Editorial - No harm, but out-of-town protesters are plenty foul
Monday, April 14, 2008 11:45 AM CDT
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Many of the signs carried by the 1,000 or so UW-Stout students (joined by several from UW-Eau Claire) expressed relatively peaceful sentiments similar to those expressed seen here: “Hate is a sin in God’s eyes.” Barbara Lyon/Dunn CountY News
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Ordinarily, we like to greet out-of-town guests to our town with a warm and hospitable welcome. But when those “guests” descend upon us waving signs scrawled with hurtful, hateful messages, it’s hard for us fallible human beings not to respond with an equal measure of malice.
That measure was sorely tested early Thursday morning when four members from Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) — a small, but infamous hate-mongering group from Kansas — arrived at the Memorial Student Center to spew its wrath-of-God venom in response to the deaths in a house fire of three Stout students.
Despite some off-color language, the more than 1,000 people (most of them Stout students) who turned out to “greet” the WBC members behaved with remarkable restraint.
Without getting physically abusive, the crowd made it abundantly clear to the four protesters that neither they — nor their messages of hate and claims that the students’ death were proof of God’s wrath — were welcome on campus.
Homemade signs conveyed peaceful sentiments like “Friends Forever” and “Hate is a sin in God’s eyes.” Chants of “go home” resounded through the unseasonably cold morning air.
After 15 minutes, the quartet from WBC got into their van and headed west to St. Paul to picket at April Englund’s funeral. Unconfirmed word has it that when they arrived, several Stout students convinced them to leave after five minutes.
Unfortunately, despite their brief visits, the interlopers succeeded in their mission to draw further attention to their church’s anti-gay message. (It is equally unfortunate and patently unfair that the Baptist church as a whole is tangentially associated with the WBC.)
Focusing on a more positive aspect of a sorrowful situation, however, both Stout and the city of Menomonie should be proud of the way the students conducted their counter-protest. The shock and pain of last Saturday’s deaths still fresh in their minds and hearts, they showed admirable self control.
Instead of reacting in kind to WBC’s exhortations, the students rejected the group’s evil epistles and forcefully demonstrated that they embrace the diversity that makes all of us human. And in doing so, they also showed their support for the families and friends of the three students killed in the fire.
As Doug Mell, director of university communications, declared, “They did UW-Stout proud.”
They did the community proud, too. |
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