Opponents rally against Westboro Baptist hate group

Hundreds of people rallied yesterday against a handful of protesters from an anti-gay, anti-Semitic group that found itself far outnumbered at every stop.

Four members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, including an 11-year-old boy, appeared at four locations in Richmond and Henrico County, toting signs with messages such as "God Hates Jews" and chanting slogans such as "God will destroy you."

The Westboro Baptist demonstrators arrived shortly before noon at the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Shockoe Bottom, where they encountered as many as 400 counterprotesters. They moved on to The Jerusalem Connection, a Jewish cultural organization in South Richmond, and then to the Weinstein JCC on Monument Avenue in Henrico, where they were met by about 30 and 60 counterprotesters, respectively.

At Hermitage High School on Hungary Spring Road in Henrico, their final stop, they were faced by about 200 counterdemonstrators, most of them young. They did not go to Virginia Commonwealth University, but several hundred people staged an anti-hate rally there anyway.

"I feel like I'm 25 feet tall," said Jay M. Ipson, executive director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, after the oral clash there. "This community is standing behind one another in love, not in hate."

At one point, Ipson stepped into the gulf separating the opposing sides and invited the Westboro members inside the museum. They refused and continued their chants, including, "Priests rape children."

"None of you obey God," one of the Westboro members said.

"How do you know that?" replied Ipson, a Holocaust survivor. "God saved me."

Richmond police officers, some mounted on horses, then corralled Ipson and other counterprotesters to the other side of the street.

Ipson had instructed the counterprotesters to hold a "silent protest," although a few of them heckled the church members.

Nathan Cox, a 28-year-old veteran of the Iraq war, blasted rock music through a megaphone to drown out the Westboro slogans. "Everything they say contradicts the Bible," said Cox, a Mechanicsville resident who said he first heard about Westboro while in Iraq.

Members of the Topeka church picket funerals of American soldiers, claiming God has killed them for defending a nation of "sodomite hypocrites." The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups across the country, has described the group as "the most despicable group we cover."

Local opponents also mobilized against the group on the Internet, collecting more than $10,000 in donations in five days through the grass-roots Web site PenniesInProtest.com. Sarah Allen-Short, one of four Richmond mothers who started the site, said word spread quickly through Twitter on the #rva hashtag and on Facebook as people amplified their message to support the organizations targeted by the WBC.

"It's really cool, seeing people taking ownership of it," she said. The money will go to the four groups targeted by the WBC.

Andrew Large of Washington, one of the counterprotesters outside the Virginia Holocaust Museum, described the so-called silent protest as cowardly.

"Silence is not a credible response," he said.

Ipson said he advocated a silent protest because he knew "all they were looking for was confrontation."

One of yesterday's Westboro picketers, Margie Phelps, said she is an attorney and a daughter of Westboro founder Fred Phelps. She identified the two other adult protesters as her son and brother, and the child as her nephew.

She said the group has about 70 members and referred to them as "old-school Baptists" who are too ashamed to call themselves Christians, who, she said, "fornicate and divorce and remarry at such a pace."

Phelps added that they were attracted to Virginia, in part, because of the mass shooting that left eight people dead in Appomattox County in January -- which she said was evidence of "the punishing hand of God."

About 200 mostly young people staged a rowdy counterdemonstration at Hermitage High. The counterprotesters heckled the church members with a barrage of quips -- "You should be in school," one man shouted, apparently to the 11-year-old -- and also with images of homosexuality, including a large photo of two men embracing in bed.

The counterprotesters chanted "U.S.A." as the Westboro protesters, one of whom stood on top of an American flag, responded with, "God hates the U.S.A."

Haley Bohmer, 17, president of the Hermitage Gay-Straight Alliance, said she was happy with the counterprotesters' turnout.

"It shows a whole lot of love," she said, "and I like it."

Contact Reed Williams at (804) 649-6332 or rwilliams@timesdispatch.com.

Contact Chris I. Young at (804) 649-6754 or cyoung@timesdispatch.com.

Staff writers Juan Antonio Lizama, Luz Lazo and Karin Kapsidelis contributed to this report.