The half remembered wild interior of an animal life

Tomorrow the infamous Westboro Baptist Church also known as the worst perversion of christianity ever inflicted on the universe is hosting 4of their fabulous god hates fags themed protests in the Boston area. There's one at UMASS Boston, one at Brookline High School, one outside the BU Hillel building, one outside Temple Israel in Boston. In response to these there will be corresponding phelps-a-thons.

What is a Phelps-a-thon you ask? Well, for every minute those douchecanoe's are standing outside these perfectly peaceable organizations ranting and raving, you pledge some amount of money to be given to the organization that the WBC is protesting. So for example, if you pledge 25 cents a minute to the brookline protest and phelps' morons stay out there for an hour, you'd be donating $15 to the Brookline High School gay straight alliance. Each phelps-a-thon has an appropriate associated cause. There've been a few of these already and they've raised quite a bit of money.

Here is the real beauty of it. If the WBC wants to prevent the funds from being provided to those charities and organizations that promote "sin" they have to pack up and leave. If they want their message heard, they have to accept that the organization they are protesting will profit from it. And its TOTALLY LEGAL. And imnsho, completely ethical. We're not stopping them, we're just changing the effects of their actions. Hopefully we're annoying them a little but even if not, we're doing good for good people.

I mean seriously, this is the "church" that protests at funerals!

Go here: http://www.phelps-a-thon.com/Home.html and pick a protest if you can afford to throw in a few dollars. Or just write to the guy who is running it and tell him he's doing a good thing.

If it offends you that I am unable to extend empathy and acceptance to the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church, you probably shouldn't be reading my LJ?

A lot of you know my dear friend dalious. Today I am asking for help on behalf of his mother. She has been unable to work for several years because of medical issues. The details are spelled out in dalious's LJ here: http://dalious.livejournal.com/179347.html

After working and paying into the system for her entire adult life, my friends mom is being denied mass health, social security, basically any kind of help. That leaves her with no money for bills, food, a place to live... she is staying with family but needs a lot of help.

If you go to the link above you'll see a donation link at the bottom of the page. I'm kicking in what I can, which isn't much, but maybe some of you can help out? Maybe you know of some resource that might help my friend and his mom? He's doing the best he can to help her out but what he can do is not going to be enough.

There are lots of ways to do good on the internet without spending any money you don't have to spare. I thought I'd put together a few links:

food for shelter animals by clicking: http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=3 Also across the top of that site are table for other "click for charity" sites.

donate to a charity of your choice each time you do a search on the web: http://www.goodsearch.com/Default.aspx

http://www.freerice.com/ play a vocabulary quiz and people get food.