Obnoxious for those who loved her, but I think the Phelps clan shtick is getting kind of old:

[h/t Joe]

Lest you think they’re doing this for moral reasons, stop right there:

An anti-gay church group says it will not picket the funeral of the 9-year-old girl killed in Tucson in exchange for air time on two radio stations, The Topeka Capital-Journal reports, but will go ahead with pickets at the funeral of a federal judge killed in the attack.

The report comes as the Arizona legislature has unanimously passed emergency legislation aimed at keeping the protesters at bay at the funerals of the victims of Saturday’s shootings.

[...]

The leader of the group, Fred Phelps, has praised the shootings in Tucson as part of “God’s revenge.”

Although spokeswoman Shirley Phelps-Roper confirms the decision not to protest at the funeral of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, the organization has not removed its protest call from its website.

Scum of the earth, truly.

David Pakman interviewed Shirley Phelps-Roper for Midweek Politics about the whole Terry Jones thing, and she is very upset that Westboro is completely being upstaged by this crazy man in Florida!

Dangit, Westboro are the real crazies, and don’t you forget it!

Also, Shirley thinks that David Pakman should burn some Korans, due to the fact that he is Jewish, or something. Oh, and David’s going to hell.

Enjoy your Fridays with Shirley!

By the way, David, we like your sexy new studio.

Why won’t anybody pay attention to the poor, put-upon Phelps family?  I mean, they’re only really in it for the celebrity anyway:

One of those angry at a Florida preacher’s plans to mark Sept. 11 by setting fire to copies of the Quran is Shirley Phelps Roper, a leader of the Westboro Baptist Church.

While she joins Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, the White House, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and many more, Phelps-Roper, Fred Phelps’ lawyer daughter, is hardly a voice for religious tolerance.

It’s so cute when real journalists have to write about the Phelps family.  Shes “hardly a voice for religious tolerance.”  No, she is not!  I think the words McClatchy was looking for are “unhinged lunatic.”

in 2008 she and her father’s Topeka flock set fire to a Quran in plain view on a Washington, D.C., street and nobody seemed to care.

“We did it a long time before this guy,” Phelps-Roper said by telephone from a street corner in downtown Chicago, scene of the latest Westboro picket — against Jews this time, not gays.

The difference could be that in 2008 many news media outlets had decided to ignore the group’s routine of spewing hatred at funerals of fallen American soldiers.

So when Fred Phelps, calling Muhammad a “pedophilic gigolo,” went online and invited people to attend the burning, most stayed away.

So there you go.  The Phelps clan burned a Quran, and nothing happened, because nobody cared.

[h/t Mistermix @ Balloon Juice]

I haven’t had the desire to talk about Rev. Terry Jones and his “Let’s Burn Korans” nonsense, because I’m just sort of burned out on anti-Muslim bigots.

This video is hilarious, though, and says all that needs to be said on the subject.

[h/t The Stranger]

I got an e-mail last night from Show Me No Hate – St. Louis, inviting people to come out this Saturday and help to counter the messages of hate spread by the Westboro Baptist Church at various locations around the city.  You see, when Westboro goes on tour, they have a schedule!

They will be at the Staenberg Family Jewish Community Center (2 Millstone Campus Drive St. Louis, MO 63146) from 2-2:30pm, then at Busch Stadum protesting the Cardinals vs. Dodgers game from 6:15pm-7pm, and finally at Scottrade Center protesting the Lady Gaga concert from 7:10pm-8pm.

Jews and baseball and Gaga, OH MY!

Why are they protesting baseball?  Is it because God hates America, baseball is America’s pastime, ergo God hates baseball?

Those Westboro kids just get funnier and funnier.

Anyway, if you’re in St. Louis (or if you are going to St. Louis for the Lady Gaga concert, homosexuals that I know, ahem!), consider taking a minute, making up some fun signs and going to spread a message of love with the Show Me No Hate folks.  Here’s the event page Show Me No Hate has set up for the occasion, with all the pertinent info.

