Freespeech War?

In my RSS reading this morning, I came across this Fark headline:

Anonymous puts Westboro Baptist Church on notice: "neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover" 

The comments had already exploded into tl;dc territory, and I actually read through all 8 pages, which even surprised me, but I think this is an important topic. First things first though.

TFA up there includes a letter allegedly from the group Anonymous. Within the comments, a response from the Westboro Baptist Church had been posted (there is also a PDF copy of this flier on the WBC website, so I'd say it's probably legit).

Now, I follow the actions of Anon as I generally respect what they're doing. But this so-called letter leaked to CBS smacks of one of two things: it is a plant by the WBC, or it is some overenthusiastic /b/tard who wants to get Anon behind him as his Personal Army. My vote, however, is with the former. This is why.

Reading Anonymous' other letters, one is impressed with the skill and level at which they are written. They are concise, pointed, and meticulously edited (which honestly surprised me when I read them). This one, however, has grammatical inconsistencies and typos: words are forgotten, 'and' and '&' are used indiscriminately and without pattern, and the letter as a whole lacks the full effect of a legitimate Anon knockout. In short, it just doesn't sound like a real Anon letter.

The other key to the WBC-plant theory is the timeliness of their response. The CBS article went up on Saturday at 2:45pm. The copy of the response flier was posted on Imgur within only a few hours; the original would have had to have been posted on the WBC website before that. And if you look at the WBC flier, obviously some time went in to creating it. I'm sure it was looked over a few times before being posted. That WBC would have that kind of turnaround, and on a Saturday night, is too much. Take that along with the fact that the WBC are masters of spin and live off of press coverage, and I think it's a done deal.

Also, take a look at the language of the letter and the response. In both, ampersands are used with abandon, as is the ' - ' construction. This is not an em-dash, it is a hyphen surrounded by spaces. Both capitalize non-essential words, which is a feature inconsistent with, for example, the letter to the Church of Scientology.

Besides, there's no mention of teh lulz in the WBC letter.

All of this leads me to my personal response to the matter:

The WBC does some pretty despicable things, protecting themself with a bevy of lawyers (all in the family) and the concept of "Freedom of Speech," to which they have applied their own definition, it seems. I am all for the public protest, however I cannot stand by hate speech, which is what the WBC is spewing. Need some examples? The names of their websites are GodHatesFags.com, GodHatesMedia.com, and PriestsRapeBoys.com (just to name a few).

I also take issue with their bullying about of the law (which I believe is broken), namely, that they protest in order to roil people up so they will try something, and then when they do, they sue the shit out of them. Punch out a protester who is purposefully trying to piss you off? That's assault, apparently. That's also bullshit. 

What the WBC is championing is not free speech. Rather, it is abusing the system in such a way to denegrate, intimidate, insult, injure, and incense people for profit. And the worst part is, they didn't even need to break the system; it was already long broken.

If free speech means that the WBC can continue along, making profit from others' grief that they themselves have trumped up, then I am against it. I would rather live in a society where its members stood up for each other and supported one another than one which defends the rights of its most despicable members.

However, by planting a letter from Anonymous, who champions a different kind of free speech (and in my estimation, a better kind), the WBC will only bring the ire of a legion of socially-conscious hackers. That was probably not a good plan, and Fred Phelps should have put more thought into this master scheme than the fake letter. Now, they have Anon's attention, and that probably won't be to their benefit.

Posted via email from BLOG.NATHANIELRAY