At a recentJohn Kerry for President rally in Las Vegas, a man was standing at the back of the hall holding a sign that was definitely not complimentary to the 2004 presidential candidate from Massachusetts.

The security detail assigned to the rally approached the man, folded up his sign and asked him to leave.

The man balked. What about his constitutional rights? What about freedom of speech? After all, he explained, his sign was only a repeat of a phrase Rush Limbaugh uses regularly about John Kerry on his radio show.

The security officers did not pause to discuss the cleverness of the quote or entertain the constitutional debate, but hustled the man outta there — and not just for the sake of the pro-Kerry crowd that filled the hall. But for the man's sake, too.

This wasn't Rush Limbaugh's radio show, for crying out loud, this was thousands of people who adored John Kerry.

What was he, nuts?

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I bring up this recent Vegas incident — or non-incident — because of its parallels to the escalating debate over what to do about protesters at LDS General Conference. Since the 20,000-seat Conference Center opened four years ago, protesting street preachers have been flocking to Salt Lake City like flies to a picnic. They're here again this weekend, in larger numbers than ever.

It's completely understandable. More people attending conference means a bigger audience on the streets. In the protest business, the crowd's the thing. Nothing kills a protest demonstration faster than no one around to hear it.

But bigger crowds has also meant increasingly outrageous behavior by the protesters — such as waving clothing sacred to members of the LDS Church in the air like pompons. A gesture that, in the annals of public bad taste, ranks up there with the day Roseanne Barr sang the National Anthem in San Diego.

Or down there.

That's the weird part about big publicized protests. There is so much concern about the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech that protesters are able to say and do things that in a more controlled setting would result in some sort of immediate consequence, such as being found in contempt of court, expelled from class, grounded, made to write on the chalkboard "I will not be rude or mean," having your mouth washed out with soap and water, or getting a technical foul and thrown out of the game.

Get a big enough crowd, and enough media attention, and go ahead and insult others with impunity. You can say and do things at a public church gathering you wouldn't dream of saying and doing in private.

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