Nassau Will Seek to Limit Funeral Protests

Nassau County is getting ready to tell protesters to take a step back – or rather, an additional 700-feet worth.

Two days after the United States Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in the case of Snyder v. Phelps, siding with funeral protesting members of the Westboro Baptist Church over the privacy rights of the deceased and their families, Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano introduced legislation to push demonstrations back further from funeral sites.

“Our disagreement is best reflected in Justice (Samuel) Alito’s dissent where he opined ‘in order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims’,” Mangano said Monday morning at the County . “I believe a family’s right of privacy to grieve without disturbance  is paramount.”

The new law proposes pushing back the current 300 foot buffer zone to a minimum of 1,000 feet and would require groups to obtain a permit “to regulate the time, place and manner of demonstrations,” Mangano said. “It is our intention to strengthen our law as much as possible.”

The current statute adopted in 2010 limits the time a group may protest, barring demonstrations from occurring an hour before and an hour after a funeral. Nassau does not have a permit process in place as pertains to funerals.

“It’s the fact that they’re letting them do this,” Mineola VFW Commander Manny Grilo said. “And it could be the reverse – we could go protest at their funerals. We won’t do that, we don’t stoop that low. What’s to stop anyone from protesting at any funeral? You draw the line at certain areas, you have some kind of respect.”

It is the county’s interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling that the government can monitor the time and place of the protest which provides the basis for the proposed law.

“We believe its constitutional,” Mangano said, confident it “will be consistent with the opinion and is paramount to ensure a proper, respectful way to mourn those that have given their life to protect the very freedom that we discuss here today.”

Massapequa commander Jack Hipp applauded Mangano's initiative but would like to see laws go further than the proposed buffer zone of 1,000 feet.

"I wish it were 2,000 feet or not at all," he said.  "They have no right to disrupt a funerals."

Hipp, who is also a retired New York City police officer, said he's seen similar disruptive protests first hand in the 1960s.

"I was on the street and I saw what these protestors were doing, that's not freedom of speech." 

Hipp says that there are laws on the books designed to prevent public disruptions and that funeral protests should fall into that category.

Commander Richard Begandy of of Massapequa VFW Post 7763 also supported the county executive's proposal said of the protestors, "They should be pushed back to the ends of the earth."

Begandy expressed his frustration with the leaders of the Westboro church, calling them "wackos who spew hate and venom," but said he wasn't surprised by the Supreme Court decision.

"As sickening as it is, it is free speech, but the boundaries between the protesters and the funerals should be pushed back.

Nancy Fuentes, a Levittown resident whose 19-year old son Daniel was killed in Iraq in 2007 by an improvised explosive device, felt that it was “disgusting and disrespectful to allow such form of protest when I’m grieving. All our fallen heroes from all wars died for our freedom and because of that these protesters have the freedom to express their stupidity. Does that seem fair?”