Yesterday the Supreme Court decided that the 'Westboro Baptist Church' can continue to do this. I'm sure, like me, the Justices would have personally liked to have trussed up the offenders (the parents, at least), and dispatched them to a dark, soundproof room for a year or two. But I guess this is the price of maintaining genuinely free speech. No doubt jurists will dissect the decision for years to come and there will be great debates about what constitutes hate speech and how to balance everyone's competing rights.
But for my part, I hate it. And I'm glad I can express it here and express it now:
- I hate their hate.
- I hate the fact that a little band of 70 or so inbred, related folks with a crazy patriarch named Fred can pawn themselves off as a church and get so much publicity.
- I hate that these parents are destroying their kids.
- I hate that some naiive people will assume this is Christianity and that God is hateful.
- I hate the fact that they have singled out one sin, and ignored their own damning self-righteousness and arrogant vindictiveness.
- I hate that they don't seem to have read a word of the four Gospels, in which Jesus repeatedly has the harshest words for those who trumpet their own goodness and others' sinfulness.
- I hate their distortion of the Gospel, as if God's primary concern is to simply get people to improve their behavior, rather than come to know him as Savior and let him change their lives
- I hate that I am proud that I am not like them.
- I hate that the ugliness and pride and blindness I see in them resides in me, though it manifests itself in different ways.
- I love that I've been redeemed from the consequences of that, and pray they will be too.
