Is Fred Phelps Gay?

[rdubwiley]

[DeSwiss]

1. Anything is possible.....

gay [gey] Show IPA
adjective, gay·er, gay·est.

1. of, pertaining to, or exhibiting sexual desire or behavior directed toward a person or persons of one's own sex; homosexual: a gay couple.

2. of, indicating, or supporting homosexual interests or issues: a gay organization.

3. having or showing a merry, lively mood: gay spirits; gay music. Synonyms: cheerful, gleeful, happy, glad, cheery, lighthearted, joyous, joyful, jovial; sunny, lively, vivacious, sparkling; chipper, playful, jaunty, sprightly, blithe.

4. bright or showy: gay colors; gay ornaments. Synonyms: colorful, brilliant, vivid, intense, lustrous; glittering, theatrical, flamboyant. Antonyms: dull, drab, somber, lackluster; conservative.

5. Slang: Often Disparaging and Offensive. awkward, stupid, or bad; lame: This game is really gay.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gay

- Well, prolly not #3.....

K&R

[center][/center]

[longship]

4. R&K just for the Larson toon. nt

[Liberalagogo]

2. GAWD...I hope not....

Do NOT need or want that thing playing for my team.

[rdubwiley]

3. BAHAHAHAH

This is the greatest response.

[sulphurdunn]

5. It's been suggested that Hitler's

SA and SS were well represented by creatures like Fred Phelps.

[FreeState]

9. Only by hate groups - its false information

It's been suggested by Scott Lively, a man that heads a hate group, not sure I'd be spreading what he's spewing...

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/spring/holy-war/making-myths

Anti-Gay Religious Crusaders Claim Homosexuals Helped Mastermind the Holocaust
Anti-gay religious crusaders claim homosexuals helped mastermind the Holocaust. They're not telling the truth

...

The Pink Swastika has been promoted by anti-gay groups like the Family Defense Council. The FDC's Dr. Howard Hurwitz called the book "a thoroughly researched, eminently readable, demolition of the 'gay' myth, symbolized by the pink triangle, that the Nazis were anti-homosexual."

In fact, while the number of homosexuals who died in the Holocaust does not approach the number of Jewish or Gypsy victims, the historical record shows that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality (or suspicion of it) under the Nazi regime. They were routinely sent to concentration camps and marked with a pink triangle on their prison garb.

They were not systematically exterminated. But huge numbers are believed to have died in the work camps, along with an untold number of homosexual Jews, Gypsies and other "defectives" who were sent to extermination camps.

The myth that Nazis condoned or promoted homosexuality sprang up as a slander against Nazi leaders by their socialist opponents in the 1930s. Only one of the half-dozen leaders in Hitler's inner circle, Ernest Rohm, is believed by credible historians to have been gay.

[sulphurdunn]

11. I checked out the link.

Because I suggested that people like Phelps were represented in the hierarchy of the Nazi Party does not suggest by a country mile that I am "spreading what he is spewing." Are you suggesting that gays are never involved in the persecution of other homosexuals? The recent history of republican party politics and fundamentalist religion in this country should disabuse you of any such notion if you do.

[FreeState]

12. Did you follow the link?

You said (bolding mine).

It's been suggested that Hitler's SA and SS were well represented by creatures like Fred Phelps.

The link I sent said ONE person is agreed to be gay. ONE. Not well represented in my opinion. Im talking about the false notion that the Nazi's were "well represented" by gays.

As to current times, I can count about 20 that have been closet cases, out of how many thousand?

[sulphurdunn]

13. After The Night of the Long Knives,

the murder of Ernst Rohm and the rest of the SA leadership, the message went out loud and clear that gays were enemies of the state and to be persecuted along with Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, non-whites, communists, unionist, Masons and anyone else who didn't fit the ideological profile. Before that, gays had not been targeted directly by the Nazi Party. Afterward, the Nazi Party's closet would have been as safe a place as any, especially if they'd survived the initial purges. As regards the number of such people, no one knows, but the idea that there were only 20 gays in the ranks of the SS and SA, let alone the entire party apparatus, is just not credible. During the course of the war the Wehrmacht conscripted most able bodied men. Gay conscripts would have know better than to reveal themselves, or they would have been shot. There is just no way to remove Germany's gays from the horrors the Nazis committed, both as victims and as perpetrators.

