Over 2,500 HuffPost citizen journalists have helped provide comprehensive coverage of the Tax Day Tea Party protests . Click here for the latest photos and video .To join our citizen reporting team, sign-up here . While a majority of the protesters who attended tea parties across the nation convened to oppose to taxes, many conservatives viewed these gatherings as a platform to voice their other political grievances. Dan Diviney , one of over 2,500 HuffPost citizen reporters who signed up to cover the Tea Parties, found that pervasive griping about taxes served as a backdrop for other issues that elicited more vehement outrage from attendees; the majority of citizen reporters submitted dispatches that illustrated a similar environment at their local event. Diviney described a religious fundamentalist couple in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who warned the crowd against “the wrath of God” and abortion. Jon Dixon quoted Lee Carter, a tea party organizer in Roanoke, Virginia who said to the crowd, “It is impossible for Barack Obama to love America when he spends your money to kill babies.” The diversity of grievances belies the viral growth of anti-tax tea parties through various conservative networks, each with its own hot-button issue. Aggressive promotion by Fox News also spurred high turnout. In Toledo, Ohio, RJ Walker said of the twelve people she spoke to before the rally, “All were Fox News viewers and heard about the party by watching Fox.” Estimations of nation-wide attendance range from Nate Silver’s reasoned approximation of 250,000 protesters to Mike Huckabee’s cavalier estimation of six million, which he gave live on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Show. Tanner McCracken reported from Hoover, Alabama, which hosted one of the largest gatherings in the country: “Though no official figures are available, the estimated attendance as announced during the rally was over 7,000. As dubious as this claim may be, the traffic this event garnered was undeniable; the normally 20-to-25-minute drive from downtown Birmingham to Veterans Park took me an hour and a half. The event was emceed by locally-based, nationally syndicated radio hosts Rick Burgess and Bill “Bubba” Bussey, who riled up the crowd with conservative jokes ranging from homeland security “spies” keeping tabs on the “right-wing extremists,” to hunting Somali pirates with deer rifles.” The heavily attended parties appeared to veer the furthest away from tax related issues. At another large rally, this one in Phoenix, Jake Tommerup reported that while “the most popular theme did seem to be an aversion to taxes,” many of the hand written signs were considerably off topic. In addition to mass-produced visuals like the yellow and black “Taxed Enough Already” signs seen at other T.E.A. parties around the country, numerous verbose hand-lettered signs expressing sentiments about everything from government to guns suggested that the mostly white crowd here was largely comprised of Ron Paul supporters, Constitution Party fans, NRA members, McCain-Palin voters and Republican Party sympathizers. One sign in Chicago even took aim at the Huffington Post, reports Daniel Hough who spoke to the sign-bearer. I politely asked her what her sign said and she held it up proudly for me to take a picture and added just as proudly, “they’re liberals!” I could not help myself and leaned in slightly, smiled and in a friendly way said “…so am I.” Her face immediately contorted into rage, and she blurted out, “You can’t be here. You have to leave!” I smiled and politely told her, no I didn’t, it’s a free country and I can go where I want in a public place, especially in the city where I live, and a block from where I work.
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Teabaggers Stray Off Topic, HuffPosters Report