To which I say: yawn.
Why is everyone so fascinated with this group? Their media coverage has attained a near-ritual quality. Something bad happens. The WBC blames it on fags. Everyone wrings their hands, aghast that they could say such a thing. The WBC pickets funerals. Everyone wrings their hands, aghast that they could do such a thing. The WBC gets its desired media attention, and retreats back to its cave until the next national tragedy.
The Westboro Baptist Church is a small Kansas hate group (I will not degrade Christianity by calling it a church) that consists of 40 members. Forty. 40. My own [small] Lutheran congregation in Hanover has more than twice that many members. More people came to my high school grad party than go to this "church."
They speak for no one and nothing else but their own desire to make everyone gasp. And somehow, they've succeeded at that for the better part of the last decade. 40 people from Topeka have managed to earn such a reputation for hate that even the KKK has told them to tone it down. They've provoked lawsuits, won a Supreme Court case, and have attracted the ire of the Anonymous hacker group.
This is not good for the gay rights movement. The continual, ritualized attention these 40 people attract does nothing but distract from more subliminal bigotry. As long as anti-gay figures and groups can point to groups like this and say "Hey, at least we're not that bad," their positions become that much more respectable. As long as the average person can read blog posts about the WBC and see how revoltingly hate-filled it is, he'll stop thinking about he can change his own attitudes and actions, as long as he's not as bigoted as these 40 people from Kansas.
Relating this to a pet topic of mine: The Boy Scouts may finally overturn their ban on gay youth members. Progress! but not really. They'll still ban gay adults, which is still a pretty offensive position if you think about it. This could be a great moment to talk about how so many people still stereotype gays as dirty old men.
But compared to the 40 idiots from Kansas, the Boy Scouts' position looks positively magnanimous. When society has a bête noire, it is less likely to address its real problems, or won't do it as effectively.
To the media, to bloggers and Facebook users and Twitterers, to Anonymous, to everyone else: Stop. Stop giving these 40 people attention. Stop fulfilling their own self-importance. Stop distorting the conversation on LGBT issues by including them in it, even tangentially. Stop wasting your breath, your time, and your 140 characters on them.
This is the last time I will ever mention the Westboro Baptist Church — and I ask everyone else to join me. We all have much better things to do.
