The Westboro Baptist Church dwells on the furthest extremities of the Christian right. Its tiny congregation believes God kills US soldiers to demonstrate his disapproval of the US's tolerance of gay people. It feels this belief is best propagated by staging inflammatory 'protests' at these soldiers' funerals.
One might expect that these sickening demonstrations would fall foul of US law. But in 2011 the US Supreme Court decided otherwise. It effectively decided that the church's right to freedom of speech trumped the right of families to farewell their loved one in peace.
Most Australians would no doubt declare 'Only in America'. But something similar almost happened here.
Over the last few years, radical Muslim cleric Man Haron Monis and his friend Amirah Droudis have written letters to the families of Australian soldiers who have died in Afghanistan, insulting the recently-departed soldiers' memories by, to take one example, referring to a soldier's corpse as the 'dirty body of a pig'.
These men were charged under a law that prohibits sending 'menacing, harassing or offensive' letters. They appealed the charge to the High Court by arguing that this law against sending offensive letters ran against the 'freedom of political communication' that is implied in our Constitution.
Noone used to think our Constitution had a right to freedom of speech in it. But in the 1990s, the High Court decided that in fact our Constitution necessarily implied that a certain amount of 'freedom of political communication' must be allowed.
The argument is that our Constitution clearly establishes a system of representative and responsible government, but you can't have that unless people know what the government is doing, who the candidates to be our representatives are, what those candidates stand for, and so on.
So our Constitution implies that there must be at least some freedom to communicate about political and government matters. Any law that unreasonably restricts that freedom is unconstitutional.
The freedom isn't absolute — only laws that unreasonably restrict the freedom are unconstitutional. But what's unreasonable? That's been a tricky and divisive question ever since this implied freedom was 'discovered'.
The early cases involved serious threats to political speech — a law that banned criticism of the Industrial Relations Commission, and laws that made it difficult for anyone except an established political party to run political advertisements. But over time, the freedom has been slowly developed and extended.
In this case, six High Court judges heard the case. Each of them