WICHITA, Kan. - One side rides motorcycles to fight what they believe is an abuse of free speech. The other side uses words and posters that, for some, seem to stretch the boundaries of First Amendment freedoms, but to them are their God-given right.

Terry "Darkhorse" Houck's voice breaks with emotion when he talks about the time he spent as a Vietnam combat soldier.

Same goes for Carvel "Wild Bill" Logan.

It's been decades since the two served in the U.S. military. But there's pride in their voices when they talk about being veterans.

In August, Houck, Logan and Cregg "Bronco" Hansen became outraged when they heard that Fred Phelps and members of his Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., were planning to picket and protest U.S. soldiers' funerals.

So they formed the Patriot Guard, a grassroots organization that's quickly gaining momentum.

Composed of veterans' motorcycles groups, motorcycle enthusiasts, Christian motorcycle groups and people who simply consider themselves patriots, the group provides a human barrier at funerals to protect mourners from hearing and seeing the protesters.

If requested, they'll even rev their motorcycles' engines to drown out chants.

"It is a low, vulgar thing what these folks are doing," Logan said. "They may or may not be protected by the First Amendment, but to me it borders on treason."

Shirley Phelps-Roper, attorney for Westboro Baptist Church, disagrees.

"These are the most unpatriotic bimbos," Phelps-Roper said. "They stand at funerals and say to us this guy died for your right to do this is almost laughable. ... God gave us these rights."

Westboro Baptist Church members began protesting at soldiers' funerals in June, claiming that God is killing the soldiers with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in retaliation for a plastic bomb set off in front of Phelps-Roper in 1995.

Hansen said the Patriot Guard would like to see laws changed either prohibiting people from protesting funerals or restricting the area or hours where protesters can be heard.

"We're getting e-mails from people in Texas and Indiana, all over, who are going to go to these protest funerals," Hansen said. "The word is out. Our group is going to get bigger and bigger until it stops. It's going to take everybody to get laws changed."

Phelps-Roper said the laws have already been changed.

"You are permitted to keep us off the sidewalk in front," Phelps-Roper said. "You don't like what you are seeing? The Supreme Court recommends a solution - avert your eyes. ... Sidewalks are held in trust by local units of government for robust public debate."

Logan says it's not all about First Amendment rights.

"I don't want to take away their rights," he said. "We all have those rights. But there should be a boundary, and they have crossed over it."

So far, the riders have only attended three funerals. The first was Staff Sgt. John Dole's funeral in Chelsea, Okla., on Oct. 11; 40 riders from Kansas participated. The second funeral was for Army Spc. Lucas Frantz in Tonganoxie, Kan., on Oct. 17; 120 riders attended that one.

Last week, more than 150 cyclists participated at the funeral for Sgt. Evan Parker in South Haven, Kan.

"Not all of us are veterans, but we are all patriotic citizens," Houck said. "When you see somebody out picketing a military funeral, you take it personal. ... How could anybody do such a despicable, horrible thing to grieving family members who've just lost a son or daughter?"

Hansen said the group always checks with local law enforcement before attending a funeral.

"We don't want to interrupt any services. We are not counter-protesting anything," Hansen said. "But we are there to honor the soldier and protect the family from the chanting and signs."

At funerals, the group takes their motorcycles as close to law enforcement officials as they can. Many of the cycles sport American flags. The riders then turn their backs to the protesters.

For the Oklahoma funeral, the group revved their cycles' engines; in Tonganoxie, they recited the Pledge of Allegiance; and in South Haven, they recited the pledge and revved their engines.

Logan said it's been years since he swore to protect his country and, at 65, he hasn't quit yet.

"We've let these people get such a toehold," he said. "They apparently are a fairly powerful group of people but are just filled with hate. The more we can do to bring this to the public's attention, and get enough people to agree with us, then maybe we can change things."

SOUTH HAVEN, Kan. — The Phelps family hoisted the same old laminated gay-bashing placards.

They made their same tired chants taking glee in a soldier’s death.

Another funeral, another round of pickets from the minichurch fixated on homosexuality.

Yet now that the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. has moved on to flinging epithets at military martyrs, a few politicians have begun trying to silence him. Their success will depend on how carefully they mind free speech as they write their laws.

In the meantime, noise is met with noise.

Whenever the few protesters from Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church shouted or sang Wednesday in South Haven, the earth trembled.

Any time they spoke up, the wrists of biker veterans twisted on dozens of throttles to strike the thundering chords of Honda and Harley-Davidson.

More than 200 bikers had made themselves into a chrome-and-black leather barrier. The 10 anti-gay picketers stood on one side, drowned out by the noise. Mourners arriving for the funeral of Army Sgt. Evan Parker passed on the other side.

“We’re supporting the family of a fallen soldier,” yelled Don Barr of American Legion Post 138 of Caney. “And we’re telling these jokers” — he jutted a thumb in the direction of Phelps’ picketers — “to get lost.”

Were the protesters concerned that the spectacle might upset a grieving family?

“No,” Fred Phelps Jr., said. His 75-year-old father is increasingly absent from the picketing. “The (soldier’s) family has made a public spectacle of things. There’s nothing private here.”

