Last week, members of Westboro Baptist Church decided that they were going to visit St. Louis and protest Jake Bain. That's right. They're going to protest a high school football player because he's gay.
Which says something about Westboro Baptist Church. It used to be that they would protest funerals of gay people. But that didn't grab enough attention for them, so they started protesting the funerals of military soldiers and officers. Which got the world pissed at them. They then began protesting the funerals of famous people like Mister Rogers and Bill Clinton's mother. And then they kind of fizzled out after Fred Phelps got kicked out of the church and died. Now they're protesting high school students.
When Jake Bain learned of the protest, he reached out to a local LGBT pride organization. Which resulted in a counter-protest of hundreds of local students, families, and activists.
Which is amazing when you think about it. Fred Phelps and his fellow Westboro Baptist Church members used to regularly protest gay funerals when I wasn't much older than Jake Bain. And most people didn't care. Now Westboro is resorting to protests of LGBT everyday people again and find themselves the targets of sizable counter-protests.