ABSTRACT
The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is infamous for its protests, often at sensitive events like funerals and against the LGBTQ community, as well as its efforts to attach sexual politics to military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (Brouwer & Hess, 2007; Schrader & Rief, 2012). Previous scholarly work has investigated reactions by the Supreme Court to WBC protest strategies (Schrader & Rief, 2012) as well as the “vernacular responses” of counter-protesters (Brouwer & Hess, 2007); however, signifi cant work remains to understand the WBC’s role in U.S. culture. Importantly, unpacking how the WBC has been counter-protested remains a largely unfi nished task that may highlight what the WBC’s wider rhetorical context can tell scholars about the study of public argument.
