This as a great article , from March 4th, that Cindy Brookshire sent me, Thanks Cindy!
Hate is meant to incapacitate righteousness; literally cut its head off. We witnessed hate this week in Virginia when the Westboro Baptist Church came to the Commonwealth. They’re the jewskilledjesus.com and godhatesfags.com crowd. While we rarely use protests to draw attention to an issue, the fact that the Kansas-based anti-Semites sought to protest the Virginia Holocaust Museum motivated us to turn out folks to that sacred space.
Last is the professional hater, those like the Westboro crowd who earlier this week looked at Holocaust survivor Jay Ipson and shouted that “Hitler was God’s answer to the Jews.” These are formalized family groups who work at the fringe of the fringe to develop a social or religious orthodoxy that uses untempered hate and extremism to generate a self-fulfilling paranoia suggesting the entire world is against “the family.” We have seen this with David Koresh and other cult leaders who are masters of pitting society against a faux-sacred that claims an orthodoxy so far out of the mainstream that the majority of society shakes its head and simply ignores the shouting as crazy background noise. Many who have commented on the news accounts of this group’s presence in Virginia had wished for just that: a broad ignoring of their visit; a roll of the eys, a brief verbal expression of disgust, and nothing more.
But there’s a monument in Richmond to what can happen when hate goes unchecked. It’s called the Holocaust Museum. And that’s where we stood – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Unitarians and none of the above — with a survivor, supporting him, and each other, so that together we might never forget that big hate can start small and needs to be met with compassion, love and strength.
Those pigs were in DC yesterday because of the gay marriage thing. I loved the tv shots of the gays walking in to city hall laughing at them.
I would be tempted to spit in their faces…but that would put me ever so slightly closer to being like them.
Thanks for sharing this, Elena. I was interested in reading about his “three degrees of hate.” Juvenile hate — the graffiti we find in our neighborhoods. Recreational hate — the groups that find comfort blaming others for the problems they are experiencing. Professional hate — hard to believe a church would orchestrate that. Are these the same folks that disrupt funerals of war veterans? I was glad to see such a diverse group of Richmonders come together to counter-demonstrate “not in our town.”
Elena, thank you for posting this article. This is why it is so important we all work together to restore a tolerant and civil society.
I feel certain that Westboro Baptists embarrass every other Baptist in the country. Shame on those ugly acting people. Totally nasty.
God hates Fags………too funny.
I remember driving home from work in Maryland years ago to see the KKK marching down the street. Where I lived, just north of the Mason-Dixon line, we made CNN one night with race riots. The Pagans, IIRC, were asked to come to town and clean things up a bit. Didn’t work too good.