bygjohn's blog

I've just watched what I was expecting to be an upsetting and disturbing documentary: Louis Theroux with the most hated family in America. It's about the Westboro Baptist Church from somewhere in Kansas, who make most fundamentalists seem sane. There's only about 70 of them (nearly all from one family), but they're obsessed with hating homosexuality and anything they (somewhat arbitrarily) lump together with it, including the US services. Which must be news to the gay personnel forced to hide their sexuality in the American military... Watching one of them smile with pleasure at the thought of Theroux burning in hell was very disconcerting, but by the end of the programme I'd actually started to feel a bit sorry for that particular woman: she was obviously having difficulty with the questions Theroux was putting to her, and I had the impression he'd managed to penetrate her defences slightly. The whole thing is run by its "pastor", an angry and miserable old man, seemingly devoid of compassion (I kept thinking of the grandfather in the Texas chainsaw massacre...). At least he was congruent, unlike most of them who smiled away while picketing the funerals of soldiers who'd died in Iraq (even the most ardent anti-war protester wouldn't stoop that low). Some of it was surreal: picketing a shop which sold Swedish vacuum cleaners because the Swedes imprisoned a preacher who preached hatred against gay people (if it's the case I'm thinking of, he wasn't actually imprisoned, but what's truth got to do with any of this?). But the lasting impression is one of staggering ignorance and hatred, and vileness being spewed with a smile. Oddly, it wasn't really an upsetting and disturbing programme in the end. More reassuring, in that I'm so glad to be me (with all my neuroses, fears and anger) and not them, filled with that level of fear and hate. Made my own fear and hate look like chicken feed!