2723 - WBC

I found this exchange of ideas on the subject of the Westboro Baptist Church. It's been sitting in my blog folder gathering dust. Time to get it out.


(from the original poster...)
I'll keep this short. One person I cared about very much, a few years back, was killed and the Westboro Baptist Church promptly showed up at his funeral to picket it and scream obscenities at the funeral procession. The family was in tears, I was in tears, and these WBC ghouls seemed to relish in making broken people feel even more heartbroken. The deceased was one of the closest people in the world to me, and I still feel my lungs suffocating in fury towards the universe and sadness whenever I think about the fact that I will never see his face again.
And I couldn't even have a peaceful last day with his body because the Westboro Baptist Church decided to make it into a bitter, sour moment for everyone there. Just because they could.
The funeral was supposed to give me peace and closure. Instead, every time I think about that evening, I am filled with a mix of poisonous emotions like rage and confusion over how such filthy people like the Phelps gang could do what they did without any remorse.
I live pretty close to where Fred Phelps will probably be buried, and I fully intend to take out my anger on his grave. I'm not going to give many details because I know it's a crime according to local regulations. Suffice it to say the grave will be extremely unclean and disgusting by the time I'm done with it.
I just need to release all this anger somewhere, and I've thought about my decision. It makes sense.
Fred Phelps himself won't care because he's dead and rotting.
The only people emotionally affected by my desecration will be his family, and honestly I couldn't give two shits about how they feel.
So this act will really be about final closure and a way to release the bottled up anger in a satisfying way.
Please change my view.


(first good response...)
"I live pretty close to where Fred Phelps will probably be buried, and I fully intend to take out my anger on his grave. I'm not going to give many details because I know it's a crime according to local regulations. Suffice it to say the grave will be extremely unclean and disgusting by the time I'm done with it."
It's likely he'll be buried on their own property for this reason; if that's the case, you'd almost certainly be nabbed for trespassing. Phelps isn't worth winding up in court over.

"The only people emotionally affected by my desecration will be his family, and honestly I couldn't give two shits about how they feel."
This is true, but probably not in the way you're imagining. They'd love for you to do that, and would take it as a vindication of their views and proof that they're both righteous and right in what they're doing.

The members of Westboro Baptist Church know that they're hated; it forms a core part of their doctrine. They believe in the idea that there is a limit on the number of people who will be saved, and that the vast majority of us are damned and it happens that they are the elect. It's a particularly nasty spin on hyper-Calvinism (though it should be clarified that while WBC considers itself Calvinist, actual Calvinist denominations typically denounce them outright). Their protests aren't meant to change minds; in their view, the elect are preordained and there's basically nothing that most people can do to avoid being damned, so they see it as their duty to make sure we know that we're damned.

Part of that whole package is that they believe that their rightness is assured by how much opposition they attract; that the fact that so many people hate them and speak out against them is proof that their doctrine is correct.

If you do go to desecrate his grave (and somehow either get away with it or don't mind the legal consequences), you will not be hurting his followers. You will be making them happier, because they'll see the desecration not as a desecration, but as further evidence that they must be on to something if so many of the "non-elect" hate them so viciously.

I understand they've hurt you. They've hurt a lot of people, because they're genuinely awful human beings. But they thrive on the hurt they've caused. It'd be best to acknowledge that Fred Phelps can't hurt anyone else and let his squirrelly little cult degenerate into infighting and eventually cease to exist. they'll try to keep it going for a while, and people like Shirley Phelps-Roper will never see that what they're doing is wrong, but eventually, it'll stop.

For your own self-interest in not being either in jail or inundated by lawsuits and to make sure that you're not both increasing their happiness and how much they believe in the horseshit that Phelps wasted his life spewing, you should find another way to get closure. He's gone, and his life was sad and miserable and dominated by rage and hatred and the rest of us come out on top.


(second good response...)
I am an ex-Calvinist; I wasn't as extreme as the WBC, but there was a point in my life where I sympathized with them.

Being hated is a core doctrine. When people denounced us or spat at us, we took it as pride. Additional detail edit: If someone expressed anger or hate towards us for something religious-based, it actually made us feel pleasure and was something we actively searched out.

Desecrating a grave will not hurt them; they cannot be hurt because they feed on aggression. They believe they are right, and any anger at them is a sign that you are wrong.

Anger is a tough thing to handle, but it hurts no one but yourself. The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy, because once you feel nothing, they are dead to you, and that is power.