Westboro Baptist on a Beautiful Spring Day

It was a perfect day for a demonstration.

Warm but not too warm, with a gentle breeze and little puffy clouds scudding lazily across an azure sky. As I arrived at Walt Whitman high school to counterprotest the Westboro Baptist folks, I realized that I was going to be pretty much by myself. The folks from my church and/or from my denomination who I thought might be able to make it...well...it didn't quite happen. And here I was with a little stack of signs. Ah well. I was happy to be out, and curious to see the Westboro show with my own eyes.

After shooting the breeze with some of the law enforcement folks who'd arrived to keep things in check, I settled in across the street from where the cultists were to protest. I struck up conversations with those around me, passing the time with a small cadre of folks from a nearby Unitarian congregation and a fellow from the neighborhood whose kids had attended the school.

The Westboro folks arrived exactly on time, four women and three little kids. Their hateful signs came out. Some painfully reworded hymns were sung. They looked...well...more than a little pathetic.

I began displaying my own signage, a mix of different Bible passages that reiterated the love ethic that is central to the Gospel. For a little while, there weren't many onlookers, and the single largest contingent was three dozen rather bemused cops. Then school let out, and several hundred kids poured over to the police line to have a look. Many were part of the organized counterdemonstration, but most were just curious.

I rotated my signs. I chatted with folks around me. I didn't do the Jesus-skeeving thing for a second. I wasn't pitching my church to anyone, or collecting names and numbers and gladhanding. I wasn't doing anything other than presenting what Jesus taught. I was just there to witness to that essential goodness. Nothing more.

Then one Whitman kid asked if they could have a sign. Then another. Finally, I managed to distribute pretty much all of them. There, courtesy of folks who were just volunteering on the spot, was a nice little wall of grace confronting Westboro. Only one part of that wall was me. The rest were folks who may or may not have been Christian, but who responded positively enough to the core message of the Gospel to be willing to use it to confront hatred.

I found that rather reassuring.

The Westboro Circus Is In Town

During the shared time for joys and concerns this last week, one of my young congregants shared that we're going to have a visitor in the neighborhood in late April. The good folks from Westboro Baptist are showing up for one of their demonstrations. Yes, it's the God Hates Fags "church." Right here! Less than a mile from my teensy little church!

They're here to demonstrate in front of our local high school, which they've targeted because it's named Walt Whitman High School. Beyond their likely being offended at the whole concept of poetry, they've chosen Whitman as a target for their endless fountain of bile because Walt Whitman most likely was gay or bisexual. That means, or so one of the blogs at Westboro puts it:

"The children that attend that high school are taught Rebellion Against God 101 every day in every way. "

I wonder if you can get college credit for that. I think you need to score a 4 or higher on the Rebellion Against God AP exam in Virginia, but I'm not quite sure about Maryland state universities.

As Fred Phelps and his clan continue their Quixotic assault on all things that they perceive as homosexual, I find myself feeling motivated to show up for a little counterwitness on the day they're in town. It's not that the Westboro Baptist Church represents any significant movement in Christianity. They don't. They're a tiny little cult, whose fundamental failure to understand the core of the Christian message radiates from them like fever-heat. They loves them some attention, and their "pickets" are more like an attention-seeking tantrum than a real protest.

Problem is, they've also become something of a poster child for folks with an axe to grind against Jesus people. "Look," they say, pointing at the signage. "This is what Christians believe! How could you be a part of such an evil thing?"

That's absurd, of course. Anyone who's bothered reading the Bible knows that this kind of hatred is utterly out of keeping with the foundational principles of Torah and the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth. But if you've already been put off by the intensely exclusive anti-gay, anti-"unbeliever," anti-science rhetoric of fundamentalism, it's easy to think that somehow Westboro represents what most Christians really believe.

So on Friday, April 24th, a little counter-witness seems both decent and in order.