Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

Guess who was in town this weekend? The Phelps clan. You know, the fascists who run God Hates Fags.com and protested at Matthew Shepard's funeral?

What the hell were they doing here? Good question. The Pantagraph seemed to know they were coming. I'm thinking a press release tipped the usually clueless Pantagraph off. Obviously, they invited themselves to Bloomington-Normal to protest at the Eureka vacuum headquarters. Why Eureka? They are owned by Electrolux which is a Swedish company. And Sweden allows same-sex marriage. That makes sense, doesn't it? I can almost hear the planning session: "Maybe if we protest at the American branch of Electrolux, the entire Swedish nation will change their gay marriage policy." Right. Just as soon as hell freezes over.

Seems that Eureka wasn't the only protest site on their hit list. They protested at a total of six churches as well including St. John's Lutheran (the church that looks like a giant toaster,) Vale Baptist and Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

I cannot possibly fathom what they were doing at Holy Trinity except for the fact that it's kitty-corner from the Eureka headquarters. Obviously, these idiots don't read the news. They apparently don't know that the Catholic Church is in full anti-gay marriage mode itself and still reeling after a decade of sex-abuse scandals involving priests.

And obviously, these morons don't know the community very well. St. John's Lutheran is right next to the Unitarian Universalist Church. This particular UU Church is a Wecoming Congregation which means that they welcome people of every sexual preference. And they didn't protest at Illinois State University, which grants benefits to same-sex couples. Very sloppy homework.

So why didn't they protest at ISU instead of a Catholic Church and the Eureka headquarters? Perhaps they DID know that ISU has it's own police force.

Which leads me to believe they're cowards as well as stupid. Why risk getting arrested on the ISU campus when they can protest at churches and buildings that don't have security guards or a police force?

I've lived here 11 years (God, has it been that long?) and mostly I've felt like a fish out of water. I am native New Yorker Joel Fleishman plunked down in the middle of a cornfield. It's too conservative, too Republican, too white-bread middle American for me here.

But I have to say my fellow residents of Bloomington-Normal made me very proud this weekend. For the first time in 11 years, I can actually say I'm proud to live here. We responded in the only sane way to these mindless losers: We ignored them.

Nick