Love meets hate on the streets of San Diego (all photos: Mike Tidmus,
fair use encouraged, larger versions available)

A tiny contingent from the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas paid the City of San Diego a visit today. Infamous for their long history of picketing the funerals of AIDS victims, gay and lesbian leaders, hate crime victims and American soldiers, the organization — officially still headed by the Reverend Fred Phelps — has recently focused its attention on Jewish targets. Fred’s daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, two other adults and four extremely young children took up a position, surrounded by the press and film crews, on a corner diagonally across the street from San Diego High School. The other three corners were jammed with over 500 peaceful, but noisy, counter-demonstrators bearing flags, bullhorns and colorful signs and banners with positive, upbeat and occasionally humorous slogans.

It’s highly likely that the media’s focus will be on the group of seven with their vile messages, but the citizens of San Diego can be proud that so many of their fellow citizens showed up in the name of love, diversity, tolerance and equality to deliver a message that our city is and will always remain a Hate Free Zone.

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UPDATE (16 October 7:24 pm): The number of counter-protesters, originally cited as 300-400 based on police estimates obtained by me at the scene, was just reported by the local CBS affiliate as being in excess of 500 San Diegans opposing the WBC’s hateful message.

Tags: AIDS, California, Crazy Fundies, Hate Crimes, Queer Culture, Queer History, Queer Rights, San Diego

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 6:47 pm and is filed under People, Places, Politics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.