Let us take as an initial supposition that the population of those who agree with the Westboro Baptist Church, the group who grabs headlines every quarter by conducting the laziest protests imaginable, literally writing "God Hates Fags" on a sign and yelling, is zero. While satirists may appreciate the lampooning of organized Christianity or America, and journalists may appreciate having something to cover—and individuals certainly appreciate having something in the media to define their identities in opposition to—no measurable quantity exists who agree with both the ideology and the tactics of the church. If this is true, then even members of the church do not, and we are faced with a puzzle. Why do they do it?
Before we can answer that question, we must first holy shit, I hate these fuckers. Look at those signs! “Pray for more dead soldiers.” “Thank God for 9/11.” “You're going to hell.” This is unfucking acceptable. Funerals for soldiers, 9/11, and my right to think I'm going to Heaven are all sacred. Is this legal? How can this be legal? I'm having to ignore them and I can't, it's taking all my energy giving them as much attention as possible. Hold on, I'm going to post a link to coverage of their opinions on my facebook, reddit, imgur, twitter, etc. Maybe then they'll switch tactics aarrrrg I can't even think straight. Why doesn't someone do something about them?
Well, there was that law that got passed by Congress in 2012. The Honoring America's Veterans Act restricted funeral-related access for protests, a direct response to Westboro and only Westboro. But getting statutory language through Congress in 2012, a miracle on par with transubstantiation, is insufficient. These Westboro Baptist Church shenanigans are still popping up on my facebook, reddit, imgur, and twitter feeds. What else can we do to target this one specific group?
But the quarter-million signature effort to recognize Westboro as a hate group is also getting a boost from two other petitions calling for the congregation's tax-exempt status to be revoked. Both of those have also crossed the 25,000 signature threshold needed to prompt a response from the administration. -source-Gogogadget unwieldy machinery of democratic governance! Lets break the law to target a specific group. It's definitely in my best interest if government can act more capriciously. While this insufferable commitment to justice and fairness goes on there are people planning to commit harm with signs. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where the Westboro Baptist Church can express itself publicly, even if preventing that means leaving the world in a smoldering political ruin. Tolerance has limits, you know. That limit is where your voice meets my ears.
This said, we return to the original supposition, in which Westboro Baptist Church either exists solely in our heads, or as a minority. A powerless minority, whose protests are so insubstantive they only reach us through the concerted effort of their opposition. Only because their signs and shouting are made “news” do they even exist to us. Because they pose no real threat to our way of life, any action we take against them can be nothing more than a misguided waste of time, and through the strictures of law, possibly something much more harmful. I think once online petitions become an occasional means to have tax statuses modified we might wish we could go back to when the only thing Westboro achieved was grabbing a headline.
"Freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend someone." - Brad Thor
"Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection." - Neal Boortz
"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." - Martin Niemöller
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