If you were asked to describe the ideology of the Westboro Baptist Church in one word, what would it be? Heinous or offensive? Ludicrous or absurd? All four would be fitting. In response to these hateful Westboro protestors, students at Brandeis voiced ideas to the organizers of the counterprotest directly, attended an open meeting in the Castle Commons and posted comments on the event's Facebook page.

Organizers ultimately decided to hold a "Celebrate Brandeis" event to reaffirm support for the Brandeis community internally and raise money for Keshet, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Jews.

Friday's on-campus festivities could have taken on a different tone, though. As many students already know, the WBC did not only make an appearance at Brandeis this past Friday.

In addition to stints at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Mass. and at Framingham High School, the WBC staged a protest outside the Harvard University Hillel. That means Harvard students faced the same debate we saw at Brandeis in the weeks leading up to the announced protest.

According to a recent Harvard Crimson article, though, Harvard students chose a different method of response. Organizers of the counter-protest held a "Surprise Absurdity Protest" to mock the beliefs and values of the WBC. It was "a whimsical event" that included "live music, food, and signs with sayings such as 'God hates figs' and 'The sky is too blue.'" Though this is obviously an amusing demonstration, I think Harvard's protest organizers made a mistake in choosing this type of response.

Honestly, I'm happy the WBC came to Brandeis to protest. As members of a university community, we live somewhat in a bubble, where controversial discussion is almost always conducted in an atmosphere of intellectual sophistication.

Take, for example, the on-campus debate sparked by the recent Israeli Occupation Awareness Week. As contentious as the discussion eventually became, participants supported their arguments with rationality and acted respectfully towards one another.

Unfortunately, we cannot say the same for members of the WBC, whose presence on Friday was a healthy reminder that we do not live in a world of totally lucid, intelligent and like-minded people like the ones who surround us in college.

Thomas Jefferson wrote after Shay's Rebellion in 1787 that "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing" to act as a check on government. The same principle applies to the WBC protest at Brandeis. It may have come as a shock, but we were reminded on Friday that there are a lot of stupid and hateful people out there in the real world who refuse to listen to debate or reason.

Harvard's "Absurdity" protest missed an opportunity to take the WBC seriously. Harvard students decided to scoff at the church's despicable and archaic values instead of recognizing them as a true threat.

This is a kind of snobbery that refuses to consider extremist fringe views as even worthy of notice. In choosing its own, more sophisticated method of response to the protest on Dec. 3, Brandeis student organizers also subconsciously chose to treat the WBC as a legitimate organization representing a serious and established point of view. And rightly so.

The WBC's values are hardly as radical as those images of 6-year-olds holding "God Hates Fags" picket signs would suggest. Though their hateful language and well-publicized stunts, like protests at soldiers' funerals, make the church members obvious extremists, some of their views are shared by more moderate thinkers. It seems to me that their beliefs echo a fair amount of what one hears daily in mainstream American public life. Among its other controversial claims, the WBC's website declares its belief that United States President Barack Obama is both the Antichrist and a closeted Muslim.

While I doubt most Americans would agree with the statement found on the church's website, "The Antichrist Bloody Beast Obama is going to become king of the world," we should remember that, according to a Pew Research Poll from August 2010, one in five Americans believes that Obama is a Muslim. And though most do not outspokenly sympathize with the WBC slogan, "Fags are nature freaks," gay Americans are denied full civil rights, and our elected representatives still question the merits of allowing gays to openly serve in the military.

I hope one day we can all laugh at the Westboro Baptist Church's obsolete and irrelevant protests in the midst of our future enlightened society. On that same day, I'm sure I will turn on the news and hear nothing of hate crimes, terrorism and religious intolerance.

But Friday was not that day, and until it comes, we should be wary of laughing in the face of groups and ideas that reflect opinions that are not uncommon in contemporary political discourse.

Until we as reasonable individuals adopt this mindset, we cannot be sure that extremists will not be the ones who ultimately have the last laugh.