Megyn Kelly discusses Westboro Baptist Church with Bill O’Reilly
Kelly argues areas where O’Reilly has misrepresented the facts surrounding this case. O’Reilly accused Kelly of saying the case had no merit, while Kelly’s position was that it was going to be a closed case.
O’Reilly accused the other two judges in the case with concurring with Judge Shedd’s view that “reasonable people can debate the worthiness the appropriateness of Westboro position.” Kelly points out the other judges threw the case out for other reasons, and did not need to concur with Judge Shedd.
Kelly goes on to explain to O’Reilly that Judge Shedd has a point. “It may not have been intentional infliction of emotional distress, for this Westboro Baptist Church people to go outside of that funeral and protest, because to make that claim under the law you have to prove conduct that is extreme and outrageous, but extreme and outrageous don’t have the meaning that you and I understand them to have; legally it means something else.”
Latter on Kelly also points out that the Westboro protest was a thousand feet away from the funeral. For a moment, I thought Kelly was going to point out another area where O’Reilly has misrepresented this case, as the protesters didn’t disrupt the funeral.
O’Reilly states at the start of the clip:
As you may remember, these fanatics disrupted the funeral Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, twenty years old, killed in Iraq.
Evidently the Westboro group wasn’t very successful in disrupting the funeral in question. The father of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder did not see t signs of the protesters until he saw them on television later that day.
Kelly points out this case has serious implications on free speech, which it has; but this case has also been a serious misrepresentation of the facts by O’Reilly.
