Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church coming to Southern Ill. University to picket speech by Matthew Shepard's mother
Cross posted at Marathon Pundit.
Matthew Shepard was the unfortunate gay University of Wyoming college student who was brutally murdered by hateful hooligans in 1998.
Matthew's mother Judy is scheduled to speak at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale on December 6. And that vile cretin, Fred Phelps, plans to bring some of his Westboro Baptist Church followers to SIU to picket her appearance there.
Phelps, who is repeatedly denounced by the Southern Baptist Convention and other mainstream Christian groups, advocates the death penalty for gays, as you'll learn in this Phelps flier (which also contains a picketer claiming Matthew Shepard is in Hell).
Phelps first gained his ill-repute for showing up at the funerals of AIDS victims. Lately, he and his "church" have been picketing funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq; Phelps is under the belief that God in punishing America because of our toleration for gay rights here.
Thankfully, counterprotesters usually are there to confront the Westboro Church members, as they did earlier this month in Galesburg, IL.
Hopefully Phelps and his group will be greeted in a similar manner in Carbondale next week.
7 comments:
Yeah, that guy is nuts, so I agree with you. However, I am remebering a story of a 13 year old boy who was abducted by two homosexual men, bound and tied, and killed...guess the media didn't care much for that story...the Shepard one advances a "cause" so he gets all the attention.
Agree. Jesse Dirkhising was his name. Fox News and the Wash. Times covered it.
Wikipedia has an entry on that tragic case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dirkhising
If you think the media didn't care b/c of a pro-gay bias or something you're nuts. It didn't get play because the victim wasn't an attractive young woman.
Also, the best thing to do with nuts like Phelps is to ignore them.
And to be clear, I think that it is clear now that the killing of Shepard had more to do with a drug deal gone bad than the fact that he was gay, although being gay certainly didn't help his case before his murderers.
Uh ..no, the "drug-deal-gone-bad" story was concocted by one of the killers and only surfaced AFTER the trial and conviction.
It was particualrly heinous because the two killers were spared the death penalty partly due to pleas by Matt Shepard's mother and family. The sentence they were given was life, and they were forbiden to do interviews or write about the killing in order to give the family some chance at closure. (See, sorry, convicted felons in jail lose that free-speech-rights thing...)
But, facing life, what did they have to lose?
You can also wiki that part of the story.
As for the Jesse Dirkhising story - it's disgusting, but a different thing altogether. Sadly, kids are sexually exploited and killed all to frequently in the US. And it is usually young girls killed by adult males. I doubt Jesse was targeted due to his orientation. He was targeted because his killers were sexual predators, and they probably would have gone after anything that caught their attention.
Didn't make the "Missing White Woman" Fox new item of the month - sorry, Jesse.
But it wouldn't surprise me if Phelps and his crew picketted Jesse Dirkhising's funeral too - they's probably say he 'deserved it' based on some twisted reason.
Don't even give this loser publicity
I grew up in Topeka and personally know Fred Phelps. He does this protesting purely for publicity. Ignore him and he will quit doing it.
A couple of other fun facts:
* He has a son in San Francisco who is reportedly gay.
* His church congregation is made up solely of family members and in-laws. (As are the picketers).
* They don't have a church -- but Phelps writes off his house as a church for tax purposes.
* He has a swimming pool in his backyard -- also written off as a "baptismal font."
* Fred used to be a lawyer. But was disbarred for actions like writing off his house as a church.
All Americans, gays and Baptist Ministers alike, have equal protection under the law. That includes the First Amendment right to protest.
Post a Comment