Monday, February 09, 2009

What if you held a protest and no one gave a damn?

With Peter LaBarbera, the laughs keep coming.

As I understand it, he continued his protest against Winter Wickedness with a small number of protestors this weekend.

If you blink, you will miss it because no one covered it - that is except for a newspaper in Columbus who had a very interesting point of view of the entire thing:

Our neighborhood in old Worthington is a close-knit, tolerant and faithful community. So it was shocking this morning on the drive home from grade-school wrestling practice, to see a small group of protesters lined up outside of the Holiday Inn on Wilson Bridge Road waving “God Hates Fags” signs.

Try explaining to your first grader “what’s a 'fag'?” then explaining that, number one: we don't say 'fag' and God is love, and number two: if God has a problem with somebody, he’s got the resources to work it out on his own—you don’t have to worry about judging anyone, son.

And all this before my third cup of coffee. Yeah, it would piss you off, too.

So I returned to the protesters, notebook in hand, to find out why these three had such a giant bug up their collective ass. After introducing myself, I asked what they were protesting and why they were doing so from Holiday Inn’s side lawn.

“Is it a homo paper?” asked a scruffy 50+ man who spoke broken English with an Appalachain twang. In one hand he waved a large sign with the anagram “Gross Anus Yearning Sodomists” (whatever in the world that means) and in the other, he had two naked Ken dolls taped together in the position commonly referred to as “doggy style”.


All I can say is Lawd Hammercy!!

2 comments:

Matt Algren said...

Wow. The Columbus Dispatch doesn't even have much to say, and nothing at all about the protest.

LaBarbera can't blame the low protester turnout on the weather. Saturday was a beautiful day in Ohio. Warmest it's been in months.

Is the low turnout and non-existent press a sign of things to come? We can only hope.

bugbear said...

Columbus, Ohio is a very tolerant town with a large and diverse community of gay folk. The outlying areas are perhaps less tolerant but I've the feeling the whole town knows that it owes its social/art/downtown scenes to the Family.

I sincerely miss the place and often wish I had never moved from there.