[FreeState]

16. Yet Another Historian Refutes ‘Gay Nazi’ Claim

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/08/29/yet-another-historian-refutes-gay-nazi-claim/

But as Zimmerman writes in his editorial, Lively’s “history” has nothing to do with reality. Rather than encouraging or coddling gays, he says, the Nazis banned homosexual activity as early as 1935. And in 1936, the Nazi Party established a Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. In 1941, Hitler ordered the death penalty for any SS and police members found guilty of homosexual activity. Between 1933 and 1945, Zimmerman says “the Nazis arrested roughly 100,000 men as homosexuals.” Most were sent to prison, but “between 5,000 and 15,000″ ended up in concentration camps, where they were forced to wear pink triangles. Many died.

These facts have long been known to virtually all serious World War II historians and, in fact, were highlighted earlier this month, when the last known gay survivor of Hitler’s concentration camps died.

Lively’s book has been discredited by other legitimate historians (see here, here and here), but that doesn’t stop people like Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for government and public policy at the American Family Association (AFA) from using it as a way to demonize LGBT people (the SPLC lists AFA as an anti-gay hate group). Nor does it stop antigovernment conspiracy sites like World Net Daily (WND) from hawking the book. Joseph Farah, editor of WND, brushes off criticism of The Pink Swastika and instead says that “[t]he book more than stands up to all the attacks I’ve seen, most of which are completely baseless.” That from a man who’s sure President Obama wasn’t born in this country and who publishes articles on his site like this one, in which the writer claims that soybeans cause homosexuality.

There is an irony to all of this. As Zimmerman points out in his editorial, before Hitler came to power, rampant anti-gay prejudice in Nazi circles was highlighted by German socialists and communists as a way to discredit Hitler and his hateful party. And now anti-gay groups are using claims of Nazism to discredit LGBT people. What a tangled web they weave.

[sulphurdunn]

19. The right wing loonies

are suggesting that gays comprised a movement and a power structure of their own within the Nazi Party. I never endorsed such a claim. The point I have been trying to make is that it would not have been virtually impossible for there not to have been gay Nazis, willing to send other gays to concentration camps or to commit mass murder. Certainly, you are not suggesting that gay people were only victims of the Nazi terror and no more than 20 of them aided and abetted their crimes?

[Gravitycollapse]

23. Again, you are explaining that which is tacitly understood.

That some Nazis were probably gay is not really a great revelation.

[sulphurdunn]

27. Apparently it is.

By your reasoning, 20 gay Nazis, more or less, is "some" in an organization that had 5 million members.

[Gravitycollapse]

29. I have claimed no such thing. And neither has anyone else.

They stated that there are only a handful of documented closeted homosexuals out of thousands. Not that there were literally only 20 homosexuals in the entire Wehrmacht.

What isn't true is your initial claim that people like Fred Phelps were "well represented" among the Nazis.

[sulphurdunn]

32. I think that evidence

of 20 documented claims of closeted homosexuals is less compelling than the inference that the Nazi Party would have been a natural home for people like Fred Phelps. That was my original argument. If the psychiatrist are correct, it normally takes a powerful lot of physical and emotional abuse early in life, self-loathing, guilt and anger later to produce a Fred Phelps. Whether Phelps is gay or straight is really immaterial. What matters is that the ranks of the Nazi Party, especially the SA and SS were well represented by such people.

[Gravitycollapse]

34. Your original post is implying that Phelps was gay.

And that such self-loathing homosexuals were "well represented" in the Nazi party.

[sulphurdunn]

39. My original post read:

"It's been suggested that the ranks of Hitler's SA and SS were well represented by creatures like Fred Phelps." I stand by it. You may read what you will into it.

[Gravitycollapse]

20. The poster doesn't understand why his or her argument is offensive.

So they won't understand why you're posting those articles.

The argument that homosexuals hid in the Nazi party is an argument from the anti-gay right. It always has been. But if one is ignorant of the history of his or her own argument, he or she will not understand why it's ultimately offensive.

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

6. most likely

he obviously has major unresolved issues, if he feels so threatened by gay folks.

[PolitFreak]

7. Bank on it

Literally, he doth protest too much!

[Gravitycollapse]

8. Being homophobic means you're gay like being racist means you're black.

[FreeState]

10. +1

The vast majority of anti-gay people are heterosexual.

[sulphurdunn]

14. You might want to check

the recent history of the republican party, evangelical Christianity and the Catholic Church.