People have hoped for years that the obsessively anti-gay protesters would go away. Yet the Phelps clan travels the country, and even overseas, to protest anything it deems not hostile enough to homosexuality. (The Kansas City Star, and the funerals of former employees, have been picketed at times.)

Most recently, the peculiar Phelps logic has shifted the pickets to funerals of Americans killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Phelps’ church says the deaths are the penance of a nation too accommodating of homosexuality or, alternatively, that the deaths of U.S. servicemen and woman are divine retaliation for a small bomb that caused about $1,800 damage in 1995 outside the Topeka home of one of Phelps’ daughters.

Legislators in two states are pushing laws to bar protests at funerals. At least one Tennessee county has adopted a resolution to keep picketers away from mourners.

That has triggered warnings of a First Amendment showdown. While Phelps family’s message strikes many people as offensive (one of their signs reads “Thank God For Dead Soldiers”), it is decidedly political.

In 1995, a federal judge threw out a Kansas law that prohibited picketing outside funerals because it was too vague. With Phelps in mind, legislators quickly adopted a law specifically barring pickets an hour before and two hours after a funeral. (Missouri has no law regulating picketing at funerals.)

The Kansas law bars pickets only near a funeral, and in planning for Wednesday’s demonstration, Sumner County Attorney Shawn DeJarnett looked at lower-court rulings that said the state law effectively allows people to protest from across the street.

“We came to the conclusion to avoid confrontation” and decided against arrests, DeJarnett said. Officials elsewhere have taken the same approach.

The U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has upheld laws that establish protest-free buffer zones around abortion clinics — laws that specify the distances and apply to everyone.

Before memorial services in 1998 for Matthew Shepard, a man singled out for a brutal robbery and murder because he was gay, officials in Casper, Wyo., adopted a 50-foot no-protest zone. The action earned them a letter from Phelps that described it as an “ideal arrangement.”

But in September 1998, the city of Lincoln, Neb., passed an ordinance in response to protesters who staked out a church attended by a doctor who provides abortions. The courts tossed out the law saying that in protecting children from upsetting messages the ordinance also kept those messages away from adults.

Tim Butz, a Vietnam veteran and executive director of the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he thinks similar efforts to muzzle the Phelps protests will be doomed.

“It may be obnoxious as can be,” said Butz. But “we don’t just protect popular speech in this country.”

One legal argument, however, holds that the right law could keep Phelps from tossing insults at funeral processions.

“The regulation has to be content-neutral,” said Michael Fenner, a First Amendment expert at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.

Fenner said a law might stand up if it is related only to time and place of funeral pickets — limiting protests to within so many feet from a service or so many hours before or after a service begins. Even if lawmakers obviously intend to push away Phelps, Fenner said, the law might survive. He noted a 1960s law aimed at stopping protesters from burning their draft cards by requiring young men to always carry the cards.

“Everybody understood this was a way to jail people who burned their draft card,” Fenner said. “It didn’t matter. It stood up.”

Likewise, Fenner said laws aimed at Phelps might withstand court challenges precisely because of whom they are intended to control.

“Judges are humans,” he said. “They’re not going to have any sympathy for this guy.”

Oklahoma Rep. Paul Wesselhoft makes clear his sympathies lie with military families. A retired Army chaplain, Wesselhoft has introduced a bill that would ban any protest within 500 feet of a funeral site from two hours before the service starts until two hours after it is over. Violators would face a mandatory 30 days in jail.

“This comes when a family is in its most vulnerable state,” Wesselhoft said of the protests. “We can protect them a little without trampling free speech.”

Clay County, Tenn., adopted a ban on picketing funerals, and Indiana state Sen. Brent Steele has drafted similar legislation.

“In my family, if somebody had done that at one of our services, it wouldn’t have been pretty,” Steele said. “No family at their lowest emotional ebb should be put into this trick box of (being provoked into) clocking these guys and then getting sued.”

For years, the Phelps protesters stuck to waving placards at the funerals of people who died of AIDS or harassing public officials in Topeka and elsewhere who dared condemn them.

“For our folks, the shock value has mostly worn off,” said Ron Schlittler, deputy executive director of Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. “The answer to abuse of freedom of speech is for other people to speak up more vigorously.”

Vanda Neely, a doughnut shop employee who lives in South Haven, said of Phelps, “I think this bunch needs to go home. They’re not making any friends.”

Rather, they draw regular confrontations with American Legion bikers.

Bill Logan of Wichita was at his fourth funeral to counter the picketing. Each time, the veterans check with police and the family of the deceased to make sure they are welcome, Logan said.

“It’s the least we can do,” he said.

Inside the South Haven High School gymnasium, Sgt. Parker’s family and friends recalled an energetic and competitive 25-year-old father of two who died in Germany a few days after a roadside bomb went off near Balad, Iraq.

“He was not a victim,” Brig. Gen. Vern Miyagi said. “He was an American hero.”

Outside, men such as “Grizzly” Bob Jeter, a 51-year-old Army veteran from Wichita, stood vigil.

“If those losers are going to be somewhere,” Jeter said of the protesters, “there will be a whole lot more of us.”