Bedfellows Getting Strange
Here’s some whacked-out crap. A group in Wisconsin is showing up at the funerals of servicemen killed in Iraq and staging protests. Out-of-control liberal group with, at best, a tin ear for political theatre and, at worst, a dark and disturbing misanthropy, right.
Wrong! They’re from the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, who contend
the deaths of the military personnel were God’s revenge on the United States for its acceptance of homosexuality…
The women held signs that said such things as “Thank God for 9/11,” and the group sang parodies of songs such as “God Bless America” with lyrics critical of tolerance for homosexuality.
The Wisconsin legislature is formulating a bill of some kind to try to keep these people at a distance from the funerals, but still be constitutional. This has to put Pat Robertson-wing Republicans in an uncomfortable position. They’re being whipsawed between constituencies that heretofore were natural allies - military families and the Iraq war mission on one side, and gay-hating evangelicals on the other.
It’s an unlooked-for fissure in the smugly consonant “base” of the GOP. I don’t think it’s got legs, though. My bet is that the Westboro Baptists are an aberrant mutation of the species and, despite Kansas’ antipathy to the theory of evolution, it will be swiftly selected out. And, whatever happens, don’t hold your breath waiting for progressives to take any sort of astute advantage.