[Gravitycollapse]

15. You might want to realize that those examples are cherry picked.

[sulphurdunn]

17. Are they accurate?

My point is that gay people are no better or worse than other people, regardless of what either homophobes or homophiles may say to the contrary.

[Gravitycollapse]

18. The question is whether they are representative. Not whether they are accurate.

The argument often made by those on the left is that homophobic conservatives are harboring deep, latent homosexuality. Which is inherently flawed on two accounts. The first is that it's not an easily observed phenomenon and thus will always be speculative. The second is that it is a claim that inadvertently stigmatizes homosexuality as the product of a disturbed mind.

[sulphurdunn]

21. Certainly, there are people

like that, and most certainly heterosexuality is not a precondition for being a conservative anymore than it is for anything else. The only people left in this culture who are willing to denigrate gays as a group are conservatives. If one is a gay conservative wishing to move up in the movement, it is not unreasonable to assume that such people as you describe would exist within the conservative movement. That is not to say that they are many or that they are necessarily powerful, only that they are there.

[Gravitycollapse]

22. And, to be honest, I think we're smart enough to know that without you telling us.

We don't need people parroting over our shoulders that gay conservatives exists. We aren't stupid.

[sulphurdunn]

24. If you are (specifically) then why

have we been having this discussion?

[Gravitycollapse]

25. Because I'm trying to explain why you are being offensive.

This isn't a discussion more than it is myself trying to tell you something and you not understanding.

[sulphurdunn]

28. Then say it in plain English.

Forget the data, and just tell me why you are offended. It was my intention to posit an argument suggesting that gay people cannot be better or worse than other people, because they are people, nothing more, nothing less. If I have given offense by this, that was not my intention, and I apologize.

[Gravitycollapse]

31. I've already told you why what you said was offensive. I will not explain it again.

[Deep13]

26. He's wrong. It doesn't matter if he's gay. nt

[LiberalElite]

30. Does a Bear S**t in the Woods? eom

[Smarmie Doofus]

33. Insulting premise:

Only someone who's gay could be so crazy.

Gee whiz. Straight people never seem to do anything wrong, do they?

Even when they hate , insult , and even KILL gays it must be BECAUSE they AREN'T straight !


And the NAZIs must have been gay too! An added BONUS!!!!!

Otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to round up gays and put 'em in concentration camps!

This thread sucks. ( Are YOU gay?)

[Gravitycollapse]

35. It's not just this thread...

It's a commonly held sentiment amongst those on the left.

There is always the drive to define homosexuality as pathological.

[Smarmie Doofus]

36. I know. I know.

But they never seem to get it.

One more try: back to the Nazis and European anti-Semitism generally. There are some good analogies to be had there.


Historically, some anti-Semites and prominent persecutors of Jews were ex-Jews, Christianized Jews, descendants of people who had converted ( forcibly in many cases) to Christianity; that is: Christians w. Jewish ancestry.

Historians have written much of this in a connection to the Spanish Inquisition and there has been non-crazy speculation that Hitler himself might have had ( or might have thought he did) a biological Jewish parent or grandparent.

Point: Individuals like this did NOT create the conditions that resulted in the holocaust. They did not create the condition of 2000 years of Christian hostility which set up a culture of anti-Semitism and set the stage for the extermination of virtually all of European Jewry.

Christian anti-Semitism did that. In exactly the same way a few insecure gays who wish they were straight are not the CAUSE of the persecution of LGBT people in this society.

It is rather the historical and relentless insistence by the straight 90% majority that homosexuality is a defect ---- moral, medical, social; what have you ---- and that homosexuals are therefore defective in those ways, that is responsible for the marginalized status that LGBT's "enjoy" today.

In short... even if Fred Phelps is gay... and there isn't an IOTA of evidence to suggest he is... it doesn't fucking MATTER. Straight, majoritarian assumptions about what is and is not considered normal and acceptable are the problem for LGBT s in this particular society in the year 2013.

[Neoma]

37. Huh...

I don't think he's gay. If you're going the "he might be" gossip route, than my argument is that he was more likely raped and shamed for being homosexual for having been raped.

[Kalidurga]

38. I hope not...

I also don't think so. I think he is just a jerk. He might have some kind of mental illness. But, I am not going to give him a pass on that or declare he defiantly does, but it doesn't seem like it can be healthy to hate so much. Or maybe it's all just a big ole Poe.