CFJ intern Drew Pollom was convinced the Westboro Baptist Church’s hate speech attack on Spokane required a response. So he went to work trying to shape it.

Although they will never admit to it, last week’s visit to Spokane by the hate speech specialists of the Westboro Baptist Church didn’t do the cause of hatred much good.
It wasn’t because they didn’t try. As they do with tiresome regularity, the church members brought their angry voices and well-known placards (i.e. “God Hates Fags,” “Thank God for AIDS,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “Fags Die, God Laughs”) to places they regard as bastions of moral corruptness. Here, in Spokane, those places were Ferris High School, Eastern Washington University, Gonzaga University, the Moody Bible Institute, Whitworth University, and the Chavurat HaMashiach synagogue.
But hatred is not what this late October spectacle in Spokane will be remembered for.
Quite the opposite.
It will likely be seen, instead, as a significantly re-defining moment in the city’s history for the way in which hundreds of people peaceably confronted the church members at every stop. Because so much of what Westboro is known for is condemning all Americans for tolerating homosexuality, the church’s visit became an opportunity for people in Spokane to actively demonstrate for tolerance and take a stand against hate speech. And they did so in remarkable numbers.
Drew Pollom
But it wouldn’t have happened without the people who saw this potentially ugly event coming, and quickly organized to blunt it and transform it. One of those organizers was our own Drew Pollom, a 22-year-old Gonzaga University senior who, for the past year and a half, has been one of the tireless case workers in our Community Advocacy program.

Drew learned about Westboro’s planned visit from Eastern Washington University student Taylor Malone, another of the organizers for the opposition rallies. But he was already well aware of the church’s activities and history and remembers watching, a year ago, the 2007 BBC documentary The Most Hated Family in America.
The church was founded in 1955 in Topeka, Kansas by Fred Phelps, a pastor who also worked as an attorney until he was disbarred in 1979. The congregation consists almost entirely of Phelps family members who have, by now, engaged in over 30,000 demonstrations, in all fifty states. The church and the Phelps family have been in the news more prominently lately as the defendants in a law suit, Snyder v. Phelps, that reached the U.S. Supreme Court for oral argument earlier this month. The case was brought by Albert Snyder, the father one of the many fallen soldiers whose funerals have been picketed by the Phelps family. It pits the Phelps’s First Amendment rights to free speech against the Snyders’s rights to privacy.
For Drew, his knowledge of the Phelps family and their history was disturbing enough to him that he felt he had to do something, that simply avoiding the visit by the Westboro picketers was not an option. He decided he would take a lead role in organizing the counter-demonstration at Gonzaga, which is where the Westboro clan would begin their day.
“We made a Facebook event of it and invited everyone to the first one [at Gonzaga]. All I remember is that 12 hours later we were looking at more than 800 people.”
From the start, Drew was adamant that he and the other organizers wanted to avoid a violent or even close-quartered confrontation.
“If you plan on coming to our thing and roughing up Westboro Baptist Church members,” Drew told a KXLY-TV reporter, “then you are not welcome, you’re not what we want. What we want is people coming together for the right reasons–which is a community of peace, love, and tolerance.”
When Thursday arrived, so did the crowds. By his count, 800 did attend the Gonzaga counter-demonstration, with hundreds at the other sites as well, including more than 1,000 at EWU. The event at Eastern was the only one of the six Drew missed, because he had a mid-term exam to take that day.
Other than that, he says, he couldn’t have asked for more and the taunts he received from the Phelps’s just rolled off his back.
“I don’t really care what they think of me,” he said. “What I wanted to do was change it from a negative to a positive, to show that we, as a community do not stand for that kind of behavior.”
One of the groups he personally tried to reach out to and bring into the counter-demonstrations was a group of biker military veterans. It worked.
“It’s awesome when you can stand next to a combat vet and bike rider, a tough Harley guy and then, on the other side, to have a drag queen in a pink wig. And have them on the same side, in solidarity for the community of Spokane. So, for me, that’s what I really liked, and that’s what I was really happy about.”
When I talked to Drew the day after the Phelps’s visit to Spokane, he was still trying to soak in what Thursday meant, not just for Spokane but for important issues like the First Amendment.
“It’s one of those interesting points where you’re faced with a conflict in which you like the principle and want to guard the principle, the principle of free speech, but you hate the people who are using the principle,” Drew says. “And I actually had these conversations with people who were in the organizing group for the counter-demonstrations who were saying, ‘I can believe we’ve allowed groups like this, and so forth. And I say, ‘well, you have to slow down for a second and realize that the same law that is allowing them to preach their hatred, is the same law that allows us to come together for peace and love. You have to understand with the law and something like free speech that it’s a two way street. And once you say it’s two way street and come to that realization, you’re a lot more comfortable with the fact that, yeah, they can go and do this. You don’t like the message, but the principle remains.”
Here I pushed him a bit. The Center for Justice is one of those law firms that will fight at the drop of a hat for the First Amendment. And, still, the Phelps’s speech, (especially to the families of soldiers who’ve died in service to the same Constitution that the Phelps’s wrap themselves in every day) is so deeply offensive that offensive isn’t even the right word for it.
“There’s no real way to react to that other than with a very strong feeling of anger and hatred toward these people,” Drew said. “And those feelings, for all intents and purposes, are entirely justified. But, at the same time, we have to understand why they’re doing it. And the minute we understand why they’re doing it, we take away their power. We take away their power to offend us and insult us even further.”
It was an impressive answer coming from a 22-year-old from Sammamish who plans to be a lawyer some day.
Drew Pollom and his peers didn’t win Thursday solely with their words and their impressive organizing. They won it with their hearts. On Friday, as satisfied and relieved as he was about how smoothly things had gone at Gonzaga, Drew was most upbeat about how things had gone at Ferris High School. On his mind was not just the recent suicide of an 18-year-old in New Jersey, but countless other young people who dread being hazed if others know about their sexual orientation.
“It’s just real important that they know that we care about them and that we want them to live a life without fear for who they are,” Drew said. “This was a way to show that.”
–Tim Connor