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MONTPELIER - The face of hate came to Vermont and was turned away by the face of pride.
The most hateful, virulently anti-gay preacher in the land decided to spread his gospel last month in a state that doesn't take very kindly to being told what it should do or what it should think.
So, with the music and puppetry of the Bread and Puppet theater troupe to accompany them, Vermonters of all stripes — gay and straight, bisexual and transgendered — escorted the hatemongering followers of the Rev. Fred Phelps to their cars and sent back them to Kansas.
But the demonstration by just 10 members of Phelps' Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church exposed some deep fissures in the ranks of Vermont's gay community.
When Phelps announced in a vile flyer that he was coming to warn of the dangers of allowing same-gender marriage, there was great dissent about how to respond.
Leaders of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force advised that it would be best just to ignore such a hateful message as the one preached by Phelps.
Even Gov. Howard Dean weighed in from Europe, where he was vacationing with his family, cautioning that it would be best to let Phelps' supporters demonstrate alone.
Phelps is, after all, the man who stooped so low last year as to picket the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student who was murdered in part because he was gay.
Some of the signs toted by Phelps' followers on the lawn of the Vermont Statehouse carried Shepard's picture and slogans about him.
But there were many others who argued that Phelps could not go without a response from Vermonters who would condemn the message he was preaching.
Meetings were held around the state debating what to do in the few days between Phelps' announcement that he was coming and the day of the demonstration. Non-denominational services were held, community meetings were organized and e-mail messages flew to all corners of the state.
In the end, there was no real organized effort to counter the Phelps' message. But hundreds of Vermonters turned out to demonstrate that this is not a state that tolerates the kind of nonsense that the Phelps family was spouting.
Ten-year-old Marila Hewitt said she and her mother attended because "we thought this was more important than other things we had to do this morning; because if you love somebody, it shouldn't matter whether it's male or female."
Although the morning started out with tension, some shouting and an early scuffle over a sign that ended in the arrest of a 22-year-old Maine man, there was relative calm among the counter-demonstrators. Many members of the clergy circulated among the group holding signs refuting Phelps' purported biblically based messages, and friends and families socialized in the crowd. One young woman, citing a desire to be neighborly, offered to share a homemade pie with the Westboro group. Of the Kansans' refusal, she said "I don't think they wanted to share the same fork."
Not long into the demonstration, the huge old bus of Bread and Puppet lumbered by on State Street, pulling up alongside the Statehouse. Suddenly the mood changed. A cheer went up, and, very quickly, music began. The theater group appeared with a huge sign proclaiming: "Please take your hate out of our state." The counter-demonstrators picked up on the theme and began chanting the slogan. Before long, the Kansans were seeing a theatrical Vermont message of love and friendship. The contrast between the two groups couldn't have been more stark: the Kansans holding their neon-colored signs were ugly; the Vermonters, represented by the peaceful message of Bread and Puppet and the beauty of Yolanda, were fun and loving.
The Phelps clan had planned for a 90-minute vigil outside Vermont's seat of democracy. But finding themselves vastly outnumbered, outperformed and outmaneuvered, they summoned nearby police for an escort to their rented cars 25 minutes before the scheduled end of their demonstration.
To the tunes provided by the Bread and Puppet band, the crowd of more than 200 helped walk them up State Street, halting the flow of traffic. The Kansans got in their cars and drove away and the Vermonters returned to the Statehouse to wrap up the event with a festive air.
In the end, the news media played the story for what it was: Vermonters showing their true natures in the face of an invasion by outsiders. As Sandi Cote of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force put it," These people are not Vermonters. They don't represent Vermont."
