Westboro Baptist Church Founder Passes

By: CAYLEN PERRY

The best counter to a life filled with hate is compassion, as these Missourians realized.”We realized that it wasn’t so much about antagonizing them but sending out the countered safe that we are here for people who need that message and need that positivity,” said Megan Coleman, who helped make the sign.

Westboro Baptist Church founder and vitriolic anti-gay bigot Fred Phelps — best known for leading protests of dead American soldiers and others with signs that say “GOD HATES FAGS” and other awful things — died this week at the age of 84.

But instead of protesting his funeral (which according to the WBC, isn’t being held anyhow), a group of people showed up outside a WBC protest of a Lorde concert in Kansas City with a different kind of banner.

The best counter to a life filled with hate is compassion, as these Missourians realized. “We realized that it wasn’t so much about antagonizing them but sending out the countered safe that we are here for people who need that message and need that positivity,” said Megan Coleman, who helped make the sign.

Love is the only thing that can fight the kind of bigotry the WBC tries to spread everywhere it goes. And compassion for even the church’s members is a part of that. In fact, as The Guardian’s Patrick Strudwick pointed out, many members of Phelps’ family can be viewed as victims of a different kind.

 

“With love’s antithesis being indifference, forgiveness — that highest of virtues — is surely the real antidote to hate,” Strudwick writes.

Actor and gay rights activist George Takei also had this to say:

“I take no solace or joy in this man’s passing. We will not dance upon his grave, nor stand vigil at his funeral holding ‘God Hates Freds’ signs, tempting as it may be. He was a tormented soul, who tormented so many. Hate never wins out in the end. It instead goes always to its lonely, dusty end.”