'F*ggot. ... You ought to blow yourself in the head.' Should This Speech Be Illegal?

Spencer Macnaughton | Uncloseted Media Weekly Newsletter

In a recent sermon titled “Pray the Gay Away” inside Indianapolis’ Sure Foundation Baptist Church, church leader Stephen Falco said the LGBTQ community should be ashamed of themselves and die. “There’s nothing good to be proud about being a f*ggot. You ought to blow yourself in the head in the back of the head. You’re so disgusting,” Falco said during the Church’s “Men’s Preaching Night.”

Shortly after, Brother Wayne from the Church doubled down on its desire to execute gay people, stating, “I think they should be put to death. … These people should be beaten and stomped in the mud, and then they should take a gun and blow the back of their heads off.”

We posted this on our Instagram and folks from all over started weighing in, outraged and—in some cases—confused about how this level of hate speech isn’t illegal in the U.S.

Screengrabs of some of our Instagram followers’ remarks.

These comments got me thinking… is this definitely not illegal? In Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany, hate speech is restricted.

However, in the U.S., hate speech is legally protected under freedom of speech laws. That means you can call someone a f*ggot or any horrific racial or antisemitic slur without facing legal repercussions. There are exceptions, including if something is considered a “true threat” where the speaker is knowingly causing someone to fear for their safety or if they use fighting words intended to provoke a violent reaction.

But even then, there is still a high bar that would make the speech illegal in the eyes of a court. For a true threat, a judge will consider what the speaker intended; whether they knew how their speech would affect the receiver; whether they could reasonably carry out the threat; and how the receiver reacted.

I reached out to a lawyer friend about the Church’s horrific remarks and he said that while the quote is “dancing on the line” of hate speech, he thinks the courts—and in particular the current conservative Supreme Court—would likely rule that it wasn’t a serious call to violence but rather a political statement.

So what do you guys think? What should be done when someone is this vitriolic, hateful, threatening and abusive toward LGBTQ people?

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Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline recently discontinued “Option 3,” a call menu route once dedicated to specialized support for LGBTQ youth. While the broader crisis line remains active, the closure has raised alarms among mental health professionals, advocates and those who relied on the unique services it offered. We investigate why Option 3 was shut down, who is most affected and what the decision reveals about the state of mental health support systems in the U.S.

• 🆕 Alex Byrne, an MIT philosophy professor with connections to at least one Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group and no experience with gender medicine, recently came forward as one of the authors for the Trump administration’s controversial HHS report on pediatric gender dysphoria. We spoke with MIT students and others who know Prof. Byrne to hear about how this revelation has rocked the department.

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Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

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