When hate comes to town

Editor's Notes

Two weeks have passed since the traveling Westboros burst into town, waving their signs of hatred at our high school graduates and yelling at our church-going citizens.

Thankfully, the picket signs and T-shirts are gone, along with the out-of-town media and counterdemonstrators. Unlike Topeka, Kan., home of the anti-gay Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church for the past 14 years, Tracy can sigh with relief that its residents don’t share Phelps’ extreme wrath.

Two weeks have passed, but we’re still talking about the pickets — and our response to them.

A reader asked why we put a photo of the protesters above the graduates on the front page of the June 13 paper. A school board trustee remarked at the last meeting that the demonstration was a “non-issue” and that we should have covered it as such.

Most people are surprised to know that we debated for weeks how we would cover this spotlight-seeking group. We knew we wouldn’t ignore them, because as journalists, we are responsible for reporting what’s happening. But we didn’t want to overplay — or be played by the players.

At first, we tried to bolster the understanding of what was coming to town with research and learned that the Westboro folks are publicity hounds who know how to get free airtime and newspaper space. In our reporting, we tried to reflect that research — that Phelps’ followers are mostly family members; that they not only target gays, but all Americans; that they rarely spur violence; that 30 extra Tracy police officers and a handful of sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers would be assigned for crowd control during the two days of protests; that counterprotesters would far outnumber the protesters.

We know that it was our original reporting of West High’s Gay-Straight Alliance that drew the attention of Phelps in the first place. And later, when we talked to local ministers, we reported that even the most conservative refused to take Phelps’ side, and that’s what led to the public protests at the churches.

But we didn’t create the Phelps family and its anti-gay, anti-American sentiment. And unlike what one letter-writer has asked of us, we can’t print just the positive news in town; that’s the job of the chamber of commerce.

Still, what’s a local newspaper to do when hate comes to town?

We did what other newspapers do when faced with demonstrations by the white supremacist Aryan Nations or rallies by the Ku Klux Klan. We covered the attention-getting protests and the community’s response to them, betting on the public benefit, and we tried to keep our own biases at bay.

And now we take notes of the lessons learned — that events such as this can provoke individual thought and reveal shared attitudes. That some churches will pass the collection plate to help pay for the extra police protection that the city provided. That the effect of blatant hate can backfire on its instigators.

The Westboro crew got us talking about what was once considered taboo and maybe, just maybe, it brought us closer as a community. And that’s news.