Thursday, June 02, 2005

By the Company We Keep

If you thought the anti-kiddy picture book people were weird, just wait until the Westboro Baptist Church gets to Lexington to support them. [Warning: The pamphlet linked here includes anti-papist slurs and images, as well as coarse language.] The Topeka, Kansas, based group says it will send its protestors for Saturday through Monday, June 4th through 6th.

They intend to picket local Roman Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal and Baptist churches. The hate highlights will be, as the group's flyer puts it, "picketing the fag-infested Estabrook School and the Lexington Public Schools administrators Mon. June 6 (and) the dog kennels and leper colonies masquerading as Lexington churches."

They must assume that subtlety is wasted on anti-homosexual folk.

The local religious groups and school staff are receiving short-course training in non-confrontational protest, according to the local weekly, the Lexington Minuteman. Parents of the elementary-school students got notes about the protests and will get at least one more.

While mad dad David Parker and his lawyer say his anti-same-sex-family stance is not about hate, the WBC make no such pretence. It castigates the local churches for complicity in not safeguarding their community. Again from the flyer:
The unfaithful, apostate churches are mostly to blame for creating the Satanic zeitgeist where in filthy, militant fags & dykes have seized control of Massachusetts government, sending feces-eaters to Congress, and same-sex marriage is law.
Perhaps we should appreciate the smallest positives. Unlike the Mass Resistance/Article 8 folk, the WBC does not use quotes around same-sex marriage.

One would hope that Parker would be insightful enough to see how he is on a spectrum of bigotry, much closer to the WBC than to the New Testament teachings of love and tolerance. His words are nowhere near as strident, but we are all known by the company we keep. Will he distance himself from those putting his feelings into the worst possible words or will he look at his sneakers and hum a hymn?

1 comment:

bentley92 said...

Well spoken, I enjoyed the blog. I also have a blurb about the WBC going to the Bedford School system at Westboro Baptist Church Protest.