The Westboro Baptist Church are famed for their talent of putting bullshit slogans onto badly designed placards and slinging verses of fire and brimstone. This publication is a call to arms. A sort of ‘start your own protest’ kit to use in retaliation to the WBC by using humour rather than hatred. People like this do not listen to reason, they set out to cause anger and hatred in people. People have been trying for a while to fight the good fight against this pocket of whack-jobs and it always seems to end in hostility. Acknowledging how much WBC aspire to be detestable in everything they do, I tried to take a different tack. Rather than giving them the hate they so obviously crave I suggest instead using silliness and humour to to undermine their groundless bigotry. One of the initial problems with this idea of using their nonsense as a way to get back at them is that frankly no amount of irony can make “God Hates Fags” “Jews killed Jesus” etc funny. That was of course until I realised that most of these slogans are one or two letter changes away from sentiments that are vaguely surreal yet just as batshit. Oddly Jesus having never really said anything about “Fags” he did deride figs Matthew 21:19 “Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.”
The format of the kit was came purely out of its function. It needed to function both as a publication but also used as a piece of protest equipment- this is where I took a leaf out of the WBC’s Our-Ladybird book of protesting. The sign can be used propped against the hip facing the user (like a kind of makeshift pulpit) or held outwards to project nonsense to the rest of the world.
The construction of the kit was a balancing point between looking good but also realistically improvised using readily available materials and somewhat amateur production skills. I aimed for “a perfect amount of shittyness” as if its production had been hasty and makeshift. There are slight mis cuts of the wood, and I didn’t take the time to avoid fragments of words being lost across the centre of the pages.
(Note: The person in the photograph is not infact a member of the WBC or a bigot, that’s just Rob) The full protest book (minus two smaller insert pages that contained Louis Theroux articles on) Can be accessed here: http://issuu.com/mrdavedodd/docs/wbc_hates_web
