This shit has got to stop!
Rev. Fred Phelps has been successfully sued by the family of a marine killed in Iraq whose funeral his acolytes protested.
I know, protesting a funeral … there are baton-charged hippies spinning in their ponchos right now.
Whatever your feelings about Phelps and his horrid brood making this decision by the courts (a 5million dollar payout by Phelps has been awarded) a freedom of speech issue is making the aggravating error of misapplication of merit.
Phelps’ family have the right to spew their hateful and idiotic nonsense as much as they like. Everyone does (it’s the basic justification for nearly everything I write). Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing and probably the single most important right that has ever been enshrined by the people of the so-called free world.
It does not, however, extend to the “freedom-to-harass-innocent-people-with-religious-gobbledygook”.
Phelps’, for those who don’t know, is the reverend of his own Church whose fire and brimstone revivalism makes some Taliban clerics blush. He orchestrated various websites (many of which has disappeared off the internet) such as godhatesfags.com, godhatesamerica.com and godhatesireland.com. The central tenant of his pseudo-christian sect seems to boil down to “If you don’t do what I like, you are a fag!” … just quite what Phelps means by fag is a little hazy. Apparently it means everyone who has anything remotely liberal to say, anything that is not 100% pure white-Anglo-protestant (hmmm?), anything gay, anything foreign, anything Jewish, anything fun, anything that encourages freedom, anything that is pleasurable … anything at all really.
One of the major tactics employed by the church is to travel thousands of miles to the funerals of US Military personnel killed in Iraq (a step up from the funerals of teenage football stars) to declare them “Fags!” and to pray for “more dead kids” because “God hates you!” – in a sense I like this pathetic caricature of a man. At least he is keeping the real kill-em-all attitude of the Old Testament alive – something God Himself was apparently unable to do (presumably because he was a Fag or a Jew or some such).
It’s yet another example of people imitating the internet … a real life “troll”.
So, I will defend Phelps’ right to say whatever loose-brained nonsense comes to him in a pre-senile dream – but I will not extend my support to him harassing innocent people, causing yet more pain to families of people killed in a war they didn’t want, hijacking of peoples private grief for advertising purposes or causing a traffic disturbance with colourful and homophobic slogans.
It does invite the question though (to paraphrase Mark Thomas) If you are the omnipotent and omnipresent creator deity, why choose a mealy-mouthed right-wing homophobe as your spokesman? If man is created in gods image and Phelps’ is an example, we can only assume God to be a twat!
Rev. Fred Phelps has been successfully sued by the family of a marine killed in Iraq whose funeral his acolytes protested.
I know, protesting a funeral … there are baton-charged hippies spinning in their ponchos right now.
Whatever your feelings about Phelps and his horrid brood making this decision by the courts (a 5million dollar payout by Phelps has been awarded) a freedom of speech issue is making the aggravating error of misapplication of merit.
Phelps’ family have the right to spew their hateful and idiotic nonsense as much as they like. Everyone does (it’s the basic justification for nearly everything I write). Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing and probably the single most important right that has ever been enshrined by the people of the so-called free world.
It does not, however, extend to the “freedom-to-harass-innocent-people-with-religious-gobbledygook”.
Phelps’, for those who don’t know, is the reverend of his own Church whose fire and brimstone revivalism makes some Taliban clerics blush. He orchestrated various websites (many of which has disappeared off the internet) such as godhatesfags.com, godhatesamerica.com and godhatesireland.com. The central tenant of his pseudo-christian sect seems to boil down to “If you don’t do what I like, you are a fag!” … just quite what Phelps means by fag is a little hazy. Apparently it means everyone who has anything remotely liberal to say, anything that is not 100% pure white-Anglo-protestant (hmmm?), anything gay, anything foreign, anything Jewish, anything fun, anything that encourages freedom, anything that is pleasurable … anything at all really.
One of the major tactics employed by the church is to travel thousands of miles to the funerals of US Military personnel killed in Iraq (a step up from the funerals of teenage football stars) to declare them “Fags!” and to pray for “more dead kids” because “God hates you!” – in a sense I like this pathetic caricature of a man. At least he is keeping the real kill-em-all attitude of the Old Testament alive – something God Himself was apparently unable to do (presumably because he was a Fag or a Jew or some such).
It’s yet another example of people imitating the internet … a real life “troll”.
So, I will defend Phelps’ right to say whatever loose-brained nonsense comes to him in a pre-senile dream – but I will not extend my support to him harassing innocent people, causing yet more pain to families of people killed in a war they didn’t want, hijacking of peoples private grief for advertising purposes or causing a traffic disturbance with colourful and homophobic slogans.
It does invite the question though (to paraphrase Mark Thomas) If you are the omnipotent and omnipresent creator deity, why choose a mealy-mouthed right-wing homophobe as your spokesman? If man is created in gods image and Phelps’ is an example, we can only assume God to be a twat!
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