The founder of the Westboro Baptist Church is clinging to life, despite the combined wishes of the majority of the American population.
Apparently, although the Westboro members refuse to talk about it, Fred was voted out of the church by the other members, according to people like his estranged son, Nate Phelps (who regained his sanity 37 years ago and left the church).
Now, it's possible that the other members of Westboro Baptist Church realized that Fred was the worst person in America, and decided that they didn't want him around any more. It's just as likely, though, that much like the Tea Party and the Republicans, they've decided that Freddy was holding them back from reaching the true depths of hatred available to them.
Here's the thing, though. Our boy Freddy isn't dying because of some unexpected illness or because his body finally got tired of his shit. It appears that he is dying from an extended tantrum.
After Phelps was voted out of Westboro Baptist Church this past summer, he was moved out of the church and into a house, where he was watched to ensure he wouldn’t harm himself, a son estranged from the church said Sunday. Phelps eventually stopped eating and drinking, and on Sunday, he was near death.
And at age of 84, you can't do that to your body, as Fred has apparently just discovered.
So, having warped the minds of at least three generations of followers, Fred has just learned that you can't keep your body running for over eight decades on a diet of hate, and then try to replace it with sadness.
When he finally stops wasting our oxygen, he will not be missed.
The 'reverend' Phelps is at it again, twittering that God Bombed Boston for the same reason God does most of the horrible things he does like letting millions of children die miserably and needlessly and live miserably and hopelessly all over the world -- because they aren't actively persecuting gay people. So busy is the God of Rage and so obsessed with regulating love and sex that he's never had the time to do anything else. You'll notice that he never blew up Sobibor or Auschwitz or wasted his time with chastising the murderers of millions of children in Africa and Asia and yes, even Europe. In fact he must have blown the budget on his flood since he hasn't done shit that looks anything like divine retribution since -- except for the odd bombing or two -- and a lot of threats.
No, what God, or at least Deus ex Wesboro, is about is -- you should pardon the term -- "fags." God just hates 'em, the way Indiana Jones hates snakes or the way I hate preachers. He can't really do much about it though, whether he's in the form of the old man or his son who's also himself or that bird that crept in sometime in the 4th century when they left the window open, other than to use an improvised explosive device against people who can hardly be blamed for not persecuting anyone. Little kids, for instance.
Persecuting gay people isn't something God is good at doing all by himself actually. He needs kids and grown ups with hate in their hearts and not much in their heads. Gay people or doctors who perform abortions or as the commandments stress: abominable people who eat cheeseburgers or hate any of the 613 commandments. The best he can do is kill one or two here or there who have no connection to his weird dislikes and kids are always best. No, those flood days are over for good what with the economy as it is.
Typical of helpless tyrants, what God does best is to make gruesome threats and Phelps quotes Leviticus 26:15-16 where the anonymous author speaking for his version of God, tells anyone who doesn't like all those psychotic prohibitions and commandments:
"I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it."
He quotes the Prophet Micah as saying "Hear ye the Rod and who hath appointed it"
So what I put together from this strange choice of divine inspiration is that we should be concerned with our rods and that our enemies will eat them. You know, I suspect and I suspect that you suspect that Phelps is a bit overly concerned with rods and those who eat what issues from them.
Too bad for him and good for us, that celestial ventriloquist's dummy only speaks with our voice and only says what each of us thinks he does. For my part, I see Phelps' lips moving with desire when God talks about Rods and Staffs and the seed thereof and as the Old man of the Sky happens to be sitting on my knee at the moment, I seem to hear him saying "SUCK IT PHELPS -- YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO."
Anybody who meets me will slowly come to realize that I have no time for religious extremism. Adding even more stupidity to an already illogical belief system is just compounding the brain damage.
On a (potentially unrelated) side note, I like to say that I use Facebook much in the way most people use their refrigerator door: as a place to hang things I find interesting/funny/unbelievable. I think it's a better idea than sticking things to my computer with refrigerator magnets.
(This is not a non-sequiter - it just looks like one. I once worked with an older woman, and one day I caught her using a magnet to put a picture of her grandkids on her hard drive. And just to make it better, she was putting it over her air vents. She didn't appreciate my input on the subject.)
My sister, the Episcopalian priestess, gets a little cranky with my lack of respect for her chosen profession. (By the way, she really dislikes the term "priestess." Just so you know...) She even wrote me, on Facebook, to ask why I kept putting down Christianity, and no other religion. You can probably insert a little "why do you hate god?" into that, too, if you'd like. Entirely subtext, of course.
My answer included the fact that there were plenty of other people out there bashing Islam, so they don't need any help on that front.
But overall, my opinion of religion is pretty much like the somewhat-overused joke:
Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat.
There's a thousand variations on that one, but there it is.
With all that being said, I came across the following video clip, which is worth the ten minutes out of your day that it will take to see it. It's a bit from Russell Brand's talk show, where, inexplicably, two members of the Westboro Baptist Church agreed to appear.
For any of you that are unaware, Westboro Baptist is a cult dedicated to the idea that the Prince of Peace wants them to picket funerals and sporting events holding up colorful signs saying that "God hates fags" and explaining that you're all going to hell.
There's a lot of people out there, who've spent a lot of time and venom talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, so I'll let you look them up on your own. (At this point, all you need to google is "Westboro," so it isn't like the material is difficult to find.)
So, a couple of takeaways from this.
1. Russell Brand has a talk show? I mean, admittedly it's on FX, so how many people actually see it? But still... really?
