A gay old time

Our old buddy Fred Phelps is back in the news, demonstrating how hard it is to win a defamation suit:

The first individual lawsuit brought against Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church for its protests at military funeral ceremonies will go to trial next week in Baltimore.

A father claims protesters from the Kansas-based anti-gay group destroyed his only chance to bury in peace the son he lost in Iraq. The picketers, who had carried signs with messages such as “Thank God for dead soldiers,” countered that they were only trying to oppose gays in the military.

After the two sides presented legal arguments in a Baltimore courtroom Monday, a federal judge offered a split decision, ruling that a more limited lawsuit brought by Albert Snyder, the father of the slain Marine targeted by Phelps’ church, can proceed to trial next week.

At times incensed over what he described as long-winded theological speeches given by a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett nonetheless dismissed two of the five counts against the church and three of its leaders, saying in part that their statements, no matter how incendiary, amounted to protected speech.

Comments posted on the church’s Web site that Snyder raised his son “for the devil” and taught his son how to “defy his Creator, to divorce and to commit adultery” did not defame the father because it was “not the kind of information that a reasonable person is going to assume was presented to be considered fact,” Bennett said.

Note that last sentence. The more outrageous the lie you tell, the less likely a reasonable person would believe it and the more protected you are in saying it.