My daughter alerted me of the plans for a group called Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), located in Topeka, Kansas, to hold a "demonstration" in our town outside of a local high school.

For those who recognize this group, they carry a message of hatred toward gay people and towards society as a whole for accepting/tolerating/including gay people in society, schools, the military, etc. Their demonstrations consist of signs bearing their "message" and occasional chants.

Although they haven't been guilty of violent and/or other criminal behavior (they apparently don't murder gays or abortion doctors or blow up bombs and such) they have become notorious for showing up at military funerals with the signs and the chants, condemning the military and the fallen soldiers. A group of veterans, originally started by a vets' motorcycle club, has organize to show up at these funerals and position themselves to block this group from the view of the mourners and to drown out their chants with patriotic "noise".

It was pretty drizzly all day, we had to walk several blocks to get to the road that had been blocked off by the police and I had two cameras that I had to try to keep from getting soaked.

Surprisingly to us, there were only seven WBC demonstrators. Quite funny and refreshing is that the word had spread and there were maybe 200-300 "counter-demonstrators" -- people standing in the drizzle across the street from the WBC peopld (police were keeping them there and on the sidewalk part of the road) with signs that said things like "God is Love" (if you can imagine) and who were all having a lot of fun!