In place of Westboro's standard issue rainbow-colored "God hates fags" signs, the Facebook page featured quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama, cute pictures of animals captioned in LOL speak and nerd culture ephemera, like a "Star Trek" meme that caught the attention of Hikaru Sulu himself.

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In the hours since the two explosions rocked the streets of Boston, messages of love and support have saturated the internet — but these inspiring and compassionate posts were not universal.

In fact, the commentary streaming across the Twitter feed of the Westboro Baptist Church was both hostile and hateful.

The Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Kansas, is a small, virulently homophobic, anti-Semitic hate group that regularly stages protests or pickets institutions and individuals they think support homosexuality or otherwise subvert what they believe is God’s law.

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Twice on March 25, Ebert tweeted a link to a Salon excerpt from Jeff Chu's new memoir, "Does Jesus Really Love Me?" In it, Chu, a gay man, goes undercover in the Topeka, Kan.- based "church," where he spends a day picketing with the group who believes that "Spreading their gospel is their duty and their gesture of kindness to a hell-bound world." It just happens that their method of spreading the love involves screaming, "I don’t even know what’s growing inside your crusty assholes!" at gay men.

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Westboro took issue with the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, who died on Thursday, after he tweeted out a link to an excerpt from Jeff Chu's book "Does Jesus Really Love Me?" on Salon, in which Chu, a gay man, goes undercover to spend four days in Kansas studying the homophobic group. Ebert tweeted two links, saying in one of them, "Just another day at Westboro Baptist."

Westboro's protest will begin at 9:15 a.m. From the press release:

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Let's say, for example, you're a folk singer with a once-strong lesbian following who peaked in the late '80s. Let's say you went all "born-again, sanctified, saved-in-the-blood Christian" a few years back. Then let's say you show up for a gig in San Francisco, a town that is known for being, oh, on the gay-friendly side, at a gay-owned club called Yoshi's. And you reportedly start talking about how you're afraid that the world will be destroyed if gays are allowed to marry, and cap it off by telling the audience "You can go on Twitter and say 'Michelle Shocked says God hates fags.'" 

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Turns out, real estate was the answer.

After seeing a "For Sale" sign across the street from the anti-gay hate group Westboro Baptist's compound in Topeka, Kansas, Jackson decided to buy the property. Oh, and paint it to look like a rainbow flag.

As Jackson told the Huffington Post:

I didn't know anything about the church or where they were located, but that story kept popping up. And one night I wondered, Where is this church? I got on Google Earth, and I was 'walking down the road,' and I did a 360 view. And I saw a 'For Sale' sign sitting in the front yard of a house. Right away it hit me, Oh my gosh, I could buy a house in front of the WBC! And immediately I thought: And I'm going to paint that thing the color of the pride flag.

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In a statement on their website, Westboro warned "students,  faculty, and alumni that the satanic policies of this nation, especially those of the colleges and universities, are causing God to pour His wrath out upon this nation. Doomed American academics fancy themselves to be smarter than God. They promote the fag agenda with all their might and mock the word of God and His messengers at every turn.”

Well, Vassar might not be smarter than God, but they're definitely smarter than Westboro. Here's how the college prepared for their visit from the hate group: By rallying the school's network of alums and other supporters to raise $100 to go towards an LGBTQ rights organization for every minute the group planned to protest.

And people say liberal arts degrees are useless!

The fundraiser for the Trevor Project, a national organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ young people, exceeded expectations, bringing in $41,529 as of this posting. (Keep an eye on the growing total here.)

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The Phelps name is strongly associated with the vile 83-year-old patriarch Fred, a man whose contribution to our national dialogue has, for the past several decades, consisted almost entirely of the motto GOD HATES FAGS. The Phelps clan and its congregation, Westboro Baptist Church, have earned themselves quite a reputation over the years, mostly for their penchant for showing up at funerals and gleefully spewing invective at mourners. But in December – shortly after the group threatened to picket the funerals of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre -- a petition to finally officially designate the "church" as a hate group became the most popular on the White House's We the People site ever. And after years and years of bullying, the small but appallingly vocal group seems to be losing its talent for making a scene. In January, the group failed to show up for four demonstrations it had vowed to do at four different Pennsylvania churches. Its big protest at the presidential inauguration had more signs than humans.

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An announcement about the next phase of #OpAngel is expected from Anonymous Wednesday.

Original post: Following the MIT hack this morning, Anonymous has extended its tribute to Aaron Swartz into #OpAngel. The operation, launched Monday just one day ahead of the gifted programmer and activist's funeral, has manifold intent.

First, Anonymous plans to thwart Westboro Baptist Church's announced plans to picket Swartz's open funeral in Chicago. "Twenty-four hours after the death of Aaron Swartz was announced to the world, a heartless cult announced their intention to picket his funeral. In response, Anonymous has launched Operation Angel," the hacker collective announced in a statement.

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The comment, written by a teenage boy at Berkeley High School a few days after the Sandy Hook shootings, came in response to a Facebook post made by my own 15-year-old son.

My son was passing along the word that the hacker collective Anonymous had declared war against the Westboro Baptist Church, that clan of deranged religious fanatics who routinely seek to turn the misery of others into their own grandstanding opportunity.

Outraged at WBC's plans to protest at the funeral of Sandy Hook Elementary's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, on Dec. 19, in order "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," Anonymous proceeded to expose the personal information of WBC members -- home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc. -- and started acting as a coordinating center for anti-WBC counter-protests. For teenage boys at Berkeley High, Anonymous' direct action was the epitome of cool.

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Topeka, Kan.,-based Westboro Baptist Church, better known as those "God Hates Fags" creeps, is already considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most recently it made news for threatening to picket the funerals of the Newtown massacre victims. The hacker group Anonymous responded with attacks on the church's online presence.

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Of course, it’s impossible to say with certainty which actions "Anonymous" actually pulled off, since its membership is ill-defined and anyone can claim association, not to mention that sometimes Anonymous hacktivists act alone or as part of a subgroup.  Even when Anonymous has put out one of its quintessential videos claiming responsibility for a hack or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service—shutting down a website by flooding it with requests) attack, it hasn’t always turned out to be true.

Given that, below are Anonymous’ “Top 20” for 2012. With its widening arsenal and focus, one can only imagine what these Internet denizens have in store for 2013.

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When Westboro members planned to protest the funerals of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, they were met by counter-protesters, including a group of bikers called the Patriot Guard Riders, which specifically organized to “shield the mourning family [of fallen servicemembers] and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor or group of protestors,” i.e., Westboro activists.

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Hacker collective Anonymous was swift to respond, releasing private information of  Westboro members including email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses. This video, decrying the church for spreading “seeds of hatred,” was also released. It warns, “We will destroy you. We are coming.”

An Anonymous source has said it intends to keep the website offline throughout the day, with plans to take it over completely and deface it.

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Hacker collective Anonymous was swift to respond, releasing private information of  Westboro members including email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses. This video, decrying the church for spreading "seeds of hatred" was also released. It warns, "We will destroy you. We are coming."

[h/t BetaBeat]

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Nate Phelps is the sixth of Fred's 13 children, and he has the scars to show for it. He describes his father as verbally and physically abusive. When he was 18, Nate ran away from home and from the fundamentalist Calvinist religion in which he was raised.

Now in his 50s, Nate finds himself publicly squaring off with his father and siblings to reverse their legacy of intolerance. He lives in Calgary, where he has become a public speaker who champions LGBT rights and raises awareness about the connection between extreme religion and child abuse. He is currently writing a book about his life and is the subject of an upcoming documentary.

What was your childhood like?

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