Scott Lively made his career by perpetuating the revisionist lie that the Third Reich was a homosexual movement, claiming that only burly macho male homosexuals were capable of committing the heinous genocide of the Holocaust. Last year he went to Uganda and told that audience that not only was the Holocaust perpetuated by homosexuals, but that the Rwandan genocide was also likely the work of male homosexuals. For these and many other reasons, most any group affiliated with Scott Lively in any way has earned a spot on the SPLC’s list of anti-gay hate groups. Perhaps the American Family Association is angling for such a designation itself. I can’t imagine why, since they surely know, privately, that virtually no one under 35 in this country supports people like them. This is why they’re all pathetically trying to “reach out to millenials,” a group which is blessedly out of their grasp, for the most part, as a voting bloc. But as long as they allow Bryan Fischer to speak, we can only deduce that the AFA has completely jumped the shark into full-on Fred Phelps/Scott Lively territory, and that they should be addressed as such.

Watch this video, via Right Wing Watch:

If you can’t watch, here’s the transcript:

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn’t the Germans, didn’t the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Browshirts, were male homosexuals.

He doesn’t specifically cite Scott Lively, but again, we know where that particular lie came from, so Lively’s work is obviously informing Bryan Fischer. The problem here is this: Scott Lively is completely fringe and respected by very few people in the United States, and instead has to run off to foreign lands to spread his bile, places where people might not Google him quite so quickly. Fred Phelps has no credibility with anyone, anywhere. But there are still many Evangelical churches where the American Family Association is considered just a normal, run-of-the-mill Christian organization like any other. We who have been paying attention to their radicalization know otherwise.

In my opinion, this should earn the AFA a hate group designation on two fronts: Both as an anti-gay group and as an anti-Semitic group. It is my strongly held belief that anyone who seeks to obfuscate or revise ANY part of the well documented history of the Holocaust for their own purposes is engaging in fierce anti-Semitism. This should not be a surprise coming from a Fundamentalist Christian source, as I explained fully here. To use that very real event and scare-monger people into believing that the perpetrators of the greatest genocide in recent memory were such monsters due to their alleged homosexuality is beyond the pale, and it’s nothing short of a modern-day blood libel. (Again, not surprising coming from a fundamentalist strain of Christendom, since Christendom frickin’ created the blood libel. And I don’t want to hear any fundamentalist Evangelicals giving me any crap about how that was Catholics, because a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist. I don’t care what strain of that virus you’re infected by, because the behaviors and the end result tend to be the same.)

Well, it looks like the “good folks” at Itawamba Agricultural have struck fear into other random counties in Mississippi, with the way they set the bar for good old Southern Christian gay-hatin’. Apparently worried that their pictures wouldn’t appear in the dictionary next to the “bigot” entry, Copiah County, Mississippi has submitted a gay-hatin’ entry of their own:

When Veronica Rodriguez opened Wesson Attendance Center’s Yearbook on Friday, she didn’t find a trace of her lesbian daughter Ceara Sturgis after a long battle with school officials to include a photo of her daughter wearing a tuxedo in the school’s 2010 yearbook.
“They didn’t even put her name in it,” Sturgis’ mother Veronica Rodriguez said. “I was so furious when she told me about it. Ceara started crying and I told her to suck it up. Is that not pathetic for them to do that? Yet again, they have crapped on her and made her feel alienated.”

Sturgis and her mother commissioned the Mississippi ACLU to protest officials’ October 2009 decision not to allow Sturgis’ photo to appear in the senior yearbook because she chose to wear a tuxedo instead of a dress.

The ACLU wrote an October letter demanding officials use Sturgis’ submitted photo in the yearbook, but Copiah County School District officials refused. Rodriguez said she expected the yearbook to at least contain a reference to her daughter on the senior page. What she discovered on Friday, when the yearbook came in, was that the school had refused to acknowledge her entirely.

“It’s like she’s nobody there, even though she’s gone to school there for 12 years,” Rodriguez said. “They mentioned none of her accolades, even though she’s one of the smartest students there with wonderful grades. They’ve got kids in the book that have been busted for drugs. There’s even a picture of one of the seniors who dropped out of school.

“I don’t get it. Ceara is a top student. Why would they do this to her?”

Yee-haw!

