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I know that we all love to jump up on our soapboxes and expound how the world has changed for the better or the worse (depending on your point of view) when we read articles like this, but let me just remind everyone that it's WAAAAAAAAY to early to declare anything of the sort.
Westboro Babtist has already announced their appeal. That means that they don't have to pay anything at this point. The Appeals Court will hear their case, which I'll bet has a much more 1st Amendment-centric bent to it than the trial did. If that doesn't work, they'll keep appealing until they get a Supreme Court test.
This is not the law of the land now. It is not citable precedence for legal scholars, lawyers or even law students.
As far as the case itself goes, I think this falls under the conventional wisdom about juries that anyone involved in litigation follows: all juries are dumb all the time. They are not made up of the best and brightest, and they aren't intended to be. They were given two versions of the truth and told to pick between them. They didn't even have to be unanimous in a civil case, just have a majority.
So all of you who are ready to condemn this as the worst assault on the First Amendment there's ever been, calm down and wait until it actually turns into something. This is just the opening salvo of a long, long battle.
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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo
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