"Anti-gay hate screechers outwitted, outmaneuvered"

In the Lord of the Rings someone proposed killing Gollum just because. Gandalf replied that he might yet have a role to play. What do you know, he did.

Now we have Fred Phelps's "god hates fags" crowd again, getting ink in MA. These creeps thrive on publicity - why give it to them?

Because the schools are trying to change the subject. They want the media to help them outshout the parents who are outraged that this was available at a gay/lesbian promotion at a MA high school. And of course they're trying to establish equivalence between their opponents and Fred Phelps - if you disagree with them, you must "hate fags".

Hey, don't go thinking that administrators don't attempt to protect kids from stuff they "shouldn't see":

Clever maneuvering by educators in Lexington and Dracut yesterday spared school children from protesters visiting from a gay-hating Midwestern church.

Buses to Joseph Estabrook Elementary School in Lexington pulled up to the back entrance, bypassing the groupwaving ``God hates fags'' signs.

In Dracut, students attended schoolwide assemblies in the Englesby Intermediate School gym and cafeteria - thus emptying classrooms, some of which have a view of the street.

``I came to make sure they couldn't see what's going on out here,'' said outraged Dracut parent Sheri Ritchie, who has two children in the school.

She joined a couple hundred counter-protesters who turned out to oppose anti-gay activists from Topeka, Kan., Westboro Baptist Church. Nine members of the church, including two young children, also took their rolling demonstration to John Glenn Middle School in Bedford.

``There's no voice here speaking for God. These children, these people, are entitled for once in their life to hear the unapologetic, unvarnished truth about what the Lord their God requires of them,'' church member Shirley Phelps-Roper said outside the Lexington school.

Why were they there?

Dracut attracted the hate group's attention after a student wrote an essay about gay talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Bedford flew a rainbow flag at John Glenn Middle School, and Lexington grabbed headlines when a parent demanded to be notified when his child was taught about gay lifestyles.

Got that? A parent dares to demand notification about what his kid is being taught, and the school system has a problem with it. If that same kid had objected to a cross in the classroom, or acknowledgement of the scientific truth that evolution is properly described as a theory you can bet the coverage would have a different tone.

Oh yeah, some from the sinister side of the blogosphere have been trying the usual stunt of denying that distribution of that black book linked above had actually occurred. Nice try, creeps - check this out. In what is otherwise a rant against groups they don't like, including a reference to Matthew Shepard even, they manage to acknowledge that "a local AIDS Action group brought, and made available, explicit sexual materials that are totally inappropriate for high school students". Yeah, right - his only objection is probably that the books didn't have anything explicit for the lesbians.

Anyway, despite his intentions, Fred Phelps might actually have done some good. Without his groups' presence, there might not have been any publicity at all about this nonsense.