Westboro Baptist Church
Seattle says no to Christian hate. A radical congregation out of Kansas belonging to the Westboro Baptist Church, run by Fred Phelps, picketed places of worship around Seattle this weekend. The church group is known for delivering messages of hate around the country. However, the ugly, Christian congregation was met by stiff resistance, in the form of hundreds of Seattle residents shouting the hate group down.
Jonathan Phelps, one of the protest ringleaders, said Mount Zion and other churches are spreading lies. "They've preached that lie from hell that God loves everybody - that you can live like the devil and have any hope of heaven at all," Phelps said. The protesters targeted Mount Zion Baptist Church in Seattle during the worship service, shouting and waving placards saying "You're Going to Hell" and "God Hates Fags."
Later, as church members at Saint James Cathedral celebrated the Corpus Christi procession outside the church in white robes, the Westboro protesters took advantage of the moment, shouting their messages of hate and waving placards.
The Westboro Baptist Church congregation openly admits preaching a gospel of hate. They openly despise mainstream America. Indeed, they despise the United States, and the social and moral progress we have made in the last few decades.
Yet hate must be challenged, and the good residents of Seattle did not disappoint. Hundreds of counter-demonstrators, many of them gay and lesbian, hit the streets to battle the shouts of Christian hate. The protests remained peaceful, though emotionally charged.
The group from Westboro Baptist Church plans to picket outside Garfield High School on Monday, then show up at several Jewish centers in the city. Let us hope that the good citizens of Seattle once again rise up against hate. Let every resident, in a non-violent, peaceful fashion, stand up to hate and religious bigotry in all its forms, large and small.
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Comments
Don't wrestle with pigs.. you just get dirty and the pig enjoys it.
So this is a bit of a biased piece, not sure if that is intended or not. Most Christians don't recognize Phelps as such, but more as a sectarian schismatic group from the rest of the Christian community.
Second, the phrase "Christian hate" keeps getting repeated, even as the Phelps clan continues to bash Christian groups in the form of Mount Zion Baptist Church and the Saint James Cathedral.
Third, this is written like an op-ed piece; I too love a flair for the dramatic. But, interjecting opinions every other line isn't good newswriting.
Objectivity?,
I am not writing news, I am writing commentary.
I offer observation and opinion supported by fact.
Examiner pays big bucks for my subjectivity.
peace
With all due respect, I thought that this was a newspaper that offered fact, not commentary. I apologize for my mistake.
It might be funny to see you argue with the likes of Phelps though, as the awesome Rachel Maddow likes to say, "You can't win arguments with people who don't deal in facts"; so might end up as a draw.
As for the money, I don't see the relevance.
If they pay you "big bucks" for your subjectivity, then The Examiner should be ashamed of itself. I don't know about you, Micha, but the journalism I've been trained in is the sort that is fair, factual, and unbiased; you only display one of the three here, and even then, your facts are sketchy. The Southern Baptist Convention has renounced Phelps and his "church" for their actions--they are not Christians, and saying that such protests are acts of Christian hate is a sweeping generalization. I think it's unfortunate that reporters today are unable to adhere to the basic principles of news writing.
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