Finally!
Fred Phelps and his minions of hatred get their comeuppance in court. After years of abusing the concept of free speech, after years of filing suits against municipalities and winning large awards from taxpayers to fund their obscene "protests" – finally they get slammed.
A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.
http://hosted.ap.org/...
I have had more than my share of dealings with Fred Phelps’ Westboro klan. (I won’t call it a church because it violates every known definition of a church.) I live in Wyoming. I am gay. I was vaguely aware of some crackpot in Kansas – and then Matthew Shepard was murdered.
I teach the history of genocides at a local college. I believe that there is a proper time to ignore and a proper time to resist. Since the Shepard family and local gay groups wanted no confrontation, I chose not to be in Casper during Matthew’s funeral.
Then I ended up moving to Kansas to teach there. I found a wonderful house and new friends in – you guessed it – Topeka. My church, Central United Church of Christ, was one of the Phelps crowd’s favorite places to picket every Sunday morning. Again, I was told to ignore them. Washburn University was two blocks from my house. The Phelps folks picketed on the corner of 17th and Washburn all the time. In fact, there was hardly a day that you didn’t see the vulgar Phelps signs somewhere in Topeka.
I don’t share the view that Phelps should be ignored. People who advocate violence against GLBTI people create an atmosphere in which queer people are regularly assaulted and murdered. Unless their positions are challenged directly and repeatedly, there is the very real risk that the message learned by bigots is that it is O.K. to attack GLBTI people.
I’m not sure what will happen in this case on appeal – there are First Amendment issues at stake – but I am delighted that an organization that has lived off their corruption of the meaning of the constitution and who would offer no constitutional protections to others if they were ever – God forbid – to achieve power – I am delighted that they have gotten their comeuppance