Fred Phelps

The so-called reverend Fred Phelps is a horrible person and a disgrace to Baptists and clergy everywhere. He is also a disgrace to the legal profession. He was an attorney until the Kansas Supreme Court disbarred him a few years ago for unethical conduct. He and his minions at the Westboro Baptist Church have nothing better to do than to go to funerals all over America proclaiming that America is going to suffer divine retribution because our laws tolerate gays.

I completely fail to follow his logic. I will opine that he is a horrible, hateful human being. Surprise, surprise, he worships a horrible, hateful god. Recently, the British government refused to let him and his people enter the country. To the question: do we have freedom of speech in this country? I would say yes, and the only freedom that matters is for people whose opinions are ones you absolutely despise. I have two stories about how Americans deal with Fred Phelps and his crowd.

In Kansas, there is an organization called the Freedom Riders. The Freedom Riders are bikers, many of them veterans, who go to the funerals of military personnel. Phelps disrupted some of these funerals with signs and chants about how “god hates fags.” The Freedom Riders would position themselves on their Harleys between Phelps and the churches where the funerals were taking place and simply gun their engines. Now, I ask you, who wants to try to bodily cross a line of bikers? No doubt, lots of those bikers would have enjoyed putting Phelps and his crowd six feet under, but no. This is America and we have freedom of speech.

The second story is set in San Diego. As some of you know, San Diego is home to one of the world’s largest Naval bases, and Camp Pendelton, a large Marine base is nearby. When word got out that Phelps’s people were going to appear outside a church and protest at a serviceman’s funeral, a local DJ put the word out and when Phelps’s people tried to take their position outside the church, they found several thousand veterans already standing on the site between them and the church.

Seriously. How touching is that? Phelps and his crowd like to think that he and his crowd are destined for eternity and paradise. The fact that they did not get physical with that crowd of Marines shows they were not too eager to get there.