Why Westboro stayed out of Highland Heights

Last month, Fred Phelps's far-right Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, planned to picket a military funeral in my hometown of Highland Heights, Kentucky.

For those unawares, Westboro is a cult, and they were like the Tea Parties even before the Tea Parties fancied themselves cool. They are truly vile. They make their living by provoking lawsuits or legal charges, and winning huge windfalls when their opponents are ordered to pay their legal fees. (Even when they win their case, there's no legal basis for being allowed to loot their opponents for legal fees. They only get away with this swindle because of right-wing judges sympathetic to their cause.)

But now the world knows why the Topeka Taliban didn't dare show their faces in Highland Heights. It's because just a few days earlier, they were humiliated when they showed up in Brandon, Mississippi, to picket a Marine's funeral there.

During that trip, a Westboro member reportedly started a fight at a gas station. And he got his ass utterly handed to him. Following that altercation, most of the Westboro cultists weren't even able to leave their hotel to go to the funeral, because locals who decided they had seen enough parked their cars directly behind the Westboroists' cars in the parking lot so they couldn't get out.

Ha ha! They spent all that time and money traveling from Kansas to Mississippi and had to stay in their hotel rooms and be bored the whole time! They probably had nothing to do except sit there and deface the phone book!

It was also reported that Westboro followers who did manage to make it out of the hotel were cited for trespassing when they tried picketing at the cemetery and refused to leave.

The welcome that this vile cult received in Brandon is a good blueprint for how to deal with this nationwide irritant from now on. But after they were a no-show in Highland Heights, does that mean Brandon was the place where they finally met their match?