By Christine Amarantus
Editor at Large
Published: February 22, 2010

Thousands of counter-protesters flooded 10th Street in Long Beach as members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) attempted to leave after picketing across the street from Woodrow Wilson Classical High School Friday, Feb. 19. The Topeka, Kan.-based church known for their countrywide pickets against homosexuals, Jews, military troops, liberals and Americans, were in Southern California Friday through Sunday to picket the Jewlicious Festival in Long Beach.

“That’s sort of what got us here, but once we’re here: we picket, therefore we are,” said Shirley Phelps-Roper, the daughter of the WBC’s leader, Fred Phelps.

Other pickets for the weekend included Long Beach’s Ragga Muffins Festival, convention center, police department, the Golden Dragon Parade in Los Angeles and a handful of churches, temples and schools in the area.

With the church’s schedule of planned protests available online, counter-protests began to organize against the WBC. The largest response revolved around the picket at Wilson.

Cal State Fullerton student and Wilson alumna Allison Anderson, 22, said she found out about the counter-protest a month ago from a friend at Cal State Long Beach.

“It just got me fired up … it upset me,” the American studies major said. “It just makes me angry that a whole church is coming from miles away and coming into our city and is complaining about the way we live. I’m totally for protesting when it’s for something that you feel strongly about, but for something like this … it’s just not right.”

The WBC’s picket for Wilson was scheduled for 2:45-3:15 p.m. At around 2:20, when Phelps-Roper and her daughters arrived to picket, approximately 40-50 counter-protesters stood with their own signs on the southeastern corner of the intersection of 10th Street and Ximeno Avenue. As the WBC set up on the northwestern, hundreds more arrived to support the counter-protesters. When Wilson let out at 2:50, the numbers exponentially increased.

“I’m actually pretty happy about it. We were at the Jewish Community Center on the other end of town earlier, and it was 20 or 30 people and coming here … there’s hundreds of people here,” said counter-protester and Long Beach resident Ethan Hackett, 29, of the massive numbers.

While the five WBC members’ signs read, “God hates Haiti,” “Fags are beasts,” “America is doomed,” “The Jews killed Jesus” and “You will eat your babies,” a multitude of signs and banners with statements such as “Long Beach is for lovers,” “Dog hates flags,” “Sell Alaska now,” “God hates shrimp,” “Frankenstein hates fire” and “Nuke Iceland” were displayed by the counter-protesters.

A man in a white rabbit suit stood beside Phelps-Roper with a sign reading “Welcome 2 Long Beach, now go homo.” Another man, dressed as a robot, carried a sign that simply read, “Tea party with cupcakes and giggles and dresses.”

Students from Wilson held a banner declaring “Hate is not welcome in our school.”

Wilson sophomore Emily Ha was one of the students positioned behind the banner.

“I just don’t like this. I went through Prop 8 … That was the worst ordeal to go through,” she said.

As more and more counter-protesters stood around the WBC, blocking their signs with their own and eliciting honks from many passing vehicles, the church members decided to cut their picket short and started to head back to their van, only to be encircled by hundreds in the Long Beach Schools Financial Credit Union parking lot.

“That high school was a mob scene, just shy of a riot. You raised your kids to be God-hating brutes, & so they are,” wrote Phelps-Roper’s daughter, Megan, on Twitter.

Long Beach police officers eventually intervened, keeping the Phelps-Roper family in the center of 10th Street while counter-protesters chanted, “Go home! Go home! Go home!” The crowds erupted in screams and cheers as the WBC members’ van pulled away.

Geoff Maddox, 29, Long Beach’s Hate Crime Awareness founder, insisted the counter-protesters turn their backs on the WBC members. Many did so while displaying middle fingers.

Maddox started one of the five Facebook event pages guiding users to come protest the WBC’s Wilson picket. Some of the events had names like “Not In My Town” or “Steal This Protest.”

“You’ve got all these people that all got together – it started on Facebook,” Maddox said. “(The protest) ended up being really successful. Nobody got hurt. Everybody voiced their opinion and it went really, really well.”

CSUF alumnus Steve Reeder brought a trombone to several of the counter-protests throughout the day with the intent of disrupting the WBC whenever they would sing some of their parody songs.

“The protest has been more fun and laughing at them,” he said. “I think that they were not expecting this. They’re usually expecting people to be more aggressive and we’ve just been having fun all day.”

The WBC did not appear at a 7:15 p.m. scheduled picket against a Martin Lawrence show at the Long Beach Convention Center.

For an analysis of WBC visit: http://www.dailytitan.com/2010/02/wbc-analysis.