Students saw what happens when smart meets crazy during Westboro Baptist Church event
There is an old expression that goes something like, “Never argue with an idiot because they’ll take you down to their level and then beat you with their experience.”
Shirley Phelps-Roper is many things. She is a hateful, spiteful, mean-spirited angry bigot whose words and actions are a disgrace to anybody who calls themselves a Christian or professes a love for Jesus Christ.
But she is no idiot.
That much was clearly on display as Phelps-Roper appeared before three of Associate Journalism Professor Timothy Boudreau’s classes on Monday.
The session I was able to sit in on was JRN 102 and saw time after time as students would try to calmly ask a question and within minutes, would be engaged in a shouting match that they had no chance of winning.
Shirley Phelps-Roper is a lawyer who is licensed to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court and time after time dispatched students, many of whom were freshman, with the ease that someone uses to spit out a piece of gum.
It was rather odd to watch Phelps-Roper quickly muster such hate and anger to argue with students and then quickly end her diatribes and share a chuckle with her daughters, as if the hate and anger was controlled with a switch.
As person after person had their verbal joust with Phelps-Roper, it was obvious that none of them really got the purpose of members the Westboro Baptist Church.
The Roper family did come to Mount Pleasant to save any souls, as far as they are concerned. We are doomed, lost causes and goners.
They came here because they know we are going to hell and decided it was their task to make sure we know it.
Phelps-Roper’s brand of religion and speech is both what is great and frustrating about this country.
The first amendment is the bread and butter for any journalist and is a right that is extended to all Americans that sets us apart from the rest of the world.
Two countries that are allies of the United States and like to think of themselves as far more progressive than this country, the United Kingdom and Canada, have banned Phelps-Roper from entering their country because of her hateful speech.
That is why our democracy, our laws and our country can stand apart from the world.
In this country you can be a hateful, angry and ignorant bigot and still have the same protections that every other citizen.
The solution to the problem caused by the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church or the local substitutes such as Soulwinners Ministries or “Preacher Rick” Warzywak is to use the best weapon you have at your dispersal against them, your first amendment right to ignore them.
They want to argue with you. They want you to scream and holler and sling every insult you can at them.
If everybody simply pays no mind to the type of hate that groups such the Westboro Baptists profess, they will simply go away when they have no one to argue to with and no one to antagonize. Slowly, yet surely, it will happen.
