Click on the cartoon and view it full size. If any one can find me a unicorn power t-shirt complete with fairy and roving gang of unicorn toughs, I would be eternally grateful. And by the way, could you send a couple shirts out to Toronto tonight?Guess who's in Canada to protest the opening of The Pastor Phelps Project: A fundamentalist cabaret - Paster Fred Phelps' hate gang. Don't know who I'm talking about? Check out this Michael Moore clip:
You know what? I hope there are some serious protests from the community in Toronto, something along the lines of the Sodomobile. Something vocal and something loud. If I could be there to protest hate being preaching on Canadian soil, I would fly out tonight and be gay as the day is long: short shorts, PDA, Mariah Carey songs and sexy strech offs would definitely be in order.
If you have a chance to see the play they're protesting, go.
I hope it comes to Vancouver.
While protesters plan to picket show that mocks their church's anti-gay teachings, both sides embrace the extra publicity
On the streets of gay-friendly Toronto tomorrow night, one will be hard-pressed to find two groups more fundamentally at odds than those set to converge at Queen and Cameron Streets.
Outside the Cameron House tavern, one group will arrive to take in a stage show that satirizes the hard-line anti-gay teachings of Pastor Fred Phelps and his Kansas church, while another, comprised of seven members of Mr. Phelps's very flock, plans to greet them in protest.
Controversial as it all sounds, it could be a marriage made in heaven from a publicity perspective, as each side draws more attention to the other's message than either might receive on its own. Both sides acknowledged as much yesterday, in the lead-up to the opening of The Pastor Phelps Project: A fundamentalist cabaret.
"They've amplified my voice a millionfold," Alistair Newton, the play's writer and director, said yesterday, referring to Mr. Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church, a congregation known for protesting outside funerals and listed as a hate group by U.S. rights monitors.
Shirley Phelps-Roper, the pastor's 50-year-old daughter, was similarly candid. "Any publicity is good publicity, because all our job is, is to get the words out there," said Ms. Phelps-Roper, a mother of 11 whose daughter Megan plans to be among the protesters.
Those words, plastered to picket signs, will likely include "God Hates You" and "You're Going to Hell" and "God Hates Canada," in keeping with the Westboro congregation's belief in a God who is not especially preoccupied with benevolence and does not suffer sinners gladly.
However, the words contained in the church's infamous Internet address: http://www.godhatesfags.com, are unlikely to appear in Toronto, because of the group's apparent hatred of criminal prosecution under Canada's hate-speech laws.
"I don't think they're going to be quite gutsy enough to put the God Hates Fags sign in the air," Ms. Phelps-Roper said, because "they're really not going to do a whole lot of preaching to anyone if they're sitting in a jail cell."
Mr. Newton will deliver a decidedly different message to the Cameron House crowd as he kicks off an eight-performance run under the banner of the SummerWorks Festival, an annual juried festival of independent theatre and art.
Not only will The Pastor Phelps Project mock the church's anti-gay stand, but it will point out "the hypocrisy of the Christian and conservative right wing in North America" for remaining silent when Westboro members picketed funerals of AIDS victims, and objecting only when the church expanded its protests to funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq war, which it opposes.
"Congress made it illegal to picket at military or state funerals; that irony possessed me to write the show," said Mr. Newton, 25.
As for the protest, the playwright said he welcomes it. "I'd like to engage them in a dialogue. I have the intellectual armour to deal with them."
He hopes no physical armour is required, not that he fears the church, which is known for its non-violent stand. Mr. Newton said he is far more concerned about the possibility of violence initiated by people protesting against the protesters.
On that point, Ms. Phelps-Roper agreed again. She said her group was attacked at a previous demonstration in Toronto, during gay-pride festivities in 1999.
Asked what the curious can expect to encounter outside the Cameron House tomorrow evening, she said "a group of kind-hearted, gentle souls standing on a public right-of-way with some placards ... to draw your mind to these issues of heaven and hell and eternity and God, and your duty to obey Him, and the consequences of not obeying Him."
And for that, Mr. Newton is grateful. Although some people had told him his show might serve only to give the church a voice, he said "the reverse has happened. They are empowering us, giving us publicity we would not otherwise have had."
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