A recent discussion between friends had me pondering a well-worn topic covering the Westboro Baptist Church. While I am loath to give this repugnant organization any more lines in the massive universe of online and paper text I feel that the notion they were positing was not the best course of action.
It is the standard argument that crops up each time there is a tragedy and these vultures, nay ghouls, crawl out from their miserable crypt and threaten the world with their mere presence. The subsequent ballyhoo over these vile, barely passing for, human beings feed into their hopes of either 1) spreading their woefully misguided message of monumentally ignorant hate with little understanding of their source material, or 2) getting someone worked up enough to do something irrational enough to warrant a lawsuit that will fill what has to be dwindling coffers.
However, I believe, and have argued, that the desire by the masses to simply ignore these individuals, or to refer to them in some offhand way that does not recognize them directly (such as ‘they who shall not be named’) does not retract from their capacity to continue these repulsive acts. If anything, I believe it encourages them.
They are not deterred by legions on Facebook or twitter from referring to them as ‘those wackos’, but those who attend these services and stand in direct opposition of them and their message. The Patriot riders who lined military funeral processions and revved their bikes so loudly that the WBC packed their things and left because they could not be heard. The hundreds of students who mass against a planned protest on a college campus to face off against the WBC when they came to picket, or more likely celebrate, the death of a gay student.
Our society has picked up this notion that an evil ignored dies on the vine of ignominy. We forget that terrible thoughts and hideous acts must be met with thoughts and actions in opposite. Where there is truly misguided hate and disgust, there must be compassion. Where praise of violence against the soldiers or against the children, there must be the solemn respect for the deceased and those still suffering from the loss.
The quote above is from one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett. I won’t go into his fiction, and how it should be read by all who can spare the time, but I want to point out that in this scenario we are the darkness.
We contain the ever-present capacity for humanity to care, to feel, and to have compassion in times of our own suffering as well as the suffering of others. The WBC may think they will get there first, that they will be the loudest voice, but the light, as is not often stated, only illuminates the area around it, leaving the rest into darkness. Is it not too much to hope that the darkness is not the evil of the universe, but that which is all-encompassing. That compassion for the injured, physically and mentally, the wounded, and the deceased fills the void that their ‘light’ would so like to dispel.
In that vein, should that light die, to turn a phrase on Dylan Thomas, I doubt there will be many that rage against it, but until it fails, until the abomination that is the WBC is stripped of its undeserved title as a ‘religious’ institution, and crushed under the heel of both judge, jury, and social executioner it should not be forgotten. No evil that is forgotten dies. No evil that is unchallenged shrinks. if history has taught us anything, it is that.
Old Jeffersonian 