All my adult life, I have been a supporter of the right to free speech. How could I not be, when my parents came here from a country where speaking freely could cost you your life? Even when the First Amendment permits hate-filled people to vent their hatred, I know that their rights are important to protect. But this week, my belief in the sanctity–in the beauty–of the First Amendment was tested. And I flunked the test.

This past Wednesday, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 that the morally hideous signs held aloft by the Phelps family outside the funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder were protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. The majority decision said that, because the Phelps family’s demonstration was "political, public and peaceable," it did not fall outside the First Amendment’s protection. Sympathy for the grieving Snyder family was noted, but irrelevant.

I have no doubt that was a correct interpretation. But to be correct is not the same thing as being right. And something about that ruling didn’t feel right to me. I wondered how it felt to God, Whom the Phelpses’ placards listed as a supporter.

Then I remembered a question that is–or ought to be–part of our national memory. During the Army-McCarthy hearings, sixty years ago–miraculously televised by ABC–Senator Joseph McCarthy went after a young lawyer named Fred Fisher. Fisher wasn’t even present, because Mr. Welch, Special Counsel to the Army, had decided not to use Fisher's services when the young man admitted that he had as a still younger man belonged to the Lawyers Guild which apparently had a Communist connection. Despite the fact that, due to Mr. Welch’s caution, Fred Fisher was not in any way involved in the hearings, Senator McCarthy, out for blood, brought up Fisher’s youthful mistake. He chewed on it and chewed on it, would not let it go. Finally, in a voice that can never be forgotten by anyone who heard it, Mr. Welch said to Senator McCarthy, "Have you no decency sir, at long last?"

Why did the Supreme Court ruling bring to my mind the increasingly heated exchange between Joseph Welch and Senator McCarthy? The connection is found in Welch’s use of the word "decency." The way Phelps and his feral family behaved may have been constitutional, but it wasn’t decent.

In this country, most of us hold dissent very high among our democracy’s virtues. I’ve read that the 8-1 decision this week may help the cause of free speech, and some say that there’s never too high a price for that. Maybe. But should not dissent be leavened with humanity? With, yes, decency? With enough simple decency to allow a fallen marine’s family to conduct his funeral service in peace?