The Laramie Project is a performance about the tragedy of prejudice and hatred, based on the story of Matthew Shepard, a man who was murdered eight years ago for being gay. However, the Baltimore School for Arts’ play is under attack from the Westboro Baptist Church, out of Topeka, Kansas for promoting a “perverse” lifestyle.
Westboro Baptist Church is an independent Baptist church and considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It operates a website called “God Hates Fags,” and is distributing flyers claiming “God Hates Fags! & Fag-Enablers! Ergo, God hates the Baltimore School for the Arts.” The church is also organizing protests today and tomorrow outside the Baltimore school.
The controversy has reached Southern Maryland, in particular on the liberal arts campus of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where some students are contemplating a counter-protest.
Students and staff at St. Mary’s College of Maryland previously put on their own performance of The Laramie Project, which sold out and “excited no controversy whatsoever,” said director Dr. Joanne Klein, who is a professor of Theatre, Film and Media Studies as well as Women Gender and Sexuality at the college. Luckily, none of the hate being espoused in Baltimore reached Southern Maryland.
Professor Klein pointed to the play’s anticipation and incorporation of protest. “It features Phelps [leader of Westboro Baptist Church] and his followers and very effectively vilifies them. In fact, one of the most moving sections of the script details the angel-wing protest of Phelps’s presence at Matthew Shepherd’s funeral. So, a Westboro protest of a production of this play is thickly ironic and expressly undermined by the script,” according to Klein.
Westboro Baptist Church is located on the internet at its telling URL www.godhatesfags.com. It is one church that has not heeded the lessons of understanding and tolerance, let alone love, that many Christians would consider pivotal to their faith – indeed they list “God Loves Everyone” as one of the “greatest lies ever told.”
The actions of this “church,” currently attacking the freedom of artistic expression exercised by a school of arts here in Maryland, offers us a harrowing reminder that hatred in the name of God is not reserved for elsewhere places and other religions.