Dear Westboro Baptist Church,
I know that, if any of you read this, the only thing it’s going to accomplish is you trying to track me down so you can come hold a protest in front of my house. (Sorry, I don’t go to church so you can’t protest there.) I recently read about your plan to protest at Blessed Mother in Owensboro, Kentucky. Usually, I can’t be bothered to know where you’re protesting or what you’re protesting, but since I’m from Owensboro and it’s not exactly a liberal gay-friendly haven, I was seriously baffled. I looked up some articles and found that you were protesting over a young man who shot himself because, he claims (I say this for legal reasons, not to question his veracity), a priest sexually abused him.
It literally took me ten minutes to figure out why you would want to protest that. I can understand why normal, rational people would want to protest, but your protests are special, so I took extra time to figure out what your particular motive might be, since you normally do the “gay people are killing our soldiers” schtick. After thinking really hard for ten minutes, I finally realized that you probably equate pedophilia with homosexuality.
You know, as awful as it sounds, I’m kind of glad that you’re out there protesting. There are obviously a lot of people who are uneasy about homosexuality, but your protests are so deranged that you’re making being anti-gay look really unattractive at best and totally insane at worst. God is punishing America for accepting homosexuality by killing our soldiers? I hate to tell you this, but most people are rational enough to know that Congress and the Bush Administration sent our soldiers into a fairly life-threatening situation on purpose, to a place where enemies might kill them, and that this had absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality. If I stick a butter knife into a light socket and get electrocuted, is that God punishing me for accepting gays, or is that me doing something that is liable to get me electrocuted? Our soldiers are dying because they were sent to war, and by definition, a warzone is not a very safe place for soldiers. It’s a pretty direct cause and effect link, and it was completely caused by human beings.
You know, while I’m on the subject of soldiers dying, I actually do have a bone to pick with you over your protests, for an entirely different reason. Our military is full of many, many brave men and women who volunteered to go fight to protect our country. When they purposely put themselves in harm’s way to protect your freedoms, sometimes they are killed in battle. It’s an extremely heroic thing to do–to know that there is always a chance that the enemy will kill you, and to go anyway. When you use the freedoms that they protect to undermine the heroism of their actions, you’re pretty much spitting in their faces. Dying because God has a vendetta against America about gays is not heroic; according to you, it isn’t even their choice, because God is doing it and you can’t stop God from doing whatever God is going to do. Taking the choice to be put into danger away from our fallen soldiers also takes away the heroism of their deaths. (Not that you have the power to actually diminish the heroism of their deaths, but what you say insults the courage of our soldiers at every turn.) Our soldiers are not sacrificial lambs to atone for what you think are our sins; they are a kick-ass fighting force that faces danger every damn day and sometimes falls prey to it.
And, quite frankly, if it turned out that it was somehow true, why on Earth would you want to worship a God that kills our innocent soldiers because He has a completely unrelated problem with two adult people of the same sex sleeping together? If God has a problem with the gays, let Him smite the gays and the people who support the gays. If your God smites an innocent person instead of a guilty one to make us feel bad about what we did, He is as unbalanced as you are. Can you imagine what your children would turn out like if you punished the innocent one every time the other one did something wrong? ”Timmy, what you did was very wrong. Go get me a switch and watch me whip your sister for it.” That’s screwed up, and generally accepted as terrible parenting that will cause massive psychological damage. Perhaps you are familiar with psychological damage, as you seem to suffer from it.
Finally, onto the subject of the current protest at hand, where you will probably link pedophilia to homosexuality. I could go over all of the usual stuff about how pedophiles are predators, many have heterosexual preferences, how that has just as little to do with adult homosexuals as heterosexual pedophiles have to do with adult heterosexuals. I have this feeling, though, that none of that is going to get through the tin foil hat that shields your brain from logic, so I will only say this: by blaming homosexuals for the abuse that this man suffered at the hands of a predator, you’re making his tragic death completely pointless and redirecting attention from what is a serious problem (pedophilia, particularly in the church) and co-opting his death for your own prejudices against adult homosexuals who do not prey on children. You are using this poor guy who killed himself for your own agenda, and that is sickening. If you think God cares more about stopping adults who have consensual sex than keeping people from raping children, well, I don’t even know what to say about that. I admit that I’ve not always spoken of God in a very positive light, but you worship Him and you’re making Him seem worse than any non-believer could do on their worst day. According to you, God kills innocent soldiers to punish liberals who don’t take it upon themselves to pass judgment against “sinners” (even though Jesus said that we shouldn’t pass judgment, ‘cos that’s kind of not our job–it says that right in the Bible), and He prioritizes stopping two dudes from sleeping together above keeping pedophiles from raping children–no, wait, I’ll even give you the benefit of the doubt here: He prioritizes stopping two dudes from sleeping together above keeping heterosexual pedophiles from raping children, because it’s only the “fags” that are the problem, right? Even Saddam Hussein looks like a benevolent prince next to that twisted interpretation of God.
I don’t even know how to close this letter. I’m done.
Disgusted,
me
