#FAIL: Westboro Baptist Church mocked at Twitter HQ protest

The Westboro Baptist Church lunatics preached their hate outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters last week. Why? Apparently the anti-gay church loves the social media service, but only when it’s used for “God’s word to be preached to a doomed nation of God-hating rebels!” Riiiiight.

Some clever counter-protesters crashed the WBC picket, using the opportunity to mock founder Fred Phelps and his followers. Check out some of the hilarious signs, and watch this video of counter-protester Philip Huang, who used humour to mock the WBC:

This kind of counter-protest is a great way to make a statement — exposing homophobic lunatics using parody and humour, without calling on government or the law to shut them down.

Canada is a regular target of the Westboro Baptist Church. Word spread in August 2008 that Phelps’s crew was set to picket a Toronto production of the Laramie Project. Phelps’s crew never showed up, but Toronto queers staged a counter-protest anyway. Check out the video below:

UPDATE: Regular Xtra contributor Matthew Hays wrote a piece for the Montreal Mirror in 1999, in which he pretended to represent a group called Concerned Christians for Canadian Families. Hays interviewed Fred Phelps about the “whorish” Cher, “fag parades” and Canada’s descent into “evil.”

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