We fail at protesting.

The other day, Westboro Baptist Church (the God Hates Fags folks) were in my glorious town of St. Louis, to protest a memorial service for a soldier held at a high school, a Jewish all-male high school, and the local JCC.

We planned a counter-protest with several other groups, but among my friends hardly anyone got to actually protest.

Reason: Though Westboro posted the times in which they were protesting, they actually held their little half-hour protests about 45 minutes early. We think it is so they could hopefully beat the rush of people arriving to counter them.

In any event, I noticed something peculiar. Whenever Westboro was in the local news about these specific three protests (which occurred all in the same day, within a few hours of each other) the only protest mentioned by the media was the protest related to the soldier. There was an eerie silence concerning the other locations, as if the soldier’s memorial service took up so much time that they felt it was not worth the airtime to mention the other locations. We could chalk this up to “protesting dead soldiers sells, protesting Jewish high school does not” but I really feel like people should care about both issues equally.

At the very least, my friend The Alien made up about 30 signs, went to the protest and simply threw them out in the grass for random people to pick up and use. She chose lots of cool quotes like, “One pair of hands working accomplishes more than a thousand hands praying”. I was very proud.