Arizona lawmakers plan to block protesters within 300 feet of funerals
Tucson, Arizona (CNN) — The Arizona State Legislature is expected to pass legislation Tuesday that will bar protesters at funerals from getting within 300 feet of services, a spokesman for the state Senate said.
The action, according to Senate spokesman Daniel Scarpinato, is in direct response to a controversial church’s announcement that it will picket the funeral of Christina Green, the 9-year-old who was one of six people killed Saturday during the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has made its name by staging protests at funerals of people who died of AIDS, gay people, soldiers and even Coretta Scott King.
Tucson just isn’t that kind of town, says Christin Gilmer.
“For something like this to happen in Tucson was a really big shock to us all,” she said. “Our nightmare happened when we saw Westboro Baptist Church was going to picket the funerals.”
In addition to the expected legislation, some Tucson residents are planning an “angel action” — with 8-by-10-foot “angel wings” worn by participants to shield mourners from picketers. Angel actions were created by Coloradan Romaine Patterson, who was shocked to find the Topeka church and its neon signs outside the 1999 funeral of Matthew Shepherd, a young gay man beaten and left on a fence to die in Laramie, Wyoming.
“We want to surround them, in a non-violent way, to say that our community is united,” Gilmer said. “We’re a peaceful haven.”
“You don’t mess with Tucson,” said Gilmer, 26, who described it as “a little dot of blue in a sea of red.”
But political persuasions don’t matter, she said. Republicans, Democrats, independents, right, left and center — they’ve all offered their support. Forty-two people have signed up on a Facebook page called “Build Angel Wings for the Westboro Funeral Counter-Protest and Meeting” and more than 4,500 have signed up on another page to “Show Support for the Families of the Tucson Shooting Victims.”
Jeff Rogers, the chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party, said Tuesday that his organization as well as the local Republican Party also will ask people to line the funeral routes to form a barricade if the church follows through on its planned protest.
“People, businesses, they’re all donating material and money to build the angel wings,” said Gilmer, who is helping organize the action. And, she added, they’re donating to a fund created to help pay for services for the victims of the shooting.
Chelsea Cohen, a 20-year-old senior at the University of Arizona who launched the “Show Support” Facebook page, said she never expected such a response.
“Once I heard that the Westboro Baptist Church was coming, I felt like something should be done to show support for the families,” she said. “I don’t have any experience in organizing these things. I thought I might get 50 to 100 people.”
Cohen said she thinks many of the 4,500 people who’ve signed up on the Facebook page will be there “in spirit” on Thursday, when mourners gather for the funeral of Christina Taylor Green, who was born on September 11, 2001. But she added, Tucson is an active town, and the response isn’t likely to be small.
“This isn’t a counter-protest,” she said. “We wanted it to show support for the families and to show that Tucson is there with love and support.”
They don’t want to interfere with the funeral in any way, Cohen said.
“We plan on being completely silent, and we’re asking people not to bring signs or make comments about the Westboro Baptist Church,” she said.
The angels will be doing the same thing.
“We’re going to silently stand there so people can mourn the death of a 9-year-old girl who died in a senseless tragedy,” Gilmer said.
Cohen said several groups are planning to be at the funeral to show their support, and there is an effort afoot to bring them all together “into one group so we can all be on the same page.”
“I hope that everyone there can convey the peaceful message that we want to convey,” she said
And if the church picketers persist, the silent supporters will be on hand for the funerals of U.S. District Judge John Roll, Gabriel Zimmerman, Dorothy Morris, Dorwin Stoddard and Phyllis Schneck, the other five victims of Saturday’s shooting. Giffords, who was shot in the head and is in critical condition, and 13 other people were wounded.
Westboro Baptist Church, founded by its spiritual leader, Fred Phelps, and run mostly by family members, did not respond to a request for an interview in time for this article. But a flier released by the church about the picket targets the Roman Catholic Church because Christina and her family were members.
“God hates Catholics!” the flier, posted on the church’s “God Hates Fags” website, says. “God calls your religion ‘vain,’ as it’s empty of His truth; you worship idols!”
I’ll say it again, when one persons rights deny the rights and dignities of another person, then the law that allow such disrespect needs looking at and changing. This is a dead person and their grieving family, not government etc………I am blessed to live here, not there.
As for civil war…….you mean it is not ongoing now? Look closer~~
xoxoxoxox
Patty:
Westboro gets press because their language, demeanor and protest style is so vehement and so over-the-top inappropriate that it attracts the main stream media that craves such circuses.
But isn’t the congregation tiny? Like 36 people or something? I’ve never understood why they get so much press.
I think that under Pluto in Capricorn, the “union” could certainly show signs of splitting.
And as my old American Studies-Anthro teacher (Robert Knox Denton) said to me recently, “The south won the civil war.”
I dig the notion of those big 8×10 foot angel wings being crafted and worn by people to shield those grieving their loved one. I also love this image released just last night by Nasa ( I came upon the article posted on Huffington Post”. It’s the initial shot by the hubble telescope of what Nasa is calling a rather “strange, green, glowing cloud of gas” that looks to me rather like an…….angel.
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1102/
Finally, it seems appropos here also to post this soliloquy from the show “Angels in America” which I watched for the first time over the holidays. Harper Pitt is in a plane heading out to the west coast, to a brand new life and she speaks into the camera as the plane is rising up through the atmosphere:
“I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”
I think so too.
wow chercheuse — interesting that they deleted it at all, though clearly it adds a wrinkle to the “we’re all peaceful and loving here” message of the rest of the article.
but really — everyone knows this article is about the aftermath of a mass shooting in a state with lax gun laws. i’m all for not promoting “incendiary” language, but i think maybe deleting that sentence is a bit extreme. but maybe i’m wrong.
I’m glad you posted the full text because in the seconds that I was quoting the article and e-mailing to a friend, this line was edited out of the post by CNN:
“You don’t mess with Tucson,” said Gilmer, 26, who described it as “a little dot of blue in a sea of red.”
That line was notable to me because it reminds me of a “crazy” thing I said a year ago, that I think civil war is possible in this country. Remarkable that CNN deleted it at the moment I was reading it.