolutism on the issue of slavery may not be fair, but the Rev. Jerry Falwell himself condemned the church’s picketing of the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death last year. Falwell described the church’s pastor, the Rev. Fred W. Phelps Sr., as “either mean as the devil or a nut case.”

Local exasperation in Topeka came to a head last week, when the city council passed a resolution proclaiming the city’s opposition to “hateful behavior.” The resolution doesn’t target any person or institution by name, but it would be hard to find anyone in Topeka who doesn’t know exactly whom the council members have in mind.

There the matter might rest. But it probably won’t. The church has already threatened to take the city to court over the hateful-behavior resolution. And, in its exasperation, the council may have given Rev. Phelps and his flock an opening. The first part of the resolution is innocuous enough, declaring that “the city of Topeka is against hateful behavior and hateful actions in our community.” It’s the second part that might get a civil-liberties lawyer excited: “Be it further resolved that the city of Topeka will continue to use its existing authorities to pursue strategies to control and constrain hateful behavior and hateful actions and to promote positive alternatives within our community.”

Maybe Topeka will get away with using such a thinly veiled threat to try to restrain free speech. Maybe the members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who profess to be Christians, will rediscover Jesus’ injunction to love one’s enemies, and will turn the volume down to a level that allows something like civil debate. The most likely result is that neither of those things will happen. The people who give up so much of their time and who work so hard to serve in local public office have to put up with a lot. It’s a price they probably will just have to keep paying. And the citizens will pay a price as well, as good people who would like to serve see what is happening in Topeka and conclude that the personal cost is just too high.

John Martin is editor of Governing.com.

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