Westboro Baptist Church Gets Competition

But the competition is the kind that all people who support equality would hope for.

The Huffington Post and Gawker (among others) are reporting:

Aaron Jackson, one of the founders of Planting Peace, a multi-pronged charity that has in the past concentrated on rainforest conservation, opening orphanages and deworming programs, bought a house that sits directly across from the church's compound six months ago. On Tuesday, March 19, he and a team of volunteers are painting it to match the gay pride flag.

At first, it seems a little frightening to think of a house that is supposed to help LGBT people located right across from the Westboro Baptist Church. Most of the people that need help for being LGBT is because of people like the Westboro membership. The last thing you want to do is expose them to the same people that cause the majority of their torment.

But that isn't what the Equality House is about. Back to the Huffington Post:

"We want this house to be a message that where there's hate, there's also love. But we also want to raise awareness and capital, and we want to put all that money into creating and sustaining anti-bullying programs, along with supporting anti-bullying programs that already exist," he said. "Beyond the symbolic message of the home, [the house] will be utilized by volunteers to live here, and these volunteers will work on promoting equality anywhere in the world and managing these anti-bullying initiatives that we plan on creating."

Perhaps this is the first in a series of push backs against the very people that are the worst offenders of trying to keep society segregated. Perhaps it is time for people who believe in equality to stand as firmly as those that would see our society degraded into an us-vs-them competition where the only mobility is downward.