How The Westboro Baptist Church Unite Good People
By Samuel Leighton-Dore
I was nineteen years old when I first encountered members of the Westboro Baptist Church, AKA the most hated family in America.
I was in New York City for the first time, traveling alone, and had made my way uptown for one of the shows I’d scabbed tickets for at New York Fashion Week. And there they were; three generations of the infamous Phelps family barricaded into a neat little rectangle across the road like pigs in a pen. I have to admit to being a little star-struck.
Not that the notorious group of homophobes are ‘stars’ by any stretch of the imagination, but my favourite documentarian Louis Theroux certainly is, and he’d already completed two incredibly disturbing documentaries on the family and their particular brand of incestuous religious cult.
I ordered a tall Starbucks and stood within meters of the family, who were ten-strong in their representation, for close to an hour. I was hypnotised by them; silenced by the most extraordinary display of hatred I’d ever seen. They carried many of the signs I’d previously seen on television, GOD HATES FAGS being among them, and chanted in rehearsed unison of God’s fiery condemnation of faggots.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, standing in their presence was an incredibly affirming experience for me. In a society so muddled by varying prejudices and levels of tolerance, their senseless protest stood out in sheer contrast to the waves of equally bemused and disgusted passers by. I remember in particular one garbage man rolling his eyes and spitting on the pavement before them; an upper-class woman shaking her head as she bit into her cream cheese bagel.
In a strange way, their presence served only to unite all of us who weren’t them. Instead of causing division and hate, they achieved the exact opposite of what they set out to. There was no violence, no retaliation, no lawsuit in the making. Christians condemned them. Atheists condemned them. The rich condemned them. The poor condemned them. Blacks and Whites and Hispanics condemned them.
Which is why it comes as no surprise to see the gorgeous response coming out of Orlando this week to the so-called Church’s protesting of Pulse victim funerals.
A tragedy such as the recent massacre in Orlando is like Christmas morning for these freaks. I mean, today they posted on their website: “No coincidence that God is smacking Orlando with grievous sorrow, killing your children with shooters and alligators, when you are about to belly up to ‘father’s day’!”
In a World so full of conflicting beliefs, groups like the Westboro Baptist Church can act as perverted anti-cornerstones for decency. Not that it should take the personification of pure evil to highlight common goodness, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt. Just look at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, who this week teamed up with the Angel Action Wings Project to clothe local actors in massive white linen angel wings; successfully blocking the WBC’s attempts of protesting victim funerals.
Running on donations, the team worked hard in coordination with a private Facebook group of Orlando locals – vowing to attend and protect each and every funeral in the comings days and weeks.
Proving that angels – the real, human kind – really are everywhere.