For more than two decades, the Westboro Baptist Church has been the tin can tied to the tail of those who opposed the expansion of marriage equality and other legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, defining an extreme end of the spectrum of American thinking on gay people. Whenever conservative Christians tried to draw a distinction between their objections to homosexuality and outright hatred of gay people, there were Phelps and his followers cheerfully brandishing their distinctive striped “God Hates Fags” placards in a sort of intellectual photobomb.

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In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson suggested that the hijackings had been punishment for America’s tolerance of abortion and homosexuality, prompting then-President George W. Bush to distance himself from their sentiments. (He’d later sign a law limiting protests at military funerals, passed in response to the church.) The Westboro Baptist Church responded by leaning into the narrative, celebrating the deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Describing the September 11 attacks as retribution was “the strongest insult to the sinners and the one most certain to get a rise out of the people within earshot,” former Westboro Baptist Church member Lauren Drain writes in her memoir of her experience protesting at Bush’s second inauguration.

A continued dedication to rhetoric like that, as well as pickets at military funerals, set the Westboro Baptist Church apart during a period when public support for marriage equality is rising and when prominent conservative Christians like Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren are trying to find more politically palatable ways to talk about their objections to homosexuality. No matter how much distance other gay rights opponents tried to place between themselves and the church, Phelps and his followers acted as a kind of confirmation of the suspicions of the real feelings that lay behind less radical political language. And their consistent incivility highlighted the ways in which anti-gay sentiments don’t just function as expressions of private beliefs, but as acts of unkindness that disturb our sense of manners and proper treatment of our neighbors and fellow citizens.

Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church didn’t just attract political attention out of proportion to their actual influence on policy. The church’s protests prompted all sorts of creative responses, some of which became visually iconic. When the Westboro Baptist Church picketed the Wyoming funeral of Matthew Shepard, a college student who was murdered in 1998, counter-protestors dressed as angels, building wings big enough to obscure the church’s signs from view. College students have formed human walls to isolate Westboro Baptist Church members from their targets, including University of Missouri football player Michael Sam, who may become the first openly gay National Football League player, and the funeral of Lt. Col. Roy Tisdale, a graduate of Texas A&M. The Phelpses and the Westboro Baptist Church chose such a broad array of targets that standing up to them has become a sort of gateway activism, a way to demonstrate not just that you’re an ally to the LGBT community, but that you respect veterans and their families, or even just that you’re a Mizzou fan.

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Not all the responses to the church were serious or solemn. Redditors played on the Church’s most notorious slogan to make a meme suggesting that “God hates figs,” basing their conclusions on a passage from the Gospel of Mark. The Westboro Baptist Church provided a rich vein of humor for comedians eager to pick apart inconsistencies in the practices of Christians who claimed to live by literal interpretations of the Bible. And the Church’s indiscriminate approach to picking enemies of the week made them easy targets.