The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend

That statement has probably brought more people together and ended more wars than any protest, advocacy, or humanitarian effort.

Why? 

Because humans are messy. We're saddled with the unique ability to reason with absolutely no reason to use it. Humanity is stuck in an evolutionary hiccup, somewhere between where we've been and where we're headed. Those before us maintained a harmoniously chaotic balance, and barring any extraterrestrial variables - asteroids, comets - life would have continued to simply exist and not much more. 

As soon as the first homosapien discovered that unique ability and fashioned a spear, the planet changed. Agriculture led to societies, societies led to nations, and nations led to culture. And with culture came a flood of questions followed by a drought of answers. How do you answer the unanswerable? Religion.

Nothing has simultaneously united and divided people like the quest to answer that which the human mind can't comprehend, and abstract ideas like gods and blind faith were set up to fail.

Unfortunately, stuck in evolution's hiccup, we're still dry heaving explanations for the unexplainable. We will never know where we come from. But discontent with the absence of answers, we discard reason for the ugly, irrational traits of the human mind.

But that's where our enemies come in handy. The messiness of idle humanity takes a streamlined turn when faced with absolute insanity. As irrational as we are in our spiritual beliefs, we can become extremely rational when faced with things that any sane person knows is complete bullshit.

I certainly don't want to give the haters any credit, at least not the credit they want. Organizations like the Westboro Baptist Church are comprised of pure evil. And I understand the irony in the term "evil" considering what I just said, but I'm a flawed human like the rest of us. 

Still, as hateful as the hate mongers are, they inadvertently unite the rational people, those willing to entertain reason every once in a while. Protesting the funerals of fallen soldiers with signs reading "GOD HATES FAGS" does nothing for a hate monger's cause. It's a disgustingly disrespectful act and causes nothing but pain when it's inflicted. But in the aftermath of these atrocious events, it forces those fortunate enough to live free of persecution to understand what it's like to face bigotry for a day. 

The Westboro Baptist Church and other hate groups have a sole target: Humanity. And in doing so they turn the world into a united minority group fighting for a common goal: To live free from hate.

Of course examples of this behavior are not always as painful as the slurs cast by Fred Phelps and his cohorts. Sometimes it makes us step back, cock our heads to the side, and laugh. Pastor James David Manning of the Harlem's ATLAH Worldwide Missionary Church recently claimed that Starbucks was adding "male semen" to its lattes, apparently in an effort to attract "upscaled sodomites."

Pastor Manning

Manning has his share of followers and comments like this get paraded across social media. But it's almost unfortunate that anyone, especially legitimate advocacy organizations, actually entertain these comments in any serious context, because the vast majority of those reading the overuse of the redundant phrase "male semen" are likely getting a good laugh. That includes thousands upon thousands of straight men and women who might finally be thinking, "this anti-gay shit is getting ridiculous." 

Insulting the general public might be the best avenue for humans to revisit their unique ability to reason. There will always be unreasonable people and, if they're just insane enough, I say let them sing. Their audience - the world - is turning their hate into our love and bringing us together. There might not be anything more beautiful than that.