The picketing hate group known as the Westboro Baptist Church—which is basically just one family, led by patriarch the Rev. Fred Phelps and his daughter Margie—is infamous the world over for its hate speech aimed at Jews, blacks, Catholics and especially homosexuals. The Phelps family made a trip to West Virginia earlier this month to picket things the Phelps family—calling them a “church” is really twisting language—view as sinful. This could be just about anything with the Phelps family, of course, and often is: The WBC once picketed an appliance store that sold a particular brand of Swedish vacuum cleaner.
Why? Because Sweden supports gay rights, of course!
Make sense? Of course it doesn’t. These are the same people who picket the funerals of dead American service members with signs reading “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and instruct their children to desecrate the American flag as families grieve. Astonishingly, during their stay in West Virginia, as news from the Montcoal Mine disaster became known, the Phelpses targeted the families of the dead miners!
But how do you counter such people when they decide to inflict themselves on your community? First off, you don’t even bother trying to counter them, you siphon off their media thunder. Concerned civic and religious groups in Wheeling and Charleston took the novel approach of using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to organize Stop the Hate Rallies, Spread the Love flash mobs.
Signs in front yards also spread the message: “West Virginia is No Place for Hate!” with symbols of Judaism, Christianity and a rainbow (representing gay and lesbian residents) by far outnumbering the placards carried by the Phelps family (one read “God Hates WV.” Another said “You Will Eat Your Babies”!). But it was the disco dancing flash mobs doing the electric boogaloo to “Take Me Home Country Roads” that stole the show.
“We want to become the story; to steal the story from the WBC,” said one organizer, Rabbi Jim Cohn of Temple Israel. “We’re annoyed by the idea that they get the publicity through hatred.”
For more information see www.niot.org.
Cross posting from Brand X