The great thing about blogging is you join this informal community of opinionated people who express themselves, often with great zeal, in the spirit of civilized discourse. Viewpoints are all over the place, disagreements are real, tempers frequently flare, yet the vast majority of bloggers honestly try to make sense of things and relate their own thoughtful conclusions on the global digital tablet. We agree, we disagree, and oftimes we agree to disagree.

The world can be a pretty horrible place and, yes, we sometimes attribute the source of the horror to our ideological opponents' misguided views, but darn it all we remain civilized men and women throughout the debate.

All that being said, I think the Westboro Baptist Church protesters should be shot.

Shoot'em dead, then holster all firearms, then proceed with the service in an appropriately solemn fashion.

Soldiers have died to protect a bunch of freedoms, but not the freedom to desecrate the lives and memorialization of good people. We don't need that particular freedom.

So who are these losers? Before getting into the historical background, let's drop in on the present day. Tonight, to be exact, on Hannity and Colmes.

This is Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church:

There are no innocent people. Thank God for 9-11. Thank God for dead soldiers.

Why won't you just obey?

Phelps-Roper:

How dare you fail to obey the commandments of the Lord Your God...

How dare you invoke the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Phelps-Roper:

We are hated by this nation and that is what the Scripture says will happen.

Phelps-Roper:

You have the bully pulpit. Knowing the terror of the Lord you should persuade men to obey.

Now here is the background.

Rev. Fred Phelps founded the 'church':

He and much of his family live in a one-block compound that includes the church building. Phelps has 54 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, according to Steve Drain, a church member who made a documentary film about Phelps, titled Hatemongers, in the late 1990s.

Four of Phelps's children have left the church and criticized their father, accusing him of severe beatings and a fanatical need for control, according to numerous published reports.

Phelps-Roper, who often speaks for her father, said the church has 75 members, about 10 of whom are not related by blood or marriage.

Phelps, who was disbarred as a lawyer, began picketing against homosexuals in the early 1990s. Westboro members claim to have staged more than 22,000 protests and made 21 trips to Colorado. They do not take donations and pay for their activities through the money they make as lawyers - 16 family members are attorneys - and in other professions, said Phelps-Roper.

The majority of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church can be traced back to five units originating in the 1950s: the Phelps family, the Hockenbarger family, Chris Davis, Theresa Davis and George Stutzman. Chris Davis later married one of Phelps' daughters, Stutzman has allegedly never been married, and no information is known regarding Theresa Davis.

In 2000, another major "unit" joined the church, the Drain family: Steve Drain, his wife Luci, and their two daughters (Laura, the oldest, and Taylor, the youngest).

Anti-gay crusader Pastor Fred Phelps and his group of gay-hating crusaders are hiding behind aliases after a local hotel cancelled their reservation.

The group is expected to descend on the Supreme Court this morning to protest the recent decision granting equal rights to gay and lesbian couples.

The hotel cancellation has irked Shirley Phelps-Roper, a lawyer who works alongside her father at the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. "Canadians are hypocrites -- saying that you won't discriminate against gays and then discriminating against us because of our religion."

SAND SPRINGS, Okla. -- The fliers arrived three weeks ago. Some came over the fax machines of local churches, and others appeared mysteriously around town. Printed in bold was the heading "Westboro Baptist Church." No seeming cause for alarm. Sand Springs, population 18,500, is a Christian stronghold in the gently rolling hills of eastern Oklahoma.

But the message that followed was a rant against a 17-year-old Sand Springs resident named Michael Shackelford and his mother, Janice, the subjects of a recent Washington Post series examining Michael's struggles as a young gay man in the Bible Belt. The fliers posted a photo of Michael, called him a "doomed teenage fag" and announced that followers of Westboro Baptist in Topeka were on their way from Kansas to stage antigay protests in Sand Springs.

Across Main Street, scores of locals, a mix of friends, acquaintances, strangers and news people stood in quiet astonishment as the sons and daughters and grandchildren of Pastor Fred Phelps sang their songs of hate and spoke their words of apocalyptic prophecy.

The stunned silence from that side of the street didn't last long. As Shirley Phelps-Roper began singing "God Hates America," the crowd picked up the tune and the cue, returning lyric fire by singing the original lyrics of "God Bless America." It was a pattern that held throughout the morninglong protests.

The battle had been joined. The Internet war of words that had begun in the wake of Mayor Jason West's solemnizing 25 gay marriages in February had come to a place the protesters called Sodom and the counterprotesters called home. The protesters' numbers never changed; the counterprotesters' ranks surged into the hundreds as they followed the protesters throughout the morning.

Do you think my call to arms is a little extreme? Maybe so. Some good guys have taken a more lenient approach, opting simply to defend decent behavior:

They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals.

Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs — explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq.

Our society is not just a bunch of folks thrown together who happen to interact fortuitously and conveniently get along. Our shared culture works because the majority of people hold to certain basic standards of decency despite all the other differences.

The Phelps-Roper clan, with their bizarre, surreal, other-worldly activism, extrapolating from anti-gay to anti-soldier, is only a hair's distance away from eating the poison and going to bed in matching t-shirts and tennis shoes.

This is Jim Jones, Hale-Bopp, 'religious' insanity in its highest form, friends. These 'churchgoers' are not frothing at the mouth, and in fact they are prosperous, functioning, totally literate people. That's dangerous.

And we're letting them roam free to infiltrate the holiest public ceremonies for our greatest citizens. That ain't right.

Not a shooting offense? Maybe not. But what do you make of this typical flyer from last week?

Thank God for
3 more dead troops.
We wish it were 3,000.

They all died April 12 by IEDs. WBC will picket their funerals in their home towns - and memorials elsewhere - when their bodies and/or body parts are returned from Iraq..

Here is the
Roster of the Damned:

...
...
...

They turned America
Over to fags;
They're coming home
In body bags

UPDATE: Just to hammer again on the point that the Alpaca Burger Forum audience is all about quality rather than quantity, two great observations just came in the comments:

Straight White Guy points out their modus operandi is "get some guy to lay a beatdown on one of their 'flock' and then they sue.... thus getting money to visit another funeral."

Since every other one of them is a lawyer, they're well-positioned for this, and obviously they've got a good angle because if a bunch of people sat around trying to think of "how can we get our asses kicked anywhere in the U.S," there's probably no better formula. So everything needs to be aboveboard, which explains the flurry of legislation. But really, legislation simply to "restrict"? To paraphrase Roy Scheider, we're gonna need a bigger law.

Ed of MonkeyWatch notes that with the rising cost of ammo it might be advisable to get this mess cleaned up the old-fashioned way, which I think can serve as a starting point for the aforementioned legislation.

UPDATE II: Lest we become dejected over the asininity, we need to bear in mind the many good guys who are fighting back effectively.

If you are not already supporting Free Republic, well, I think you know what to do next.