- REPUBLIC, Mo. (AP) -- There are times, Jean Webb admits freely, when she
thinks of running, just as far and as fast as she can from this quiet little
town that has become her personal hell.
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- The times when the phone rings and a
caller lets loose with a string of obscenities. The times when a formerly
amiable supermarket clerk sees her in line and closes the register. The
times when a neighbour stands outside and shouts that Webb is a witch who
will face eternal damnation for what she's done.
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- "There is a part of me that would
just love to pack and run," says this outgoing, 36-year-old mother
of two teenagers who, in fact, considers herself a witch. "But if
I did that, all it would do would send them a message. That if there was
any other minority they dislike, all they would have to do is be nasty
to them and they would run."
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- And so Webb, who was born and raised
a Baptist, married in the Baptist church and then, in her mid-20s, converted
to the pagan faith Wicca, says she is in this fight for the long haul.
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- She won't run and she won't drop the
lawsuit she and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed against this
bedroom community just west of Springfield for refusing to remove the fish
symbol of Christianity from its city seal.
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- It's not a battle she takes lightly,
the curly-haired woman says as she sits down to talk one recent day in
a living room filled with candles, incense, stone tablets and -- this one
is a joke, she says with a chuckle -- a witch's broom.
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- "I know how important the ichthus
symbol is to some people," she says of the small, simple fish drawing
that has graced the city seal since 1990. It's as important, she realizes,
as her symbols are to her.
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- Ichthus is the English transliteration
of, the Greek word for fish. The Greek letters form an acrostic for "Jesus
Christ God's Son Saviour." The two arcs which make up the fish were
used in early Christianity as a sign that one was among brothers. One arc
would have been made in the dirt by one person and the other person would
complete it with another arc. As a result the fish has become a Christian
symbol.
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- But such symbols don't belong on a government
seal, Webb says, adding that having the fish there is not only a violation
of the constitutional separation of church and state but also a signal
that Republic is a town where only Christians are welcome.
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- Mayor Doug Boatright and other supporters
of the symbol say it was never placed there to foster discrimination, only
to reflect the community's deep commitment to religious values.
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- But Webb says for her it has become a
symbol of hatred in a town of 6,000 people that she and her family moved
to three years ago because everyone seemed so nice.
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- She, her late husband, Ed, her 14-year-old
daughter, Jessica, and her 16-year-old son, Jeff, settled in a tidy new
house so much on the edge of town that one door down the neighbourhood
turns into an open field and then becomes the woods.
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- The field, Webb says, is where her children
once played for hours until people began painting the huge rock there with
graffiti accusing Jessica of being a devil worshiper.
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- They are words she said her daughter
heard before, in school in Aurora, a rural town 25 kilometres south that
the Webbs left behind. She had been openly Wiccan there.
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- Wicca, which comes from the Old English
word for witch, celebrates seasonal and life cycles using rituals from
pre-Christian Europe.
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- But when she arrived in Republic she
and her family decided not to mention her beliefs.
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- "We even considered attending the
Baptist church as a cover," she says now.
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- Meanwhile, her children made friends
at school, and Webb landed a job at the local newspaper, The Republic Monitor,
where the flexible hours allowed her to care for her 61-year-old husband,
who died Aug. 30 of emphysema.
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- The first she heard of the dispute over
the fish was when a man came to the weekly newspaper last February to complain
that the ACLU was threatening to take the city to court because someone
had objected.
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- "He was very hyperactive and the
editor said, 'Just blow him off,'" she recalls. "He said this
is not an issue we're going to get involved in."
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- But then she went to a rancorous Board
of Aldermen meeting where it was decided to keep the fish, an experience
that moved her to write an editorial opposing the symbol.
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- Soon after it was published, she says,
she was fired, and she can only assume it was over the editorial and the
controversy it stirred. The newspaper declines to discuss her departure.
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- On July 1, less than a month after leaving
the newspaper, she became the plaintiff in the suit brought by the ACLU.
A trial is probably a year away, said ACLU lawyer Dick Kurtenbach.
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- In the meantime, she said, she hasn't
been able to find another job, and her daughter has taken so much abuse
at school that she is being schooled at home.
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- She is suing, Webb says, not for the
money or the attention but because she believes she is right.
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- She reluctantly accepted a plaque last
week from the ACLU, which praised her courage. Then, when she took it home
and hung it on the wall, Jessica told her she was proud of her.
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- "Do you have teenage daughters?"
she asks a reporter before saying goodbye. "Do you know how hard it
is to get one of them to say that?"
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