Radical Evangelicals to Protest School Named After Gay Poet

It's so important that they're traveling all the way from Kansas!

Kansas' Westboro Baptist Church frequently makes headlines in the national news for traveling far and wide to protest very inappropriate things in a very inappropriate manner. Its members -- led by Pastor Fred Phelps -- do not very much care for the gays, and so usually they protest such tangentially gay things as funerals for people whom they consider to have been gay, before they died. They bring signs with such colorful slogans as "God Hates Fags." And last year they went so far as to protest the funeral for actor Heath Ledger, a heterosexual who once played a homosexual cowboy in a fictional movie.

Now they have their sights set on coming to Bethesda, Maryland. So what fictional gay person's funeral must be coming up in Bethesda soon?

There isn't one! Well, sort of. The Westboro folks read on the Internet that there is a public high school in Bethesda called "Walt Whitman High School." And then a quick googling of this "Walt Whitman" fellow revealed that the 19th-century American poet was a homosexual who wrote these really gay poems.

Ruh roh.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church, nationally known for their anti-homosexuality protests, are planning to picket on April 24 outside Walt Whitman High, named after the Civil War-era writer who may have been gay.

The students and administration at this homosexual high school have reacted with both bafflement and super-bafflement, because, um, are they SERIOUS?

"My initial reaction was that I couldn't believe they were really going to do it," said Whitman Principal Alan Goodwin. "But then my second reaction was that I hoped they wouldn't."

Now, however, Whitman is planning to use the comical protests as a "teaching opportunity" about civil rights, meaning they will all stand at the window and point at the mouth-breathing idiots who traveled from Kansas to protest a school's famous gay poet namesake.

Jim Newell writes for Wonkette and IvyGate.

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