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Event Details: "God Hates Fags" Protestors to Picket near GMU - :

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Jaap Weel is a first year PhD student in Economics at George Mason University and chair of Mason Apollonic Society, an organization for LGBT Graduate and Professional Students.

Fred Phelps is coming to Fairfax on Monday, March 30, to protest George Mason University’s celebration of the annual Pride Week, when attention is called to LGBT issues and students.

Now it is nothing extraordinary for Fairfax to play host to an elderly, self-proclaimed Baptist minister from Kansas. But this man is no ordinary preacher. Phelps’s is a gospel of hatred, and his preferred way of preaching it is the street-corner picket.

When he pickets the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq, members of his church carry signs saying “Pray For More Dead Soldiers.” On his Web site, Phelps explains that “the IED is God’s weapon of choice in avenging Westboro Baptist Church by blowing America’s kids to smithereens in Iraq.”

Phelps’s God, if we are to believe his picket signs, hates Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, and anyone with a Christmas tree. Westboro Baptist runs Web sites named godhatesireland.com and godhatessweden.com, and Phelps has wished especially large helpings of fire and brimstone upon the unsuspecting nation of Germany. But his bitterest bile is embodied in his most notorious slogan: “God Hates Fags.”

Which is where Fairfax comes in, for underneath the peaceful surface of our fair city dwells—according to Phelps—one festering sore: George Mason University. Where others see an up-and-coming
college with a surprisingly good basketball team, Phelps discerns Sodom and Gomorrah all stuffed into one tree-lined suburban campus.

It is Mr. Phelps’s inalienable first amendment right to contribute his dissonant voice to GMU’s Pride Week celebration. At the same time, it says nowhere in the first amendment that the citizens of Fairfax should be particularly pleased to see their sidewalks decorated, however temporarily, with signs shouting “Thank God For Aids” or “God Blew Up The Troops.” This is why GMU’s Pride Alliance has worked with Driving Equality, a Boston-based group that specializes in helping communities respond to Phelps’s antics, to set up a very special kind of charity pledge drive.

The idea is simple: you visit www.phelps-a-thon.com to pledge a contribution to Pride Alliance for every minute that Fred Phelps’s protesters disfigure the intersection of Braddock Road and Route 123 with their picket signs this coming Monday morning. The contribution can be as small as you want it to be, but even if you pledge just a penny a minute, that means that for every minute that Phelps is here, he will be sending another penny to the university’s volunteer-run LGBT undergraduate club.

We hope that everyone in our community, regardless of their personal beliefs, will be able to join us in condemning Fred Phelps’s attempts to sow discord in our midst.

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