Love Thy Neighbor
Whittier College Responds to the Westboro Baptist Church
Two weeks ago as I was scrolling through Instagram, I was shocked to see that one of my California liberal arts college friends, had shared a flyer a from the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, targeting Whittier College. I genuinely couldn’t believe this hate group was stopping at a college with a population of only 2000 on their exclusivity tour. Because we call ourselves the Poets, WBC felt inclined to include some poetry in their informational flyer. “Roses are red, violets are blue. You’re filled with proud sinning, so God hates you!”
Around a dozen members of the WBC converged in front of the Ruth B. Shannon Performing Arts Center just prior to 9:00 a.m. January 20, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, waving large signs that featured bold-text messages such as “God Hates Sin”, “Obey or Perish” and “The Lord is Coming”. Meanwhile, Whittier Campus Safety kept busy ushering away press and onlookers to avoid potential conflict. Although Campus Safety advised students and faculty of the college to stay away, that did not stop other members of the Whittier community from getting involved. One such member was Danette Antley, who stood on the adjacent corner with a sign reading “Have a nice gay.” As she told the Greenleaf Guardian, “I live too close to just stay home and not do anything.”
The event, which organizers called “Sweet, Simple Light of Truth Will Shine On The Darkness of Whittier College,” was emblematic of the Westboro Baptist Church, which gained notoriety by protesting the funeral of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay student at University of Wyoming who in 1998 was savagely beaten and left to die in a hate crime that shocked the American people and legal system. His ashes were finally interred in 2018 when they had a safe resting place, in the Washington National Cathedral. The hate group has also protested at the funerals of numerous United States soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2005, claiming their deaths were divine retribution for America’s tolerance of homosexuality.
With the church’s history of spreading hateful rhetoric and incendiary remarks, the announcement that they would be visiting our Quaker-rooted college stirred up the normally placid campus. The LGBTQ+ community, who were directly targeted by messages of condemnation in the flyer spread by the church’s website (godhatesfags.com), were particularly riled. In response to the growing concern and call for a response the Office of Equity and Inclusion, in conjunction with the Division of Student Life, Black Student Association and Facilities Department, organized a counter-demonstration in front of the Science Learning Center.
The “MLK Commemorative Day” featured several speakers from the community, including Whittier College President Dr. Linda Oubrè, Second District city councilman Henry Bouchot, and director of the Office of Equity and Inclusion Jenny Guerra. The counter demonstration featured a blessing by Dr. Laurel Brown. Several student leaders spoke as well, including Black Student Association President Journee Bradford, Associated Students of Whittier College Senate President Destinee Moya, TOBGLAD representative Ariel Horton, and Black Men of Whittier College Vice President Noah Humphrey. Some speakers had speeches prepared while others read poems. All included messages of love, equality, and inclusion.
The Westboro Baptist Church calls itself a “TULIP Baptist Church”, that follows the “Five Points of Calvinism” also known as the Doctrine of Grace which preaches, “total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.” While these terms are vague, the WBC website (godhatesfags.com/doctrine) offers some clarity, enough to summarize that their core beliefs are: all people are created with evil intentions, God chooses a select few who’s souls will be spared from damnation, and through complete devotion and adherence to their code one could become a member of the select few God considers worthy of saving.
The church also preaches to “love thy neighbor” like many churches, but with a twist. As explained by Megan Phelps-Roper, former member of the WBC and granddaughter of the church’s founder Fred Waldren Phelps, “Westboro would quote this passage from the book of Leviticus that, for them, shows that the definition of ‘love thy neighbor’ is to rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning. And if you don’t do that, then you hate your neighbor in your heart. Because you are watching this person go down this bad path that is going to lead them to the curses of God in this life, and hell in the world to come. And you failed to warn them. You didn’t give them the opportunity to repent, to share with them the truth of God.” Phelps-Roper stated this in an interview with NPR about her recent book, Unfollow A memoir on loving and leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. In the book she explains how connecting with strangers on Twitter opened her to new perspectives, which along with noting biblical contradictions to her actions as part of the church, inspired her to leave after spending most of her life picketing with her family. She now realized that protesting funerals made a spectacle of the WBC and took attention away from the somber events that were taking place, however her grandfather would have felt their warning to repent was more important than the funerals.
Phelps-Roper justified her actions as part of the church by claiming all of them were from interpretation of the bible she was taught. “This wasn’t because we had this inherent hatred for gay people, or other people, and that we were looking to the Bible to justify it. It was that we derived our positions from the Bible, and because it came from outside of us, from this source that we considered divine, then as long as it was in [the Bible], then it was absolutely justified. … We were supposed to be able to use the Bible’s words to explain what we were doing, and if we couldn’t do that, then we shouldn’t be doing it.” Fred Phelps, the founder of the WBC was in fact, a civil rights lawyer. Phelps-Roper said, “For my grandfather there was no distinction, there was no tension, between his support for civil rights for black people and his anymous towards gay people, because both those positions were scritpually derived. About discrimination toward black people he would quote these passages, ‘God has made of one blood all men to dwell upon nations of the earth’ and so it was necessary for all of us to be equal under the law. The verse was ‘One law shall be to him that is homeborn and to the strangers and sojourners among you’… But he also believed, because it also came from the bible, that passage in Leviticus about how, ‘thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination’.” Her grandfather, who founded the WBC, was also eventually excommunicated by the church for calling out from the front lawn of the church to people from the Equality House across the street that they were “good people”.
Although the members of the Westboro Baptist Church that gathered on Whittier College’s Campus were unwelcome guests we should engage in respectful discourse rather than closing our hearts and our minds when someone with opposing beliefs challenges us. As BSA President Journee Bradford, quoted Barack Obama saying, “To draw lessons of our past, we must ensure that the flame of justice continues to shine. By standing up for what we know to be right and speaking uncomfortable truths, we can align our reality closer with the ideal enshrined in our founding documents that all people are created equal. In remembering Dr. King, we also remember that change has always relied on the willingness of our people to keep marching forward…the is no mountaintop or promised land we cannot reach.”
