I’ve found myself by them recently. Unfortunately, Kansas City is within an hour’s drive of their compound so they show up quite often to try to get attention.
I saw them as recently as May when they were picketing a Van Halen Concert? (yeah, I guess Eddie sinned when he booted Sammy out).
I had to pass right behind them to get to a crosswalk. Kansas City residents are pretty jaded by them and most of them just ignore the WBC show. One dumb drunken schmuck was trying to debate a WBC male who was about 20 years old. I stopped, gently grabbed his arm and said, “Dude, they don’t even believe what they are saying. They just want to provoke you so you punch them and then they can sue you and the City of KC for infringing on their rights.”
It didn’t seem to register with Schmucko who thought he was winning a great debate. So I told WBC boy that I would testify against him if he got into a fight after harassing this poor drunk man.
Then I happily walked away and headed for the concert.
All this assumption that they fund themselves by milking for and then winning lawsuits: is it actually accurate? As a litigator myself it just seems implausible. Checking wiki, it talks about only two cases, both earning sums far too modest to meet the expenditure of a whole congregation, year on year.
Just as a note, while this is probably what Fred and the Westboro Baptists believe, it’s not what mainstream Calvinism believes. This is a kind of hyper-Calvinism of the worst sort that’s always been outside mainstream Reformed theology and what Calvin himself taught.
In particular, Calvin would have been horrified in first, the notion that God hates anyone, and second, that you could make the statement with certainty that “So-and-So is in Hell”. That latter belief, that humans could earn heaven or be damned to hell because of their actions, or that humans could have certainty of the ultimate fate of a man or woman, Calvin would have condemned as the worst kind of salvation by works theology and the antithesis of his belief. For Calvin, only God could know for sure the ultimate state of a man’s soul, not us ignorant and foolish mortals.
I guess I’m just getting old. I’m just tired of the vast majority having to watch what they say and do, while professional scumbags can do whatever the fuck they please.