Their children hold signs that read, “God hates fags.”
I was a child when their family, the extremist group called Westboro Baptist church, began picketing in Kansas in 1991. Driven by patriarch Fred Phelps’s homophobic interpretation of the Bible, they quickly became infamous for wielding shocking slogans and shouting lurid insults in public spaces.
It would be easy to write them off as monsters – a familiar impulse in today’s political climate, particularly toward supporters of Donald Trump. But, with democracy itself on the line this election year, we must remain open to the possibility of transformation.
I saw Westboro for the first time in the late 90s at the University of Kansas. I was a first-generation college student who had inherited no family political tradition. We were working in wheat fields when better-off families were attending civic events or reading opinion pages. In that void, I had absorbed a vague, moderate conservatism from the prevailing culture of my Reagan-era childhood and adolescence at the dawn of conservative talk radio.
On the typically liberal campus that was challenging my ideas, Westboro was a frequent, well-organized presence at the LGBTQ+ pride parade, music concerts or lectures. Over the previous decade, they had traversed the country to disrupt all manner of events, including the funerals of American soldiers and the murdered gay man Matthew Shepherd. But KU – “gay U”, some Kansas conservatives liked to call it – was just down the road from their home in Topeka, so students like myself saw them often.
“Fags die, God laughs,” read one sign. Later, in response to the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center– deemed punishment for a culture increasingly accepting of queerness – “Planes crash, God laughs.”
The content of their message was horrifying, but the tone with which they shared it – smiling, smug self-righteousness, casting pity on us who weren’t saved – was repugnant, as well. Their vitriol had the opposite of its intended effect, raising my awareness as a heterosexual, cis-gender woman of the trials faced by my LGBTQ+ peers.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
