Religious Hatred: The Westboro Baptist Church: Part Three

One tends to associate religious intolerance for other religions with bloodshed. The phrase ‘holy wars’ comes to the fore. However, the peace movement has come to religious hatred as well as in all other manner of protest movements. The most famous, or infamous, of the peaceful religious haters is probably the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). I’m sure many of the recipients of their hate would prefer the days of bloodshed so they could dish a bit something back in return.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

I also wonder if these idiots have a death or suicide wish. It’s not the best of ideas to Thank God for dead cops and soldiers when you reside in America’s heartland. The Ku-Klux-Klan isn’t exactly partial to the WBC either. And no doubt the Taliban wouldn’t mind showing the WBC some Islamic hospitality either. Friends come and friends go, but enemies accumulate. Accidents can happen when backs are turned.

The resident inmates of the WBC asylum apparently think God also hates those who mock Him. So I won’t mock Him, rather all the loonies who put their faith in the Holy Trinity equivalent of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, most notably God Himself. Those who I identify as loonies quite obviously include those wacko members at the WBC.

Now there’s a category of people and organizations well represented in say the “Guinness Book of Records” or “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not”. That category is those who have achieved their moment of fame and glory in the sunshine. Publicity seekers abound everywhere. There’s certainly a share of loony tunes – certified nut cases; there’s skilled daredevils and not so skilled risk takers. Many people like to do really crazy but relatively harmless things just for the hell of it and many do likewise as a means of raising money for various charities and other worthy causes. Thus they need all the PR they can get for their cause. But the bottom line is getting noticed, and you don’t get noticed if you’re part of the crowd. You’ve got to stand out from the crowd; dare to be different.  

But not all PR hounds are deliberately silly or daring or charitable. Shock-jocks shock to keep up their ratings. They also shock to keep up earning their multi-million dollar salaries, for example, a top shock-jock like Rush Limbaugh. Now Rush Limbaugh comes across as a total idiot; but total idiots don’t command huge listening audiences and vast, nearly obscene monetary rewards. So I strongly suspect that shock-jocks shock just because that’s part of their job description, not because they always actually believe the B.S. they spout off. But that’s their trade secret and they have to live with their often probably deliberate lies, hoping, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, the listening public can see through their charades.

America has more than her fair share of shock-jocks, including that especially one infamous name, Rush Limbaugh. Listeners tune in to see if their favorite shock-jock can outdo him or herself and top his or her previous outrageous rant with something even more outrageous. I’m sure they know this and deliberately stir the pot, though some like Limbaugh often cross the invisible line of what is and is not acceptable. 

The WBC is, IMHO, the religious equivalent of the radio shock-jock. In fact, my theory – I’m not alone here – Is that the WBC has bugger-all to do with religion and everything to do with keeping all of them the front-and-centre of attention. Your moment in the sun becomes a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade. This is getting publicity for the sake of publicity – lots of newspaper headlines and evening TV news coverage – and they don’t care who they psychologically hurt in the process. No amount of pleading will get the WBC to change their tactics, but they will call off their picket line hounds in exchange for extra free airtime. They have got attention-grabbing down to a fine art, and religious intolerance and extreme picketing and outrageous slogans are sure ways of getting attention. 

Their shock-jock tactics do have some rather chilling facets to them. First of these is their use of very young children who the WBC have carry their full-of-hate placards. The children are way too young to remotely comprehend the issues; they just parrot what the adults tell them too without such comprehension. Secondly, if you view their videos, you’ll notice, especially at the end, the narrator’s shit-eating-grin (SEG) expression - “You’re going to hell” (SEG); “Thank God for 9/11” (SEG), etc. The third chilling thing is that all of the numerous spokespersons come across as total believers in the nonsense they’re spouting off. Total sincerity or so it would seem. They have either been coached very well or totally brainwashed. You can just about imagine that bowl of tainted Kool-Aid in the WBC fridge waiting for the appropriate moment to ‘celebrate’ and go to their heavenly reward while everyone else has headed in the opposite direction.

In conclusion, the WBC membership is collectively just a bunch of PR hungry loonies who use religious themes (way out of context by the way) and outrageous tactics to attract attention and publicity as long as they stay ever so barely on the right side of the law while not caring who suffers emotional stress via their rants, raves, pickets, chants, songs, etc. Of course they deny that – it’s all about preaching “God’s hate” – but then again, such a theology is just bound to attract the sort of PR that they in fact, constantly get.

However, as my final wrap-up, there is some good news. Many WBC members, especially some high profile family members of the WBC leading lights, have decided to vote with their feet against the WBC and their version of God and pack it up and leave. Maybe there is a God after all! For details, see the BBC’s follow-up documentary “America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis” (2011).

The other good news trend is that the ungodly great unwashed, all those picketed and consigned to hell by the WBC, are fed up. Counter-pickets and wall-to-wall people blockades to prevent the WBC from strutting their picketing funerals stuff are becoming ever more frequent and so it is coming to pass that the members of the WBC are now tending to be outnumbered by ratios of dozens to one. When some of the counter demonstrators are hell-bent-for-leather motorcyclists, the sort that look as if they’d shoot first and ask questions later, it’s no wonder that it’s further coming to pass that the WBC frequently announces their picket but that’s equally followed by a no-show!   

By the by, if God is really on the side of WBC, you’d think He would have given them heavenly voices with which to sing their hatred songs. Let’s just say if you hear the WBC ‘choir’ sing their picket line songs, you’ll appreciate rap and hip-hop and even ethnic chanting (or is that wailing) in preference. WBC singers – don’t give up your day jobs! But, as an afterthought, perhaps instead WBC should picket with bagpipes a-blowing! That would show the world how much God hates ‘em!

While I’ve presented the above in a slightly less than a pure shock, horror manner, I’ve tried to keep things slightly light-hearted, there’s nothing light-hearted about the way the WBC have treated their victims. The WBC deserves no less than the severest condemnation that all feeling members of civilized society can muster against them.