Fred Phelps
I feel a bit guilty for picking Fred Phelps as today’s Enemy of the People, as he’s such an easy target. For the uninitiated, he’s the Pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church - or perhaps more commonly known as “the ‘God Hates Fags’ twat”. You’ve probably seen him on various documentaries, where the likes of Louis Theroux and Keith Allen have gone over to America to meet his crackpot family, and filming the freakshow for the telly.
Phelps though, deserves his place on this website because he is a thoroughly awful man. Aside from his hilarious godhatessweden.com, a website celebrating the 2004 Tsunami apparently killing a lot of Swedes because they’re gay or something, and the newer godhatesireland.com (I assure you these are not a parody), and the original godhatesfags.com, Phelps and the Westboro Baptists are perhaps best known for protesting soldiers funerals. No, really. Not against the war (which would still be an awful thing to do at a funeral, obviously), but against gay people… even if the soldier wasn’t gay.
His bizarre justification for this, is as tenuous as his grip on reality - the logic is something like that the soldiers are American, and America is a country of “fag enablers”, and therefore… I don’t know what the “therefore” is, it exists completely outside of the bounds of reason. “Fag enabler“ being a term that was presumably coined by Phelps, as a synonymn for “normal people”.
Basically, Phelps and his family are about as close as nature can get to self-parody. The amazing thing though is that they’re not some great satire, and are a real, terrifying, hateful bunch.
The best way to understand why its easy to hate Phelps and the Westboro Baptist is simply to search YouTube or Google for them. If you have a funny link about them, post it in the comments, as I can’t get enough of them.
Posted on May 24th, 2008 at 15:44Categories: Religious Figures |
