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Surprise, surprise. Westboro coming to Buffalo

Phelps and his clan plan to picket a memorial service for the families of flight 3407 this Sunday. This is the first time these people have come anywhere near where I live and I'm pissed. There's a group on facebook organizing an "angel wing" shield to attempt to keep them from view of the mourners. Unfortunately I am alone with my 5 yo and 3 yo that day. I'm thinking they are still too young to be exposed to this kind of hate but if they were older I'd be there in a heartbeat.

What is amazing to me is that so many people here have never heard of these asshats. In a twisted way I'm glad they're showing up. It's about time those that claim to share their faith stood up to these bullies.

Tags: Phelps, Westboro, buffalo, crash, memorial, plane

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Permalink Reply by FreeThinker on February 20, 2009 at 6:35pm

The best way to defeat the Westboro Baptist Church is to quit paying attention to them. With people protesting against Westboro and the media covering their picketting, Westboro gets what they want...fame and free exposure of their beliefs. If people just ignored them instead of getting fired up about what they say, then the Westboro members would lose their power.

A friend of mine is a retired sheriff of a small town in Tennessee. A couple years ago, Westboro announced they were coming there to picket the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. The town had to spend thousands of dollars to bring in extra police from neighboring communities and to pay their own officers overtime, just to control the crowd of people who showed up to protest against Westboro. Do you know how many Westboro members showed up? Two.

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Permalink Reply by Dawn K on February 21, 2009 at 11:26am

Interesting that they didn't really show up. I decided since I couldn't go do the "wall" to email our newspaper to ask that they not give them any additional media coverage. It's not just the coverage though it's also that I feel like the mourners should not have to see Westboro's BS. From that stand point the Angel wall seemed like a good approach (despite the reference to supernatural).

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Permalink Reply by FreeThinker on February 21, 2009 at 3:58pm

I suspect they only show up in full force when they can garner a lot of media attention. As I said, this was in a small town, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere, so there isn't a lot of media attention.