Some good news, via Bean:
SILVERTON, Ore. (AP) – Four protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas were in Silverton yesterday to protest the election of the nation’s first openly transgender mayor.
They were overmatched by a large group of counter-protesters who rallied in support of the Mayor Stu Rasmussen.
Rasmussen has twice before been mayor of the small city. But he served those terms before his breast implants and before he started wearing dresses and 3-inch heels openly in public.
The protesters arrived with an assortment of signs, such as “God Hates You,” and “Barack Obama = Antichrist.”
But the town greeted the protesters with a festive counter-protest. More than 100 people paraded in the street and some men wore women’s clothing in a show of support for Rasmussen.
“God Hates You”? What lovely people
Four protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas…
I hereby suggest that newspapers begin editing stories about these people in such a way that this story would have begun, “Four members of the Phelps family from Westboro, Kansas protested…”
Or “Four people who seemed to have gotten lost and taken a wrong freeway exit.”
Maybe that way they’d stay ON the freeway and not protest every again …
I’m a Kansas who recently relocated to Eugene, Oregon, for law school. The Westboro Baptist Church isn’t *quite* comprised of just the Phelpses, though mostly, and it’s my duty as a sane and left-leaning Kansas to point out that Phelps and his church are an embarrassment to even most right-leaning Kansans.
He gives all of us a bad name.
Fruitcakes from Kansas…I never did trust that Dorothy kid….
I saw an interview of this guy. They asked him why he did it. His answer was something along the lines of “I always wanted cleavage, so I decided to go out and get some. I consider myself a heterosexual male.” If the good people of his town see fit to elect him mayor, I figure it’s nobody else’s business. They also interviewed a few townsfolks. The general theme there was “He’s a good mayor and we don’t see what this other business has to do with anything.” If there was a dissenting viewpoint either they didn’t want to go on camera or the interviewers didn’t see fit to put it on the air.
If I had a choice between a guy who wanted some cleavage and saved my town money, and the other guy who wants to change the character of the town, I think I’d be voting for the guy with cleavage.
Paradoxically, voting for the candidate who can do the job, on time and under budget, is very conservative. Voting for the candidate who wants to play Mad Scientist, Social Engineer, is very liberal. It would seem that Silverton is a very nice little conservative town, and good on them for picking the person best qualified to represent their interests.
I was at the Silverton demonstration, among the 150 – 200 people who came to oppose the Phelps gang.
Their “God Hates Fags”, “Your pastor is a whore” and similar signs were bad enough but the thing that really pissed me off was the disrespect for the American flag. This group of loonies believes that the Iraq war is God’s judgment on the United States. The group has been disrupting the funerals of gay people for many years but has added attempting to disrupt the funerals of servicemen and women as well. The feelings of the service member’s family and friends do not enter into their calculus.
As they believe that God hates America two of the three girls were standing on American flags. The third was standing on a rainbow flag. The flags were just tossed on the ground and stood on. The man, the one adult in the group, had a flag tucked into his belt so that it dragged on the ground as he walked around.
I am not a violent person but THAT made me want to hit the guy. As that would give them the press they so desperately want I refrained.
Of the three young women I overheard one say that she was 18. The other two were younger. Raising children to have this much hatred fits my definition of child abuse.
MadMabel