Anonymous Goes After GodHatesFags.com

An anonymous reader writes "Anonymous is now recognised as a serious force to be taken seriously, but its activities aren't confined to mass global protests, as the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, is discovering, according to p2pnet. Says the Examiner, 'Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church is infamous for their "Love Crusades," obnoxious displays of insensitivity and homophobia at the funerals of fallen American soldiers. The controversial if monotone message of the "Love Crusade" seems to be to blame everything that is wrong in the world on homosexuality. The crusades are part of a hate-based mission started in Kansas by the WBC and Fred Phelps.' In an open letter on AnonNews, 'We, the collective super-consciousness known as ANONYMOUS – the Voice of Free Speech & the Advocate of the People – have long heard you issue your venomous statements of hatred, and we have witnessed your flagrant and absurd displays of inimitable bigotry and intolerant fanaticism,' says Anonymous, stating 'Should you ignore this warning, you will meet with the vicious retaliatory arm of ANONYMOUS.'"

Westboro Baptist Church and lawsuits

[Wyatt Earp]

The Westboro Baptist Church lives off suing people for infringing on their right to free speech, assembly, etc. If the IRC and 4chan douche bags attack them, then WBC isn't going to have anyone to sue, but will try and waste capital in their attempt.

And yes, they have computers, website, businesses associated with them, so there is crap for anonymous to attack.

They Do It for the Lawsuit Settlements

[Doc Ruby]

Phelps and his gang of Christianist assholes are in the business of provoking angry responses to their hellish displays that Phelps' gang will claim in court violated their rights or damaged them. To blackmail their targets, usually municipalities with the ability to pay, into settling the lawsuit and paying off Phelps rather than pay the extensive legal fees and possibly damages. That's why Phelps' gang is pumped full of lawyers trained at "Liberty" "University", the Christian crusade madrassa.

In this fight, it's Anonymous that's on the side of the angels.

Re:Ohhh the irony...

[TexVex]

trying to bully an admittedly annoying and vocal cult into silence?

Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. What those people do is not just speech. They take deliberate offensive action targeted at specific people and do them harm. They are bullies, and Anon are bullies, and is bullying a bully ironic? I don't see how.

Re:I don't think they care

[palegray.net]

If they have anyone technically competent around it would be trivial for them to identify and sue participants in a DDOS, ADDING to their cash flow.

You've just demonstrated a severe lack of knowledge about the basics of DDoS operations. It is most assuredly not trivial, especially when tens of thousands of compromised machines owned by people who are barely aware of the location of the power switch are involved. Even assuming a handful of folks were stupid enough to carry this out in a manner that were to permit their apprehension, there are probably going to be jurisdictional issues to contend with (likely crossing national borders), coupled with the age old adage that "you can't get blood out of a stone." In other words, good luck identifying any actual willful participant, and good luck getting any money out of said person should you manage to drag him into court.

tl;dr version == Ha, good luck with that.

Re:I don't think they care

[rgbatduke]

Sorry, but the Old Testament was probably written in the interval between 500 BCE and 800 BCE, solidly in the iron age. In fact, Tubal Cain in Genesis was reported as an "Artificer in iron", an anachronism as wide and glaring as steel swords and Middle Eastern plants and animals in the New World in TBOM, but anybody who thinks that it rained at a rate of six inches per minute on every square foot of the planet for 40 days straight isn't going to be put off by a little thing like consistency. You're confusing it with the time being written about -- Moses (if he lived at all and wasn't just a myth or legend being recalled by means of an oral tradition some 500-800 years after the fact) would have been dated at the very end of the Bronze Age in the Middle East (the Iron Age is usually dated at around 1200 BCE) , but the tribe that would one day become the Israelites didn't have writing (as far as archeology can tell) until 1000 BCE and didn't write the very first books of the Torah until much later (and then rewrote them after the Babylonian captivity, as it isn't clear that any of the original manuscripts survived).

However, I agree, that even at the Iron Age time of writing the moronic morality was so yesterday, just so Bronze Age...(sniff) rgb