UGH. Just when I think that Fred Phelps and the God Hates Fags crew can not sink any lower, they find a way to out do themselves. In a press release issued Tuesday, they declared that they will be present to protest the funerals of the people killed in the tragic 35W Bridge Collapse.<>
I don't understand these people. I mean, I do intellectually, but emotionally, I don't understand what happens to a person to turn them into this kind of monster. It turns my stomach to think of what the Phelps family do to their own children to keep propagating their extreme hate rhetoric. In ramming his creepy dogma down their throats, Phelps seems to have successfully extinguished the capacity for empathy and compassion in his progeny. Nicely done, jackass, nicely done.<>
I also really value our still surviving first amendment, and respect that we all deserve to speak our minds and truths, but what the hell happend to etiquette and privacy. This behavior in general is repugnant, but at funerals is really barbaric. I know you all know this. I don't know what answers I'm looking for, I guess there are none. I probably shouldn't have even diaried this according to the diary rules, but everytime I see this horrific extremism get press time, it kills me.
Here is the article that started the diatribe:
Fred Phelps Is Coming
by: Eric Black
Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 10:27:54 AM
The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., plans to stage protests at funerals of victims of the 35W bridge collapse to state that God made the bridge fall because he hates America, and especially Minnesota, because of its tolerance of homosexuality.
The church and its pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps, have become notorious over recent years for their claim that the attack of 9/11 was an act of God's vengeance and their determination to make that case at the funerals of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq.
In a press release issued the day after the bridge collapse, the church called for protests at the funerals and outlined its feelings about the relationship between God's plan and the sins of Minneapolis and Minnesota, which it calls the "land of the Sodomite damned."
Reached at the church, Shirley Phelps Roper, who is both the daughter of the pastor and one of the attorneys for the church, said that America, and Minnesota especially, have alienated God by its tolerance for homosexuality, and that the bridge collapse was an act of God's vengeance. She said:
"The bridge stood in place by the word of God and it fell by the word of God...Each of these little events is just a harbinger of the coming destruction of this American experiment. We are delivering the final call of the doomed nation."
She said, as they have done for years, members of the church would stand "lawfully and peacefully on the public right of way" near the funerals and "put in the air words of praying and instruction and warning."
The signs that the protesters will wave will read:
"God cast down the bridge... Thank God for 9/11... America is doomed... God hates fags... God hates fag enablers... God hates Minnesota."
Cross-posted at Eric Black Ink.
Related:35W Collapse Roundup: Weird News