I’d like to thank the Westboro Baptist Church for all their work on making equality for all a normal thing.
No, honestly.
Whenever these weirdos, and their UK equivalents who haunt Gay Pride parades proving that we still need Gay Pride parades, turn up, they force the general population, the 2.4 children, semi-detached house, never-knowingly-met-a-gay except-my-hairdresser-probably, Volvo driving, Sunday Times reading, Kindle owning “normal” people to decide where they stand.
Where do you stand? Do you stand with people all being equal and having equal access to goods and services and government and tax and the like, or do you stand with the WBC, holding signs explaining that their god hates people in direct contravention of all that bible stuff about hate being Not Good?
The Westboro (etc) mobs have turned the debate into a simple black and white answer where previously people had a ratio of equality-to-prejudice that they applied without ever thinking about it in any depth.
Thanks to the Phelps oddities and their UK copycats, many people whose immediate thought of “the other” is to say “ugh, no” now look at the people with whom they are standing in sympathy. And then they reject them. Let people be equal, they say, because the alternative is the Westboro Baptist Church (etc) and what they stand for.
However you come to agree with equal rights for all, welcome. The rest of us will leave you alone and not picket your funeral.
Another damn blog 