{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "The thing about Westboro Baptist Church was it was this extended family of this guy who had been a good civil rights attorney...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/659163781350506497/", "html": "

kontextmaschine:

The thing about Westboro Baptist Church was it was this extended family of this guy who had been a good civil rights attorney back in the glory days of the ‘80s, but since America settled down he needed something the powers that be would find so uncongenial they would try to suppress, so he could make money by suing them

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Also if we’re doing “90s culture war stuff that retrospectively wasn’t about homosexuality at all”, pretty much everyone who looks into it seriously agrees that the killing of Matthew Shepard came out of a meth deal gone bad, and the notion that it was about his homosexuality was made up by the killer and his lawyer not even in hope of any “gay panic” sympathy but because if you’re going to get convicted of murder, it’s better for even an unsympathetic “hot-blooded” reason than premeditatedly in service of a criminal enterprise.

"}