Right to assemble should not apply to funeral protests

Lee Bernstein, Las Vegas

Monday, June 7, 2010 | 2:02 a.m.

Regarding Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto’s May 31 commentary, “Lay heroes to rest with dignity”:

As firmly as I generally support strict interpretation of our constitutional guarantees of the freedoms expressed in the First Amendment, I believe that there are, and should be, limits to those freedoms.

The attorney general contends, rightly in my opinion, that protesters do not have license to attack the grieving family of a departed soldier, sailor or airman.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best when noting that freedom of speech does not give one the right to falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater.

The cherished right of free assembly does not give a group the right to assemble in Mississippi to burn crosses to terrorize people, nor should groups of Nazis be allowed to assemble in Jewish neighborhoods to cause anguish to concentration camp survivors (although an absolutely insane, insensitive court ruling to the contrary some years ago said it was their right to freedom of expression).

And free speech is limited by very specific laws against malicious defamation of character and slander.

As for the unquestioned sanctity of “freedom of the press,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said, “Freedom of the press is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of achieving a free society.”

There are moral and ethical codes in situations wherein “freedom” does have bounds.