Westboro Baptist Church defeated by tolerance

This is a local story for me: I pass this school frequently and have a niece and nephew who are graduates. It’s also a heartening one that counters some of the more depressing stories from the right end of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, this event seems to have received only local media coverage.
The following is from Hugh Kramer at The San Franciso Examiner:

Westboro Baptist Church is famous for picketing soldiers’ funerals, Jewish institutions, schools that are tolerant of gays and just about anything else in America that they don’t like; but when they came to Gunn High School in Palo Alto, CA on April 1, they got a big surprise. They were greeted with song.

When the faculty and students at Gunn heard that WBC was coming with their “GOD HATES FAGS” and “GOD HATES AMERICA” signs, they decided to respond to hate with love. Students sang and led others in songs that celebrated diversity and acceptance. Hundreds responded, not just kids from the school but also the other counter-demonstrators. It’s part of a change in how these counter-demonstrations are being done. WBC picketers, who’ve done over 40,000 demonstrations (they call it a “ministry”) since 1991, are used to having their hate met with anger but now they have to get used to having their protests used to promote community and the very thing they are attempting to villify; tolerance of people regardless of their differences. Some groups are even using WBC demonstrations sucessfully for charitable fundraising.

The video below has a nice comment from a teacher where she remarks that we speak of tolerance, but it’s not that we tolerate people. We accept them.
The video ends with the crowd singing We Shall Overcome. How appropriate on this anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Thanks to FB friends April and Carlos for posting the video.
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