Fred Phelps Picketing Funerals of Iraq War Dead

Plaid Adder

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Thu Jun-16-05 08:31 AM
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Fred Phelps Picketing Funerals of Iraq War Dead

Edited on Thu Jun-16-05 08:34 AM by Plaid Adder

The "Reverend" Fred Phelps, of Westboro Baptist Church, has opened a new chapter in hatefulness. He has now announced plans to go around the country protesting at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

Gee, you may be saying. This Fred Phelps guy, isn't he the asshole who used to protest the funerals of AIDS victims, and picketed at the funeral of Matthew Shepard after he got gay-bashed to death, and showed up at that church in Oklahoma trying to demand that they excommunicate that gay kid whose coming out story was in the paper, and generally has been obsessed with taking homophobia far outside the boundaries where even the most rabid Christian fundamentalists normally go? Why is he now targeting soliders' funerals? Were they gay?

No. Phelps is doing this because, he says, his church was bombed, and so God is now blowing up these American soldiers in revenge.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/228401_westboro14.html

Go ahead, read it again. It won't help.

Phelps's point, if he has one, is that these soldiers are dying because God is pissed off at America for having rejected Phelps's message, and because God was so angry that someone put out a hit on his buddy's church that he's now blowing up American soldiers who even Phelps is not crazy enough to suggest had anything to do with it. The only connection appears to be the involvement of an explosion.

Now, I have been following Phelps for a long time, and usually shit that he does that shocks and appalls people who are reading about the Phelps clan for the first time just rolls right off my back. I've always figured that Phelps actually does more good than harm, despite his unbelievably hateful intentions, because he demonstrates to all the better-socialized homophobes how truly ugly and insane homophobia can get. There are several stories out there over the years of Phelps going to some conservative town with his portable theater of lunacy and causing everyone in said town, no matter what their political affiliations, to unite in opposition to him. Usually the Phelps counter-protests are much larger than anything he can mount and also eminently better-behaved. Often I'll go into LBN and see some thread of people outraging about some right-wing Christian thing that's just way more insane than normal and I'll think, "Must be Fred Phelps," and I'm right.

This, however, throws one for a loop. For no reason that makes sense to anybody other than himself, Phelps is about to disrupt the funerals of American soldiers who were killed in action. I sure hope the people of Boise are preparing a traditional Phelps welcome for him. In the meantime, I think this puts his past career, and the history of right-wing evangelical homophobia in general, in an interesting light:

What this really shows is that all of this crap with the AIDS victims and Matthew Shepard and so on was never really about *us.* Phelps is, for some reason, completely stuffed full of hatred for everyone except for himself, his 'church' (which is mostly his family, who must all be sadly warped by all this), and his projection of God--who is, like many versions of God, as bitter, hateful, vicious, and insane as Phelps himself--and he is driven to put that hatred on display in the most painful and inappropriate ways he can dream up. He has always seemed to take pleasure in hurting people, especially people who are grieving, and in abusing people at a time when they are hurting so badly already that almost anyone else in the country would feel bound to show compassion.

This latest phase provides support for something I had always suspected: that Phelps's apparent hatred of gay people was, fundamentally, opportunism. Consciously or not, he identified the one form of bigotry that is still socially acceptable (not the only one that still exists, but the only one that a politician can still profess openly and lustily without fear of electoral consequences) and used it as his primary outlet for whatever unfathomable rage at humanity is driving him. He hated gay people, as opposed to anyone else, because that would give him a license to publicly inflict pain on other people under the guise of political protest. Because homophobia is still considered an ideological/political/moral stance, rather than just plain ol' hatefulness, Phelps was able to act out his depraved fantasies and have people treat it as political speech.

Well, now apparently he's not making enough headlines doing that--the act has gotten old--so he has decided to target a new population, and again, in his addled brain he's picking a venue where he can pretend that what he's doing is political protest rather than personal cruelty. Because these people have died in the American military and in an American war, their lives and deaths are now unavoidably political. Except that I don't know of anyone in the anti-war movement who would consider picketing the funerals of soldiers either acceptable or useful as a protest strategy, and unlike gay people, the American war dead are supposed to be as venerated and beloved as AIDS victims were, back in Phelps's prime, abjected and feared.

So, Phelps is off to Idaho to interefere with a soldier's funeral. Were I merely vindictive, I would hope that someone there will finally give Phelps the ass-kicking that most of his other opponents have held back out of respect for the first amendment and the right to protest. But what I really hope is that straight people will watch this amazing spectacle and see fundamentalist homophobia for what it really is: unreasoning, unjustified hatred bursting into public view through the only outlet that our society still explicitly authorizes. And that gay people will realize, once and for all, that this hatred is attached to us only because we are vulnerable, and not because we have done anything to deserve it.

:puke:

The Plaid Adder