The world is full of crackpots and the bigots of this world tend to confuse so many people. Which tends to amuse me. Bigotry seems to bring out a wonderful bahavioural pattern in so many people - the need to hate some people because they hate some people!
The truly amusing part is that so many people seem simply unaware that they're doing anything remotely funny. We seem to see it in so many arenas, "liberals" who hate "conservatives" that believe our lives should be our own, the public outrage at Jade Goody being silly enough to get caught on TV acting like a significant proportion of the nation, or earlier this week Louis Theroux's documentary on the Phelps family. Oh dear.
Yes, Louis has again managed to attacrt some attention with his documentaries. Apparently this series is going to be more mature, or more accurately he's dropping the celeb interviews he got into once the public loved him and doing the more social stuff he used to. Personally I was a bit disappointed with the style of the latest show, Louis was much more aggresive than I remember him for a start. The bumbling character he had before was perfect for the gonzo/comedy crossover style he had in the early days; maybe he's being truer to himself, but I think I'll need to adjust to him pushing subjects that bit more. If something has been retained it's his ability to show us a human side to even the most bizarre characters and I value that very highly. But I digress.
In the documentary we say the Westboro Baptist Church living their lives, including some footage of their pickets. Yes the things are bad taste, they can talk about Free Speech all they want but they're ignoring the basic responsibilities that come with freedom. It seems like the US authorities are handling the matter fairly well by allowing the pickets to continue but insisting they're distanced form the funerals and such - it allows them their rights but it forces a responsibility they choose to ignore onto them. Aah, the right to protest - how we miss you.
At one of these pickets we saw a car drive-by and hurl a drink into the group which hit a small boy. Maybe if they'd been sitting at the lights and got annoyed at the shouts I could vaguely understand the act, but these guys actually pulled over to disguise their license plate and then sped by. Now I'm no expert but I think deliberately attacking a peaceful protest, no matter how feeble the attack, says more about the assailants than the protesters. Thank heavens it's all in America and we can rise above it. Can't we?
Well, there's a chance it's just the church using the documentary to promote themselves but I kind of believe them when they publish a letter saying:
The humble prophets of WBC are already receiving your vile hate e-mail full of filth and violence – very predictable – in response to the BBC’s airing of The Most Hated Family in America, about our picketing ministry to the world.
Yep, that sounds like us. See a group of people acting like bigots and we'll write them stern letters explaining their wrongs, or better yet let's attack them with the kind of hatred they dish out. Sheesh. Seriously, what's wrong with us? I'd like to think that at least some of those emails we've sent have actually containd rational arguments and intelligent discourse, although I suspect the people most likely to do that are also those most likely to realise the church is a lost cause. It's not as if the documentary actually portrays the family in that bad a light - the previous documentary maker who later joined them actually seems far more rabid and likely to annoy me in person - like I said, Theroux shows us their humanity. In an interview he explains:
you can have normal conversations with these people. They're intelligent, high achieving, have good jobs, and they're kind, for the most part, when they're not on pickets. They're easy to communicate with and deal with too. It's just this one area - their pickets. They will even - so I'm given to understand and I have no reason to doubt it - work alongside gay people very happily in the work place. If a gay person goes along to talk to them outside the church or if a gay person even turned up to the church to attend a service, they wouldn't humiliate them or be rude to them; they'd shake their hand and welcome them in.
Yes, bigots are human too, and they seem far more human than many of the people objecting to their bigotry.