After watching with disgust and bluster the party-line passage of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, Americans are wont for substantive bipartisan cooperation. And around what better cause can Washington unite a fractured nation than by excising one of the most revolting poxes on civil society through the passage of federal “Rest in Peace” legislation? Kicking Fred Phelps’ ass is just the dose of bipartisanship America needs and deserves.

Albert Snyder, whose son Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder died in Iraq four years ago March, learned Friday an appeals court mandated he must pay for the legal fees of professional provocateur Rev. Fred Phelps and his controversial Westboro Baptist Church, with whom he had been locked in a bitter and protracted legal dispute for several years now.

“I think it’s a slap in the face,” Snyder said of the ruling. “It’s like, ‘Sorry Mr. Snyder, you buried your son for us, but we’re going to reverse the decision and we’re going to make you give them money so they can do this to more soldiers.’ I think it’s an insult to every soldier, marine and veteran out there that has served this country.”

Days after Snyder’s death, Phelps and a handful of WBC congregants traveled to the family’s home town of Finksburg, Maryland to share their perverse gospel: God is punishing America for her tolerance of homosexuality, and young Snyder was the latest casualty in a brewing war with Heaven.

Hurling their patented anti-gay invectives just feet from Snyder’s burial service, Phelps and his ilk came with their now-notorious “God hates fags,” “Semper fi fags,” “Fag troops” and “Thank God for dead soldiers” posters. Their signs left little to the imagination; Fred Phelps hate everyone, but few beyond gays and lesbians engender such disdain and hatred in his small black heart.

“It’s pretty bad when you go to your son’s funeral and there are pictures of two men having anal intercourse,” Snyder said recently to Newsweek Magazine, recounting the day of Matthew’s funeral. “It’s hard enough to bury a 20-year-old soldier, but to go through this at the same time is like kicking you in the face while you are lying on the ground.”

No parent should be responsible for burying their own child. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine another experience more painful, more emotionally wrecking than laying your own child to rest. But doing so within earshot of the stomach-churning rhetoric of a deranged hatemonger like Fred Phelps somehow rises to the despicable challenge like few others can.

“He was the hero and he was the love of my life,” Albert Snyder said of his son. But the last memory of his hero will be of Fred Phelps waving signs that would cause Hugh Hefner to blush.

Snyder sued Phelps and select congregants in civil court for defamation, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The outrageousness of the WBC protest was such that a judge awarded Snyder $11 million in punitive damages, which was later halved and eventually. On appeal, however, the Phelpses argued the First Amendment protected the family from claims of intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED).

Synder said he refuses to pay Phelps until Fall when the case will come before United States Supreme Court, whose jurists, he hopes, will deliver a sympathetic verdict to his still-grieving family.

The First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, speech and assembly, reads in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people to peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Phelps, who was an attorney himself before the Kansas Supreme Court permanently disbarred him in 1979 for a bevy of ethics violations, contends that his message of America’s homosexual-wrought calamity was “preached in respectful, lawful proximity” to Snyder’s memorial.

Phelps’ SCOTUS defense will lean heavily on Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, in which the late televangelist sued porn kingpin Larry Flynt over an unsavory satirical editorial recalling Falwell’s first sexual encounter with his mother. The court held that Flynt’s cartoon was protected speech, and not subject to claims of IIED, because the private citizens must be free to criticize public figures by way of creating a national dialogue. But with a conservative court and broad public opposition, showing that the act of waving offensive posters at the funeral of a soldier–whose family would otherwise not have been thrust into the public spotlight were it not for the WBC’s protest–qualifies as criticism of a public figure is a tenuous case at best.

Snyder’s complaint states five causes of action–all private in nature, all worthy of punitive damages–which were bore out in a civil trial. At issue in Snyder v. Phelps are remarks made by private individuals against other private individuals, made at a private religious gathering.

If the First Amendment has any bearing here, it is such that the Snyder’s rights to hold religious services–in this case a Catholic funeral–were infringed upon by Phelps’ picket.

In the same way they once curtailed speech relating to fighting words, defamation and obscenity, the court should find the obscene practice of hurling anti-gay epithets at slain service members an unprotected form of speech. Screaming “fag” over a reading of Ecclesiastes 3 at the top of one’s lungs simply should not be protected under the First Amendment.

Forty state legislators have now enacted so-called “Rest in Peace” legislation, stipulating that protesters must keep a designated buffer–varying from state to state, typically ranging from 200 to 500 feet–between the picket and the processional, burial and church services.

The United States Congress should pass complimentary, if not more aggressive, legislation shielding our grieving military families from these ruthless, disgusting protests. It’s a win-win for both parties: For Republicans, it wouldn’t hurt to show that the GOP is not reflexively in opposition to the LGBT community; and Democrats are in desperate need of some good will among flag-waving, bible-reading red state voters.

Facing now a mountain of debt, which promise to grow higher thanks in large part to costs associated with filing a brief for the family’s upcoming Supreme Court case, Albert Synder is nevertheless deterred. “As long as we have military people dying, I will fight,” he said.

An online fund for Synder has been established by the family’s attorneys, where those sympathetic to the Snyder’s position may contribute to help defray legal costs.