Snapshots from Life

I overheard a couple people talking politics or religion (are they different nowadays?) or something the other day and one of them asked the other “what do you think of the Westboro Baptist Church?” My first thought? “I don’t.” I just don’t, I don’t think about them, unless of course I’m forced to think about them when they pop up in an internet article or on a news story. Or in a conversation that I’m eavesdropping on. Moving right along.

The Westboro Baptist Church, along with people like Anne Coulter, are nothing more than desperate people looking for any attention they can get. This is true. I mean, there’s a lot of exaggerated bullshit coming out of the left and the right; it’s not just one side spewing the rhetoric. And a lot of times I hear politicians quoting numbers or talking policy and I think “you made that up.” That may be giving them more credit than they deserve (we all know that being intelligent and creative are not the hallmarks of today’s politicians), so maybe someone else made it up and they’re just repeating it. Whatever. It’s still true that most of the time you can follow their line of reasoning. It may have massive holes in it, you may be able to point very specifically to certain points and say “this is where your argument loses validity cause this is just plain incorrect,” but usually you can see how they got to where they are, even if you may not agree.

Not the case with people like Fred Phelps and Anne Coulter. In their case, the reasoning is so tenuous that there simply is no way from point A to point B. Take Anne Coulter’s assertion that US Immigration laws amount to genocide for white people. Um, what? She makes a half-hearted effort to connect the two, talking about the rising population of Hispanics and the policy of bestowing citizenship upon all children born in the US, whether their parents are legal or not, but in the end that has nothing to do with genocide and her argument crumbles into nothing. And don’t even get me started on why she thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Or maybe take a look at the Westboro cult and their policy of picketing at military funerals. The theory behind this is that God is against gay people, the military is an organization that allows gay people, Westboro is against this organization and is going to protest. But take a look at how they announce most of their protests: on twitter. They tweet about the time and location about their next protest. The last time I checked, gay people are, in fact, able to have a twitter account. In fact, if you were a homophobic asshole, you could argue that twitter is actually more detrimental to “family values” since gay people can tweet their “gay agenda” around the clock, while the military stuck to the archaic Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for decades and still has many high ranking officials vocally opposed to homosexuals serving openly in the armed services.

But this “church” seems perfectly ok with using a program that operates against all of their supposed beliefs, as long as it gets their “message” out to a wider group of people. So this just defies all kinds of logic (not that there was any real logic to begin with, mind you) and I’m left with two options: either these people are really that inbred and stupid or they’re just seeking out attention. As appealing as the first option is, I think it has more to do with the latter. 

With that being the case, what better way to fight their hatefulness and bigotry than by not thinking about them and denying them the attention they so desperately crave?

(Sidebar: I realize that by writing this I’m playing counter to my argument, but as only about three people read this blog, I doubt it will garner much national attention for either the WBC or Anne Coulter.)