Why Hasn’t President Obama Responded to Westboro Baptist Church White House Petitions?

It has now been about 4 months since petitions regarding the Westboro Baptist Church were started on the White House's website, and there has been no response from President Obama. The original petition to "Legally recognize Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group" went up on December, 14, 2012 and needed 25,000 signatures by January, 13, 2013 to warrant a response from the president.With 353,521 signatures, the petition is the most popular in the history of the "We the People" section of the whitehouse.gov website. Subsequent petitions addressing the Church, including one to "Investigate the IRS tax-exempt status of the Westboro Baptist Church" are also some of the most popular on the "We the People" website. With that being said, why no response to these petitions that so many people cared so much about that they took the time to register with the site and sign?

We looked at some of the other petitions on the site to see what the average response time has been, and what we found was a mixed bag of results. Some petitions were answered very quickly, while others have gone unanswered for quite some time. Here's what the website itself says about how long it will take to respond:

It is very possible that the administration is a bit overwhelmed with petitions as they raised the minimum threshold of signatures required to warrant a response from 25,000 to 100,000 at the end of 2012. Even with that being said, you'd think a prompt response to the most popular petition on the site wouldn't be ignored for too long. We've e-mailed "We the People" and will let you know how they respond when we hear back on the petition.