On one side of Arastradero Road, the signs read “God hates you.” On the other side, they declared “God hates hate.”

Five protesters from the Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church came to Palo Alto’s Gunn High School and Stanford’s Taube Hillel House on Friday morning to espouse the anti-gay, anti-Semitic vitriol for which they’re known. They hurled blame for the cluster of Gunn student suicides on “cursed Bible-ignorant rebels” whose parents “taught them lies belched forth from the bowels of hell …”

At both Gunn and Stanford, hundreds of students, staff and community members turned out to counter the protesters with messages of love and tolerance.

“They’re sharing hate all over the place and we’re going to show it doesn’t affect us,” said 16-year-old Gunn sophomore Ilya Ryzhik.

Not everybody got the tolerance message, though. When the Westboro group returned to its rented minivan after the Stanford protest, it found that three of the vehicle’s tires had been slashed, said Lisa Lapin, the university’s director of communications.

The morning began at Gunn, where the protesters stood across the street from the school’s entrance, while a couple hundred Gunn students, staff, parents, and others spilled out over the electronic sign at the school’s entrance flashed quotes and messages including “Celebrating diversity since 1964.”

Dozens of people held a long banner with a Bible quotation: “There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance. Love will never come to an end.”

“This is like a love-fest,” one student remarked to a friend.

School and district administrators had urged students not to directly counter-protest, to avoid giving the Westboro group any more attention. But Will Cromasty, a 17-year-old Gunn senior and president of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, said students knew there would be some sort of protest, and it might as well be large.

“We have nothing but compassion for those who suffer from the mental illness known as homophobia,” Cromasty said, gesturing across the street.

The Westboro protesters held their standard assortment of signs, with phrases such as “God hates America” and “The Beast,” next to a picture of President Barack Obama.

As for Gunn, “This is the same school where the doomed, cursed, Bible-ignorant rebels throw themselves in front of moving trains,” a Westboro press release stated. “Their parents taught them lies belched forth from the bowels of hell, such as ‘God loves everybody’ and ‘It’s okay to be gay.'”

The district moved back Gunn’s start time from 7:55 to 8:30 a.m. Friday in an effort to have students avoid the protesters.

“Those adults tried to move the time to keep those kids from hearing the truth,” said Margie Phelps, the daughter of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps, a disbarred lawyer with a craving for publicity and a fixation on hatred of homosexuality. “That didn’t work.”

To the tune of “America the Beautiful,” Phelps and the other Westboro protesters sang: “Oh Sodomites, your kids are killed by trains. Your moral compasses are broken, your teachers are to blame.”

The presence of a few Palo Alto police officers kept the protest from becoming too heated, but a small group of students from Menlo-Atherton High School did cross the road and confront the protesters, shouting back and forth for several minutes before the Westboro group left.

“I’m Jewish, by the way” Marshall Glass, an 18-year-old Menlo-Atherton senior, told Phelps.

“Of course you are, that means you’re twice cursed,” Phelps snapped back.

At exactly 7:55 a.m., the Westboro group left, and headed to Stanford University.

There, several hundred students gathered in front of the school’s Taube Hillel House, holding signs, singing and chanting. It almost felt more like a party than a protest, as the Stanford band played and the Stanford Tree danced across the lawn, made muddy by hundreds of feet. At one point, a bagpipe player performed “Amazing Grace.” The small Westboro group stayed at one corner, and some students posed for pictures with them, holding signs like one that read “Gay for (Westboro Baptist Church leader) Fred Phelps.”

“I just wanted to come out and show them that being a Christian isn’t about hate, it’s about love,” said Monica Alcazar, a Stanford freshman and Gunn graduate.

Word spread across campus about the protest through e-mails from student groups and word of mouth, students said.

Lapin said the turnout showed the university “standing up for a principle of tolerance and diversity.”

“Overall, this was a positive opportunity for Stanford,” Lapin said. “Because at the peak we had between 800 and 1,000 students from all walks of campus life coming together to support each other, and that’s what’s representative of Stanford.”

The church members returned to their car to find the tires slashed, Lapin said. Stanford police are investigating, but do not have any suspects or witnesses, she added.

Lapin said the university knew Westboro members’ cars had been vandalized in the past, and had a reserved a secure spot for them. But the group ended up parking elsewhere, Lapin said.

Church member Shirley Phelps-Roper declined to say whether the group was able to get another car, but noted it did not miss any of the demonstrations scheduled for later in the day in San Francisco.

At Gunn, students continued the “love-fest” with a rally at lunchtime. While students ate lunch in the school’s central quad area, a few musically inclined classmates got on stage with acoustic guitars, electric keyboards and other instruments to perform songs such as “Lean On Me” and, again, “All You Need Is Love.” Many wore T-shirts that advocated tolerance, including Principal Noreen Likins, whose shirt read “Gay? Fine by Me.”

Likins said Friday had “turned into a great day. I think the community is closer together because of it,” she said. “I think what we’ve found is people have rallied around to support, particularly, the (Gay-Straight Alliance) students.”

Bay Area News Group Staff Writer Lisa M. Krieger contributed to this report.

E-mail Diana Samuels at dsamuels@dailynewsgroup.com.