It started almost a year ago.
Josef Miles was 9 years old in May 2012 when he held up a sign near a group of Westboro Baptist Church protesters at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan. The group’s signs were full of the usual terrible messages containing awful words that only hurt people. Josef’s read: “GOD HATES NO ONE.”
NPR reported that as Josef considered the church’s protest, he thought, “I didn’t want everybody to think that Topeka has a bad image.” So he “thought about it for a minute” and decided “God hates no one” was the right message. And he said he wrote it because “that is true.” Fair enough.
After that story made its rounds through the media, Aaron Jackson decided to do something peaceful right in Westboro’s hometown.
Jackson is “a 31-year-old community-college dropout whose other projects have included opening orphanages in India and Haiti and buying a thousand acres of endangered rain forest in Peru,” according to Gawker.
It took him about six months, but after toodling around Google Maps in the area surrounding the church’s location in Topeka, Jackson and some friends purchased a house nearby and painted it the color of the pride flag.
“The concept is to show that where there is hate, there is also love,” said Jackson, who is also the founder of a Destin-based nonprofit purposed to “spread peace in a hurting world,” reported The Destin Log.
The painted project is called “Equality House.”
“The reason I haven’t gotten into the gay rights activism is because, in a sense, it’s almost silly — it’s 2013, are we really still in this position? It just seems ludicrous,” he said in a Huffington Post article. “But it is a real issue and kids are killing themselves. I’ve wanted to do something, and I knew when I saw that house for sale that it all came together. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a little crazy, and there’s no red tape in my charity. When I want to do something, I do it.”
We definitely support this peaceful form of protesting.
“Mike McKessor of Kansas City, Mo., whom Jackson hired to paint the house, wondered if other painters were scared to take on a job that is more of a statement against a church known for its political statements,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Every neighbor that I encountered was so happy, and everybody was smiling when they go by,” McKessor told the LA Times. “It was on a busy street, and everybody slowed down and took pictures. I’m not exaggerating. Dang near every car stopped and said, ‘Good job! Good job!’ ... I’ve never had people so happy for painting a house.”
This is just plain delightful. It’s not even, like, offensive to anyone. If a rainbow, or multicolored, color spectrum offends you, then you need to rethink your priorities.
Westboro is hopefully losing steam and value in our society: We can’t imagine they had much to begin with. But like Jackson said, this is 2013.
Let’s hope they don’t have a weirdly controlling homeowners association.
