Counter Protest of Westboro Baptist Church at Meade High School

The Westboro Baptist Church picketed this morning at Meade High School.  As I discussed in a post the other day, they based today’s demonstration on claims that the school has a large number of homosexual students.  When they announced their intentions, a surge of counter protest movements fired up, and the result was impressive.

We got there around 6:30am and were already there was quite a crowd.  The police closed off the road where the protest was being held, and kept the WBC & counter protesters on either side of the road.  There were 5 or 6 people from Westboro Baptist Church:

Which was dwarfed by the crowd on the other side, which must have been at least 500 people.

There was plenty of press coverage, both of the counter protest:

And of the Westboro demonstrators.

While the signs held by demonstrators from Westboro Baptist Church were offensive and inflammatory on their own, the thing that perhaps made people the most infuriated was their dancing on the American flag, often smiling while doing so.

My mom made large signs which got quite a lot of attention, and I thought conveyed a great message of peace and tolerance,

But perhaps the license plate on the car next to ours described the entire situation best.

One thing’s for certain: as frustrating and bothersome as the WBC’s message may be, they managed to bring together a community in a peaceful way around a common cause of respect and affirmation of positive feelings toward people of all races, genders, creeds and sexual orientations – all of which were well represented this morning.

You can watch all my videos from the protest in the playlist on my YouTube channel.

This video was taken by John Frenaye of Eye on Annapolis: