Discussion Main / WestboroBaptistChurch

This is a site for analyzing fiction; not complaining about social groups. This article doesn't even try to link this to any fiction; it's basically pure, 100% real life politicking and sets the precedent that is something this site will accept.

The worst part of this page is the really ugly face it gives to the site. It's written in first person collective (i.e. "everybody associated with this site agrees with this in both content and presentation") and denounces a group of real, living people as sub-human. Just look at the Acceptable Targets section with "There doesn't seem to be a single person in the world who considers it in poor taste to mock these people." (which is an incredibly tasteless statement no matter how one tries to justify it) and ask: is this really the message the site should send? If you don't like a person or group, you can start up an article about them savaging them as some social "evil" that isn't even human? What is stopping a person from writing about pretty much any and every social group they can think of in such a way?

All of this is why the original Fred Phelps article was ultimately cut: it is of no value to the site's goal and makes it look like this is a proper place to bring up any and all political grievances. Attempting to justify it by claiming "but they really are evil!" does not change the fact that this is not the place for it or that such an attitude is very ugly.

I came here (this discussion) originally to advocate keeping the article, for reasons similar to A Groupie's, but this remark changed my mind. While we do keep Useful Notes on a lot of real-life groups and organizations, most of those are because a lot of tropes rely on "common" knowledge of those groups. AFAIK, no fiction has come close to depicting the WBC, and no specific tropes rely on knowledge of the WBC: although it is pretty undeniably an example of Religion of Evil, it neither originated nor codified it.

This (IMO) falls under the Rule of Cautious Editing. I'm recommending cutting the article, reluctantly... I think the article's pretty damn powerful, in point of fact, and I'd love to see it replicated somewhere else, but as Ethereal Mutation said, this is neither the place nor the atmosphere for such an article.

How about we keep the article, move it to Useful Notes, and cut the trope list? The article itself is a neutral statement of who they are, what they do and what they believe. That's not an easy thing to find — most sites are either their own and therefore clearly positive, or attack sites, and therefore overwhelmingly negative. And while the WBC itself isn't used much in fiction, it is both satirized and parodied.

Madrugada, it isn't that hard to find. What would someone find here that they wouldn't at The Other Wiki? Moreover, if we cut the trope list what reason would they have for looking here instead? I realize our tongue-in-cheek tone is much more accessable to readers, but we are still a wiki about tropes in fiction and I see this as entirely outside our scope, Useful Notes notwithstanding.

The Useful Notes page has a fairly straight forward criteria enumerated. I don't feel that this page falls under those criteria.

I think it is not, from our perspective, "useful" since the connection to story telling on it are the noting of the documentaries. What would be good would be to have pages on the particular documentaries that dealt with the WBC but this page is stealing their examples.

Although I really like the page, I was going to recommend that it gets cut. For the reasons that have already been stated.

After reading this discussion I'm leaning towards agreeing with the people who think that while it should be removed from the main index it could still be kept in the useful notes.

"AFAIK, no fiction has come close to depicting the WBC." That may have been true at one time, but now we have "Red State" from Kevin Smith, and entirely fictional horror movie inspired by and to some degree based on his experiences with the WBC.

Look up. It got nuked.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU It used to contain useful information.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU It used to contain useful information.