The Westboro Baptist Church is in the middle of a little New York City media tour, which so far seems to consist of waving their stupid signs about God and the things they believe he hates outside the offices of Harper’s, Comedy Central, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Scholastic, HBO, MTV, Gawker, and maybe some other places. (All clear outside of New York HQ so far.) As you can see from the photo at left (taken by Gawker’s Tom Scocca), the late Fred Phelps’s attention-hungry cult doesn’t have a great grasp of Manhattan real estate: The price of a downtown one-bedroom increased by 42 percent in the decade following 9/11, but maybe it’s unfair to expect out-of-towners to know that.
Here’s how Westboro was received by “the zombies of NYC,” as their official Twitter account put it:
And yes, we know that we probably should have just ignored them completely.
