Walking through the quad late in the afternoon on Sept. 4, you may have witnessed a verbal battle between SF State students and members of the Cry to God Ministry, an ultraconservative, anti-gay Christian group. While the visitors claimed the reason they came was to "turn people away from sin" and promote their Christian values, it appeared the primary reason for their stop in such a liberal area was to frustrate and cause conflict among the SF State community. If so, they got their wish.

"The words that I use have no malice, no hatred and no malicious intent in them," wrote 20-year-old minister Kevin Farrer on the Cry to God Web site, "even though sometimes at that moment it sounds like a hard word."

If the rally was intended to cause pandemonium, the Cry to God Ministry succeeded.

Students using hate to decry messages of hate allowed the group to create a big enough scene to get their name known. Perhaps if the students realized that arguing with the evangelists was a waste of time and ignored them, the group might have given up.

Although it's fine to fight for what you believe in, there's a point where one needs to realize that some people's minds just won't change.

It's important to realize that regardless of how ridiculous some people's beliefs may seem, challenging a person's faith will do nothing but cause unnecessary drama. The power to cause conflict, not spur intellectual debate, was the Cry to God Ministry's only strength. If we ignore them next time, we won't give them this power.

Farrer appeared on campus in 2007, and has said that SF State had the angriest reaction out of all the colleges he visited, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Stanford. The demonstration at SF State was filmed for safety reasons, Farrer said, in case any students became violent.

Fred Phelps, a minister with the same mindset as the Cry to God Ministry, is another person who gets press because of his outrageous beliefs. According to nndb.com, Phelps has been responsible for over 22,000 anti-gay protests from 1991 to 2005 and became famous when he protested the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old who was murdered for his sexual orientation in 1998. Phelps' family, the main members of his church, are known to wait for someone in their group to get arrested and sue on first amendment grounds, creating the same type of "victim" publicity Cry to God intended to create.

The SF State community doesn't need to fight with a hate group in order to get our more tolerant messages across. Let them have their beliefs, because if we're all really going to hell like they say we are, at least we'll have friends there.