There's been a huge online push to get people to come and counter-protest the people from Westboro Baptist who are coming into town on the 13th to protest at the funeral of Marine Sgt. Kevin Balduf. Singer-songwriter Kevin Montgomery has been spreading the word and there's a Facebook group.

The Westboro Baptist strategy is to cloak themselves in the First Amendment in order to frame their efforts to distress families at funerals (or at the Gordon Jewish Community Center or the Islamic Center, the places the Phelps clan will be harassing earlier in the day before making their way to Balduf's funeral) and they've been extraordinary successful at this.

But I got to thinking about the fact that Montgomery and others even knew to mount a counter-protest. How does one become aware that this terrible thing is about to happen during the funeral of your loved one?

I remembered that Trace Sharp had written about the Westboro protest at Dustin Laird's funeral in Martin, so I called her up and asked her how the family became aware that the protest was going to take place. She said that Westboro Baptist put fliers up all over town, called the media, called law enforcement, and applied for a permit. She wasn't sure if they also called the family directly, but the family definitely saw the fliers with Laird's name and picture and, of course, the media and law enforcement made them aware of the situation.

And that got me thinking. Say you wanted to protest me. Okay, that's your First Amendment right. But say you wanted to do so in a way that involved my mother and would be obviously upsetting to her. Say you put fliers around her neighborhood so that everyone, including her, knew you were going to do this deliberately where it'd be difficult for her not to witness it. Say you called the media in her town ahead of time, the papers she's bound to read and the TV news she's bound to watch, hoping that they'll run stories about your presence that you must know are going to be upsetting to her.

You have the right to protest, yes. But do you have the right to terrorize my mom beforehand? The protest is protected speech, no doubt. But the campaigns of harassment? That I wonder about.