From today's Buffalo News:
Outnumbered more than 50 times over, three members of a Kansas- based fringe group here to picket a memorial service for a victim of the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 were hushed and eclipsed Sunday by counterprotesters in Buffalo and Clarence.
Three folks from Westboro Baptist showed up to protest at a funeral for one of the victims of the plane crash here in WNY. The local folks counterprotested by making sure that you just couldn't see the Westboro folks.
Loved this quote:
“We wanted to show people that we don’t put up with that sort of hate in Buffalo,” said Meghann French, a city resident who stood Sunday afternoon on a Main Street sidewalk near the University at Buffalo’s South Campus. “We just don’t tolerate it.”
They did it without violence and it involved a great many young adults.
For all the whining I do about the weather around here let me tell you the people are class all the way through.
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5 comments:
This makes me so proud of the students in Buffalo/Clarence.
Beautiful! A great idea which other groups may want to use wherever the hate-filled folks from Westboro go.
Fantastic! Is there a way to organize this across the country to drown out all of the efforts of these crazy wack jobs at every funeral they show up at until they give up?
The idea of making large angel wings to surround antigay protestors was first seen, I believe, at the funeral for Matthew Shepard, the young gay student in Laramie, WY, who was beaten by two young straight males and left for dead along a fence. Some local activists came up with the idea and it was profoundly effective. I can't remember what year that was... 1998? 1999?
Congrats to the people of Western New York. What a wonderful, decent, loving expression of community's concern.
FWIW
jimB
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