Westboro Baptist Church pickets in Shoshone County
This was the scene on Monday morning outside of the Kellogg School District office as members of the anti-LGBTQ Westboro Baptist Church picketed the school district for the part it played in the recent decision to not allow a student to participate in his graduation ceremony over controversial comments that he made during a school assembly.
JOSH McDONALD
Shoshone County resident Dayton Wiksten engaged in a brief discussion with the picketing members of the Westboro Baptist Church on Monday morning outside of the Kellogg School District office. The man in the black hooded sweatshirt pointing is Timothy Phelps, the son of WBC founder Fred Phelps.
KELLOGG — A Kansas-based group with a penchant for picketing held two demonstrations Monday in Shoshone County.
Members of Westboro Baptist Church rallied outside the Kellogg School District Office and again in front of the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office in Wallace.
According to member Timothy Phelps, the protest was the direct result of the recent incident at Kellogg High School, when a senior student was kept from participating in the school’s graduation ceremony after saying “Guys are guys and girls are girls. There is no in-between,” to an audience of younger students during a school assembly.
In the fallout from that decision, a parent protest and student walk-out were staged, which led to the school district deciding to cancel the graduation ceremony, citing a warning from the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office concerning the potential safety of the event.
“It got our attention that a person stated something that is nothing more than reality and because it offends somebody the power of government drops on his head,” Phelps said. “But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because, in every place we can, where this society sprouts up, we’re going to put our words out there from the Lord God.”
Those words included signs that read “Fags doom nations” and “Abortion is bloody murder” — as well as the singing of parodies of pop songs entitled “Fag Marriage it can’t be,” a parody of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” and “American Sodomite,” a parody of Green Day’s “American Idiot.” The group’s song lyrics and signs don’t attempt to mask the church’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, which is the foundation of the organization and what they spend the bulk of their time actively protesting.
“We’ve been doing this for more than 30 years all over the country. We’ve seen everything,” Phelps said. “It’s even more offensive to anyone that has any affection for the First Amendment, that there be a government action silencing and punishing speech just because the government disagrees with the speech, that’s such an open and shut case.”
The student who made the original comment was adamant that his statement wasn't meant to alienate or attack any groups. That didn't deter the Westboro Baptist picketers.
While a small group of counter-protesters was on-hand for both protests, outside of a brief shouting match of conflicting ideologies on the lawn outside the school district office between a few of the Westboro members and one of the counter-protesters — both protests were peaceful. No Kellogg School District personnel were on-site during the protest.
Phelps is the son of the late Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps and has been active with the church since he was 8 years old, including when they began protesting the LGBTQ community in the early 1990s. Like several of his siblings, he also has a law degree, which he uses to ensure the protests he and his family members stage fall under the legal umbrella of the First Amendment.
The Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church was founded in 1955 and has been designated as a hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Over the years, the group has used its disdain for the LGBTQ community to protest Pride events, the United States Military, military funerals, various celebrities, abortion clinics, breast cancer fundraisers, Santa Claus, as well as several other churches.
