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

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'll accept that if you give me a straight answer to these questions:

(1) Do you agree that WBC's message is a call to turn away from queer sex combined with a warning that bad things will happen if we do not? If no, what do you say their message is?

(2) Do you agree with the statement, "I disagree with what he says, but I will defend his right to say it." IOW, do you share my commitment to the freedom to speak and to hear all that would be spoken? Please answer this both in the general case and as applied to WBC.

(3) Are you willing to explore what you and I have in common in terms of world view, values, and beliefs, with the goal of laying a foundation for friendship and friendly debate? (Just a "yes" or "no" will do.)

You have raised several interesting points that I have felt would be off topic for us to explore here. If we can establish some common ground, it might be possible to enjoy doing that privately or on another thread.

The WBC's message is that if you are not a part of our church, god hates you and you are going to hell. The homosexual thing on their part is because it gets noticed. They've acually made statements to this effect more than once. They just another one of those cultish hate groups that spring up every once and awhile, they'll die off soon enough as members leave.

I do defend their right to say whatever they want, however if they also have the right to take the consequences of their words. Other people can say what they want as well, are you going to breach their rights to protect the WBC? No laws ban them from protesting, the only backlash is social. If they are going to continue to piss people off, then they can deal whith those people who have lost patience.

Thanks. I'd have to go back to the factual narratives in Snyder v. Phelps (2011) to evaluate your claim. If you're right, then they are spending a lot of money to gain a handful more attendees at their services in Westboro. And if they really are motivated by hate, you are surely correct that any true Christian will stop attending their services. ("Hate the sin, not the sinner.")

Your last point is where the role of the People's Law is critical. Speakers must not be subjected to violence or to any unlawful disruption of their speech. (See, for example, California Penal Code 403 as interpreted in Kay (1970).) The appropriate response during a speech event is heckler speech, which is also protected. A well planned picket or other heckling action can co-opt the event and capture media attention for the opposing view. Rather than silencing web sites, I would like to see pro-queer Anonymous activists putting together a brilliantly creative and effective, and entirely legal, heckle response to WBC.