Karma Is A Bitch Westboro Church

Now, typically I stay away from the bullshit that spews out of the Westboro Baptist Church but I found the story y’all are about to read humorous. Well, at least it was humorous to me. You don’t know who the WBC are? Be a friend and just Google them. But, do a search here in this blog or search the tags and you will also find breath I wasted talking about them. Anyway, I owe thanks to Shannon for sending me an email asking if I saw this story, I hadn’t, so I had to look it up. Shannon is one of a handful who belong to the unofficial Scorpion Army who send me stuff they think I might find interesting and one of the few people who make it through the spamguardian. The following story is being borrowed, to include the writer’s opinion, the pictures, and so forth. I give the original author full and entire credit. As far as my take? This is karma at work, the WBC deserves this little reminder right across the street. Fuck them for how they believe and fuck them for how they act, they are the true meaning of being a piece of shit.

Paul Lewis in Topeka

Tuesday 23 September 2014 13.02 EDT

Original story in The Guardian here.

Few neighbourly disagreements are as peculiar, or as visible, as the dispute that rages at the end of Southwest Churchill Road, in an otherwise quiet part of Topeka,Kansas.

On one side of the street is the Westboro Baptist church, the insular and fiercely anti-gay group which has gained infamy for its its offensive protests and placard signs. There is an upside-down American flag in the churchyard and billboards informing passing cars that ‘God Hates Fags’, alongside CCTV cameras, threats to trespassers and a warning that homosexuals risk “the vengeance of eternal fire”.

Across the street, its antithesis. A whole house painted top-to-bottom in rainbow colours, the universal symbol of the gay rights movement. A rainbow flag – hung the right way up – flutters above the roof; hand-painted signs in the yard advocate peace and tell passersby: ‘Feel free to come on property for pictures’.

“This is the first amendment right here,” said Davis Hammet, one of three charity workers living in the rainbow-coloured bungalow, which they have called the Equality House. “Within 50 feet you have a rainbow house and you have people telling them to burn in hell.”

Yet something curious has happened in the 18 months since the property directly opposite the Westboro church was purchased by a peace-loving charity and, in one of the more entrepreneurial acts against a hate group, transformed into a multi-coloured haven for peace, equality and gay pride. Despite appearances, the two opposing neighbours have developed a surprisingly cordial, even amiable detente.

“I go out jogging in the morning, and they’re taking out the trash, and we have small talk,” said Hammet. “Like, ‘Hey, it’s a beautiful day outside’ or ‘This damn snow: I wish I could get warm’. Just basic things that you say to neighbours.”

Occupants of the Westboro church and Equality House have even exchanged phone numbers. Recently, when someone took all of the Equality House gay pride flags and, without their knowledge, deposited them in Westboro’s yard, Hammet’s phone beeped with a text message. “It said something like: ‘A criminal has taken your flags and put them in our yard. We have put them in your mailbox. We would like to return them to you.’”

“It is odd. I didn’t really think this was going to happen,” he concedes. “A lot of people would think that in a situation like this we would have two cannons pointed against each other.”

Stranger still, the feeling of neighbourly tolerance extends across the road. “We’re just very happy to have them here,” said Rebekah Phelps-Davis, a prominent member of the church’s 70-strong congregation. In a twist on that oft-quoted Christian axiom ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways’, Phelps-Davis said God must have determined “from eternity past” that the house would be purchased by the campaigners.

The arrival of Equality House, she pointed out, has been a publicity boon for the Westboro Church, drawing attention to their own, gay-hating message. “We’re always cordial,” she said. “We are friendly with them.” Then, frostily, she added: “But we will not be friends with them.”

That is hardly surprising for a church whose vitriolic diatribes against the gay community have offended millions. The Westboro church – banned from entering the UK or Canada – substitutes argument with shock tactics, traveling to New York to hold up placards thanking God for the 9/11 attacks, or picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in combat. Both, they claim, are God’s punishment to America for tolerating homosexuality.

Their military funeral pickets, in particular, have proven especially controversial, even though they received the backing of the supreme court on free speech grounds.

Phelps-Davis’s may have a point that the arrival of the rainbow house across the street has been a publicity magnet. But she also contended that her neighbours are “just regular Joes” and “as quiet of as the rest of the neighbourhood”, and that is not true.

The Equality House, owned and run by the charity Planting Peace, attracts a steady flow of supporters, campaigners, and eccentrics from all over the world. Few are the typical characters one would expect to see in Topeka.

“We just had a person just show-up and ask if they could be a unicorn in the space,” said Hammet, 24, the director of operations. “They just showed up in black leather bondage gear, plus rainbow tassles and a unicorn horn, and kind of danced around on the front lawn.”

The Westboro residents have looked on as their neighbours encouraged same sex couples to kiss on their roof, held a gay wedding ceremony in their front yard – directly opposite Westboro’s ‘Gay Marriage Dooms Nations’ sign – and even hosted a rowdy LGBT festival, to be repeated next month, called “Drag Down Bigotry.”

The house has predictably gained fame online, and its residents have become adept at viral fundraising. When a five-year-old girl set up a pink lemonade stand on its lawn, asking for donations to support peace and equality, the campaign took off, drawing soldiers from a nearby base to flock to the house, and raising $30,000.

After the Westboro church announced plans to picket Robin Williams’ funeral, the Equality House retaliated with a fundraiser for the late actor’s favourite charity that brought in $100,000.

