NO SHOW!! Fred Phelps’ “God Hates Fags” Fails to Appear after all…
Posted by Jon on December 4, 2008
Where was everybody?!
A few passers-by were the only people we initially saw where the “God Hates Fags” /Westboro Baptist Church had said on its website it would march
against Barack Obama. Ah, well. We’ll save our signs and try again!
As I posted yesterday, our Project 12 program’s students went downtown today in order to picket the picketers. The infamous Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church (actually all members of his own biological family), were set to tell Barack Obama, the Canadian embassy, the Chinese embassy, and the Democratic National Party, that Phelps’ gawd hates them. We thought Jesus ought to be represented. So we made signs, wrote up a press flier, and drove our old rickety Project 12 van downtown to the Federal Building on South Dearborn.
But… We were there. Numbing cold weather was there. Lots and lots of police were there. Barracades were there. After a while a self-proclaimed satanic group called “S. I. N.” (Sodomite Insurgency Network) was there. (We tried to talk with them but they had no interest in our message.) Who was not there, however? Westboro Baptist Church. No idea on why.
UPDATE: It appears that Westboro changed the time of the event as well as the targets of it. They may or may not be appearing later today (near noon) at 233 N. Michigan Avenue. That is a severe scale-back from what had been planned. They also plan (if they’re to be believed) to appear at the same spot a number of times this month (as this pdf from their website lists).
At any rate, here we were:
