Notorious hate group the Westboro Baptist Church is planning to picket Silicon Valley tech companies next week as part of its "God Hates The Media Tour." For the curious, it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect. According to a flyer for the tour, obtained by Valleywag:
The Aug. 12 schedule is certainly ambitious — good luck getting from YouTube's San Bruno office to Twitter's Market Street HQ in 20 minutes around 3:30 p.m. — and they'll be hitting most of the big players in the Bay Area.
On the group's website, they've included a handy hate-primer on each company. They're all pretty much the same (Bible versus omitted so it's just the organization's own words) and sound as if they've been written by someone who recently used the internet for the first time:
Facebook:
WBC will picket Facebook to remind this nation that even the extremely wealthy will have to sit in judgment before their maker to account for their sins. Mark Zuckerberg's $22.9 billion won't buy salvation. However, he will "pay" for marching in fag parades, pushing fag propaganda in other countries such as India with the "Go gay for a day" campaign and donating ridiculous sums to promote sodomite filth.
It goes on for about four more paragraphs, but we'll spare you.
And here's what they think of Instagram:
Instagram never thinks to promote God or his standards, yet holds the world-wide platform to do so. Shame on you Instagram! You've been given the idea to invent such an application, you've been given the resources to accomplish the invention and you owe it all to God who made you. Inventions such as Instagram were all made for WBC to further preaching the word of God. All others are just incidental.
The rest of the companies follow a similar tone, each one winding deeper and deeper into crazytown, so we'll spare you more big block quotes, though this one on Twitter is...well: "Everything that you do with Twitter, OTHER than enabling Westboro Baptist Church preach the Gospel of Peace to this generation, will redound to your everlasting shame and contempt and unspeakable sorrow!"
Yeah.
But then we get to Google. And things take a different tone (emphasis ours):
WBC to picket GooglePlex in Mountain View, California. WBC thanks God for GooglePlex where creative minds are developed to further WBC's preachments! A search for Westboro Baptist Church on Google reveals nearly 1.2 million results at any moment. They have awesome colorful images of WBCers faithfully picketing. Although the picture of the church building definitely needs to be updated! Can you get someone on that?
It is so exciting! You can literally click every link (web, news, videos, images, maps and more!) to find all things Westboro. Google is our friend...however if Google didn't help us get the words out, the rocks would cry out to proclaim the message that God hates fags!...Thank you, Google for helping the humble servants of God at WBC to send His words worldwide.
As far as Westboro Baptist Church screeds go, that's pretty glowing!
Of course, Google has given exactly zero reasons for anyone to think the feeling is mutual. In 2008, the company took a very public stand in California against Proposition 8 arguing, "We should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love."
There are also rumors floating around of counterprotests from tech companies that are still in planning stages. The Westboro Baptist church may think "Google is our friend," but they may feel differently by the end of the day next Tuesday.
Oh, and good luck with the rush hour traffic!