2. Nobody should be surprised about them appearing on this show. The Westboro Baptists have made a life out of putting themselves on display, so this is just a logical extension of their standard behavior.
3. The guy with the hair, Steve Drain, can at least fake having some kind of charisma. The head-shaver, Timothy Phelps, can hardly hide his disdain for this crowd of heathens. Even when he tries for a crappy joke, his hatred for everyone and everything peeks out: "Well put. Other than the accent, very well put."
3a. Really? You dislike the fact that he's British? When there's so much else to hate there?
4. That being said, Russell Brand definitely came out on top here. (There's no double entendre there. Trust me.) He was polite, kept his audience in line, and, although he was in full Tease mode, he managed to keep it friendly and avoid most of the snark. But he didn't really take it easy on them, either.
Brand: "Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a specific litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings? The Bible wasn't literally written by a cosmic entity. It was written by people."
Drain: "It was written by the holy spirit."
Brand: "The holy spirit ain't got a pen!"
And really, that's the only way to deal with people like that. Point and laugh.
I have a little notebook in which I keep information, links, ideas and names of books or articles I want to explore and, perhaps, write about. Lots of the entries in my notebook never make it onto the blog, especially these days when the big news comes in so hot and fast, even the pros can't catch it. My reflexes ain't what they used to be, anyway, and I deliberately try to avoid sipping from the fire hydrant of televised and daily paper news. Lots of things the rest of the nation knew last week are news to me right this minute. This post is a small collection of things I learned about just this week. Take pity. Pretend to be surprised.
1) We can date the demise of Wall Street as an integral part of the American economy to a 1981 decision made by one man, once known as The King Of Wall Street, John Gutfreund.
I didn't know that. I didn't realize that, according to Michael Lewis in The Big Short, on the day Gutfreund took Salomon Brothers from a private partnership to Wall Street's first publicly traded corporation, Salomon Brothers stopped serving investors and started serving themselves. Of Gutfreund and the subsequent remake of The Street, Lewis writes,
He lifted a giant middle finger in the direction of the moral disapproval of his fellow Wall Street CEO's. And he'd seized the day. He and the other partners not only made a quick killing; they transferred the ultimate financial risk from themselves to their shareholders.
...from that moment, the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished....The customers became, oddly, beside the point.
The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had from turning an investment bank into a public corporation and leveraging its balance sheet with exotic risks, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted, from trust to blind faith.
From there on out, it was all about the CEO's, for whom short-term gain so far outweighed the value of long-term loss that a culture of growing bonuses each year was fostered even when the customers and the stockholders lost money. Even when the government bailed them out of bankruptcy! Without that one little piece, the private-to-public piece, none of it hung together for me.
2) On October 6th, the SCOTUS is scheduled to hear the case of Snyder vs. Phelps, perhaps better known as the case of a grieving father's right to a private funeral for his military son vs. Westboro Baptist Church's right to picket that funeral with signs saying, "Thank God For Dead Soldiers."
I tackled this subject in the spring in "You! What Planet Is This?" and The Wedding Bends. The synopsis is that 20 year old Marine Matthew Snyder died in March, '06, and Fred Phelps' church group picketed his funeral. Matthew's father Albert sued Phelps and his church in '07 for willfully causing emotional distress and invading his privacy. A jury awarded Snyder approximately $11 million, but, in 2009, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond, VA, overturned the verdict and ordered Snyder to pay over $16,500 to Phelps for court costs. Snyder refused to pay.
The 1988 case of Hustler Magazine v. Jerry Falwell, " in which the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous 8-0 decision held the First Amendment's free-speech guarantee prohibits awarding damages to public figures to compensate for emotional distress intentionally inflicted upon them," is cited as precedent. Phelps' daughter, Margie, will represent the family and the church. For Military.com, Craig Trebilcock, one of Snyder's attorneys, was interviewed by Andrew Lubin:
"People want to make this out as free speech," Trebilcock said Monday, "but actually it's about harassment and who is or is not a public figure." He continued "Lance Corporal Snyder was a 20 year-old Marine from Maryland who died in Iraq; how does a church group from Kansas declare him a ‘public figure? Because they're claiming that since the Snyder family ran an obituary in the local newspaper that makes him fair game.
This is a verdict to watch for in October. And, if you ever doubted that it is the exception that proves the rule, here's a chance to watch the exception create the precedent for decades to come. Who ever, in their wildest and most horrible nightmares, could have dreamed up Fred Phelps? If this becomes a First Amendment ruling, then we are powerless in the face of insane and aggressive hatefulness. And there's plenty of that to go around these days. Fred Phelps is not the only demon capable of hiring or siring an attorney.
3) Something good--quick and quickly! There IS a place to listen to both sides in an entirely rational debate format.
Go to Intelligence Squared, where you can watch, download podcasts, and even buy tickets. Foremost authorities gather for classic debates of the most important issues we face. Their motto: Think Twice. This is exactly what I've been looking for.
In the most recent debate, the topic was, "Treat terrorists like enemy combatants, not criminals; for and against." The audience is polled prior to the debate and the outcome charted; after the debate, a re-polling shows the winner. I was naturally gratified to find that the audience agreed with me and with my own previously held position. (I'm so easily naturally gratified, in my opinion it just can't happen too frequently. Ahem.)
Outcome, Sept. 14, 2010
There's a Research In Depth link that provides titles, snippets, and articles used by each side in developing positions. I may disappear into this site, never to be seen again.
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