The rainbow bungalow has also become a haven for disaffected members of the church, many of whom are related, by blood or marriage, to the founding pastor, Fred Phelps, who died earlier this year aged 84.

Lizzy Phelps, who left the group years ago and now mentors transgender teens, helped paint the house its rainbow colours. Zach Phelps-Roper, who left the church just a few months ago, has also made contact with his old neighbours.

The Equality House’s residents say their arrival was never intended to create an antagonistic relationship. The idea was to counter their hateful message with positivity – and they believe it is working.

When Fred Phelps died in March this year, Hammet sent text messages to Westboro church members, past and present, expressing his heartfelt condolences. A few hours later, he received a reply from a Westboro resident across the road. “I got a text that just said ‘thank you’,” he said. “That is all it said, but to me it was a really human, powerful, moment.”

Yet while civility, and sometimes even kindness, prevails in daily interactions between the neighbours, they are keeping up appearances online. Westboro, a prolific user of social media, is almost constantly trolling its neighbours with antagonistic tweets and Vine recordings.

Most of the time the occupants of the rainbow house ignore the bait, but once in a while they will respond, tongue in cheek.

When Westboro recently put out a video challenging the rainbow house to a weird deviation of the the ALS ice bucket challenge, pouring water over a ‘Hell Is Eternal’ placard, their neighbours reacted with their own, good-humoured YouTube clip, pouring water over their multi-coloured donation box.

“One time we tweeted them a picture of rainbow pancakes and asked them if they’d like to come over for breakfast,” Hammet said. “They just tweeted back that we should burn in hell.”

Kuwait Uses “Gaydar” To Keep Out LGBT

If you have been keeping up with international news you just might have seen the little tidbits offered about Kuwait implementing “gaydar” to keep LGBT (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual, and Transgender) out of their country. Other countries in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Countries) that include Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates already deem homosexual acts as unlawful. Health centers conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the  expatriates when they come into the GCC countries. However, they are taking  stricter measures that will help them detect gays who will be then barred from  entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states. And did you know that It’s illegal to be gay in 78 countries, with  lesbianism banned in 49. Five countries mete out the death penalty to gay people, those being Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and Mauritania.

• Iran:  Since 1979, the government has executed more than 4,000 people charged with  homosexual acts. A non-adult who engages in consensual sodomy is subject to a  punishment of 74 lashes.
• Saudi  Arabia: Although the maximum punishment for homosexuality is execution,  the government tends to use other punishments – such as fines, prison sentences,  and whipping – unless it feels that homosexuals have challenged state authority  by engaging in social movements.
• Sudan: For homosexual men, lashes are given  for the first offence, with the death penalty following the third offence. 100  lashes are given to unmarried women who engage in homosexual acts. For lesbian  women, stoning and thousands of lashes are the penalty for the first offence.
• Yemen: Homosexuality is still illegal in Yemen  in accordance to the country’s Shari’a legal system. Punishment ranges from  flogging to death.
• Mauritania: The Shari’a law applies in  Mauritania. The penal code states that, since 1983, any adult Muslim caught engaging in an ‘unnatural act’ with a member of the same sex is punishable with  the death sentence by public stoning.

This warped plan comes from Kuwait’s director of public health, Yousuf Mindkar. The clinical screens are meant to make sure the foreigners entering the Arab countries are healthy. But Mindkar wants to use them as an opportunity to crack down harder on what’s been seen as a troublesome rise in the country’s gay population. Theoretically, the health officials in Kuwait could distil this practice and other similar research findings into a science-inspired gay detection screening process. But the accuracy rate would be far from proficient, and leaps and bounds away from the level of proof sufficient to ban someone from entering the country. We don’t even have to look to the East for examples of homophobic immigration law. For 22 years the United States tried to screen out HIV-positive foreigners which could be considered a form of gay discrimination. Meanwhile, Kuwait’s gaydar plan is set to be debated at the Gulf Cooperation Countries committee meeting next month. It will be interesting to see if the committee gives the proposal the green light, and even more interesting to find out how Mindkar proposes to pull it off. Unfortunately, wherever the gay detector falls in the spectrum between asking someone if they like sports or analyzing their facial width-to-height ratio, it won’t be the first time history has used soft science to justify a kind of witch hunt rooted in fear and hatred. And those never ended very well in the past.

Everything I have read about or seen on the television about Kuwait and the GCC using supposed scientific tests to ban people from entering one of the countries has sent red flags right up my WTF flag pole. As a serving member of the United States Air Force (active duty) I was stationed in the Gulf region in the country of Kuwait as well as visiting Bahrain for r & r. As an American, used to American culture, I witness first hand, what appeared to me, as unethical treatment to human beings. That’s not seeing things as only a foreigner to the county but as a human being. Who gives a flying fuck what a person’s sexual orientation or their sexual preference is. I wonder why we haven’t seen any WBC (Westboro Baptist Church) support for Kuwait and the GCC. Maybe the WBC has been banned from those countries as well. Neither here nor there, it just seems like there are countries who wish to alienate themselves from others in the world. I would think this would affect their income from international travels no matter their orientation. Anyway, just wanted to pass on some international bullshit news that struck me as worthy to put here.

As a housekeeping note, the 3, count them 3, pictures were borrowed from 3 different sources found publicly on the world-wide web using a Google search. They don’t belong to me or this blog and were, at the time of posting, considered to be free to use in the public domain. If 1 or all of the pictures belong to you or your organization just inform me and I will remove them with haste.