Comments:Internet security firm to donate revenue to charity after Anonymous protest of Westboro Baptist Church

Back to article

This page is for commentary on the news. If you wish to point out a problem in the article (e.g. factual error, etc), please use its regular collaboration page instead. Comments on this page do not need to adhere to the Neutral Point of View policy. Please remain on topic and avoid offensive or inflammatory comments where possible. Try thought-provoking, insightful, or controversial. Civil discussion and polite sparring make our comments pages a fun and friendly place. Please think of this when posting.

Use the "Start a new discussion" button just below to start a new discussion. If the button isn't there, wait a few seconds and click this link: Refresh.

The other thread discusses WBC's obnoxious method of speech. On this thread I hope to discuss what it is, in nonreligious terms, that they are trying to say.

I claim that WBC's message is in essence a warning that the people of the United States must turn away from queer sexuality in order to avoid awful consequences. In religious terms, the message is, "Live according to God's Commandments, or else!" This is not a new message. It is the moral of the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Osama bin Laden, in his letter to the London Times, also voiced the same warning.

This warning is not a hate message, any more than the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a hate story. What we have here is simply a warning to live morally. I offer the factual narratives contained within Snyder v. Phelps (2011) in support of this:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2981429692939250360&q=snyder+v.+phelps+(2011)&hl=en&as_sdt=2003

If the people of the United States become willing to really hear this warning and to consider it fully, much good might occur. The true bone of contention is whether queer sexuality should become acceptable in society. IOW, at issue is whether the freedom to speak includes the freedom to rebuke. Queers want to silence an inconvenient idea: the marriage norm.

WBC wants to proclaim the marriage norm, which states that queer sexuality is morally wrong. WBC's message is neither more nor less than a warning and a call to return to morality.

The moral of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is that if you've a choice between being inhospitable to a guest, or giving your daughters to a mob to be gang-raped, the good and righteous thing to do is to give your daughters to the mob to be gang-raped. Well, if it's a male guest, anyway. Because women aren't important.

Claiming to derive one's morality from the bible is loony not only because the stories in the bible are some of the most immoral stories you'll find anywhere, but also because they have been naturally selected over many centuries specifically for the property of being ambiguous, so that you can use them to justify whatever form of hatred you prefer and then go around killing people who don't agree with your interpretation, safe in the knowledge that you are right because God says so. That kind of ambiguity allows the stories to remain useful to religious fanatics no matter what beliefs the religious fanatics want to pursue, so that the stories will be propagated by generation after generation of religious fanatics of all stripes. Making the stories successful replicators in the grand Darwinian sense of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

Your claim deserves consideration, but not here. In this context, your claim is misleading. Judged on its own terms, i.e. within the context of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, asserting that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is anything other than a warning to remain sexually moral is unreasonable. I referred to the story only to use it as an example. WBC's message is indistinguishable from the prophetic warnings that make up much of the Old Testament. Your opinion about the literary, moral, and philosophical merits of the Bible has nothing to do with my use of the story as an example.

I am starting to think that you do not love truth, Pi zero, because you have not answered my questions and, worse, introduce irrelevant, distracting, and divisive issues. It is as if you just want to argue.

I want to find what common ground you and I have. I know that we have common ground, because you care about Wikipedia. If you care, we are "on the same side". If you care, then we only disagree about the details; we do not disagree about the need to work for good.

The second sentence of your above remark ("Judging on its own terms...") is appallingly un-self-aware. Even worse than merely starting with what you want to believe and then seeing it reflected in the mirror scripture, because there's a no true Scotsman fallacy thrown in. You've been entrapped by an even worse conceptual tarpit than I'd realized. My sympathies.

Your insults reveal that you have run out of logical bullets. Are you a troll, or is it just this particular topic that brings this out in you?

There's no troll blood in my family, nor have I insulted you. It's a pretty standard defense mechanism of these sorts of closed meme-sets, that when the meme-set detects a possible threat, it causes its victims to think they are being insulted.

I am Anonymous. I am a civic activist with goals that align closely with those associated with Anonymous. Yet in this instance I view Anonymous as the bad guy, and WBC as the good guy. The inability of most people to see things this way reflects the closed mindedness and the thought control of this society.

Disagree with WBC's viewpoint? That doesn't make WBC a bad guy. Disapprove of the admittedly high nuisance cost of the speech method used by WBC? Again, that doesn't make WBC a bad guy. The expression of an unpopular viewpoint does not create a "good guy bad guy" situation.

The only facet of this story that creates a "good guy bad guy" element to this story is the silencing of speech, and in that respect, the bad guys are those who would silence and/or attack a speaker, and the good guy is the speaker.

The freedom to speak is the foundation of all other freedom. Freedom itself is threatened if the population becomes closed minded and intolerant and violent when an unpopular viewpoint is spoken.

If nothing else, turning up to 'hold a protest' and screaming about someone's sexual identity at their funeral is an act of such an insensitive and intolerant nature that it may-well drive people to a violent response.

So, no. No, I do not agree. Much of what the Freaky Phelps Family do is akin to yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. They are overstepping the bounds of legitimate and reasonable free speech.

Your argument was considered and rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in Snyder v. Phelps (2011),

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2981429692939250360&q=snyder+v.+phelps+(2011)&hl=en&as_sdt=2003

in which it was held that the high nuisance general method of speech that is used by the WBC activists is fully protected speech.

Read that case. Then let me know where you think the Court erred. Even better, thank me and tell me that you learned something.

Just because the Supreme Court says so, doesn't make it right, or wrong. The court, congress and every law maker errors here because they preach about hate "crimes" and the WBC is allowed to do what others in some states would go to jail for. I might be wrong on this, but I am pretty sure there are few states where WBC is not allowed or for that matter WBC won't even touch.

Thank you for conversing. You could not have read Snyder v. Phelps (2011) in the ten minutes that elapsed between my post and your reply. In the U.S., there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment; hate speech is fully protected by federal law, which trumps state law. All states must conform to Snyder v. Phelps (2011), which was decided in favor of the general method of speech used by WBC.

AFAIK, it is WBC's method, not their viewpoint, that is controversial. Their viewpoint, although unpopular and disagreeable to many, is right out of the Bible and is arguably clearly not hate speech. It is their willingness to inflict emotional pain on vulnerable people in mourning that is, rightly, controversial. In terms of law, this is a controversy over nuisance.

Whether WBC has a moral right to inflict such pain is debatable. But whether they have a legal right to do so is no longer reasonably debatable, because the issue has been decided by the Court.

You appear to be thinking inside the box that's been handed to you. That mistake goes deeper than merely overestimating the role of SCOTUS in interpreting the US constitution. You oughtn't allow your notion of right and wrong to be dictated by someone's interpretation of legal documents, just as you oughtn't allow your notion of right and wrong to be dictated by someone's interpretation of religious documents.

It would appear to me that Westboro's viewpoints are flexible. They — or at least, the people at the top — don't seem to truly believe that "god hates fags", but more that they're latching onto the most controversial viewpoint they can find, just to get the protests, in the hope that they can get a lawsuit out of it. They're not protesters; merely lawyers looking for a quick buck.

"I disagree with what he says, but I will defend his right to say it!"

If this expresses your sentiments, please say so. Stand with me in defense of our most vital freedom. Stand with me in opposition to those who would silence!

Your link is broken