And of course Ceara is an honors student. Constance McMillen is an honors student. Derrick Martin, in Cochran, Georgia, is an honors student. (Derrick was, of course, treated better by his school district, but unfortunately treated awfully by his “parents.”) And pardon me for sensing that there’s a bit of anti-intellectual resentment going on here, because not only are these kids gay, but they’re also smart. Because if anything threatens a backwoods Southerner more than blacks, gays, women, Mexicans, Muslims, books, museums, etc., it’s when these people and things are ascendant. As in, it’s one thing for gays to exist, as long as we’re behind closed doors and not bothering the idiots around us. It’s one thing for black people to live in the same town, as long as they stay over there, in smaller, shabbier houses. It’s one thing for Mexicans to immigrate to the United States, but goddammit, if they have to press 1 for English, they’re gonna spit. It’s one thing for museums to exist, but if they don’t have any wax statues of Jefferson Davis and Chuck Norris paying homage to an animatronic Jesus galloping into Jerusalem on top of his favorite Triceratops…

The point is that again, it all goes back to these people (teabaggers, many of them, and you know it) having the floor ripped out from under their illusions that, by virtue of their white skin and faith in Jesus, they are the “real” citizens of this nation, and that the rest of us are just people they allow to squat. They’re realizing that the rest of the country is on to their game, and that with every passing day, the culture is moving more and more out of “their” era, and that their worldview is truly becoming the laughingstock of educated society. Never mind that “their” era has remained stubbornly in 1954 or so for 56 years now.

Dan Savage has the contact info for the administrators at Wesson Attendance Center. They need to hear from us.

By the way, PZ Myers reported this afternoon that Fred Phelps and his feral children are going to be protesting Constance McMillen’s graduation, and he asks a good question:

This will be very interesting … how will the town and her fellow students respond? Will they be cheering the Phelpsians on, or will they finally get a good look in the mirror?

The answer is probably C, unfortunately. They’ll buck back and forth and holler about how they’re just standing up for traditional values, and how they Are. NOT. Like. Those. God. Hates. Fags. People., but are victims just the same, of the evil wily gays, who are of course being abetted by the East Coast Liberal Elites and the College Professors and the Marxists and the Moose-lems and the ACLU (correctomundo on that count), and of course, Katie Couric and probably Hollywood. At least three people in the town will blame it on George Soros, god only knows why.

The poor little dears are just misunderstood, you see, and they view us as suspect because we can’t see the various boogeymen who live in their closets. And through it all, they’ll find a way to blame it on the kids who dared to stand up for themselves, for to these people, kids like Constance and Ceara aren’t humans at all, but rather notches for their bedposts of wingnut resentment.

Take heart, though, Ceara, Constance, and every other kid in Mississippi who finds herself to be intelligent, driven, and a minority in any way: there is a greater world outside waiting for you, and y’all have a better chance to get out than any of the knuckle-draggers who feel threatened by you.

Matt Barber wrote a new column. Let’s do this:

“Progressives” are like pig farmers. In an effort to bury opposing viewpoints they sling pejorative slop, labeling as “bigot,” “hater,” “wingnut” or “racist” those with whom they disagree. It’ the height of intellectual sloth.

Except for when they’re, you know hateful racists, or bigoted wingnuts. It’s actually okay to point out that some people are not motivated by facts or evidence, but by bigotry, racism, hatred or some other form of wingnuttery. See: Entire Religious Right. Also? Pigs need slop to live, so in this utterly failed analogy, we are the farmers, they are the pigs, and we are FEEDING THEM.

Real America for the win!

The ad hominem approach — chief among logical fallacies — undergirds an effort to both marginalize conservative viewpoints and avoid arguing on the merits the controversies of the day. For liberals, to set sail in fair debate is to navigate treacherous waters.

I guess we can discount all of the ad hominem attacks levied by Matt Barber throughout his career, then. Wait, then he would have no career.

We’ve seen this tired tactic abused ad nauseum in recent days by the mainstream media and Democrats.

Bam Bam, lay off the Latin expressions until you learn how to spell them.

Aided by hard-left outfits such as the Southern Poverty Law Center — all too eager to provide “expert analysis” tailor-made for jaundiced journalism — liberal elites have been desperate to throw poison on bourgeoning grassroots opposition to Obama’ careening Marxist agenda.

“Burgeoning.” It’s “burgeoning.” And Marxism has an entire definition and a history that is easily accessible to people with internetz. You can’t just use loaded phrases that your readers are too stoopid to understand in order to scare them. (Oh wait, I forgot this was posted at TownHall. My bad. Spelling errors and specious scare terms are a GO!)

It’ straight out of the “progressive” playbook: Saul Alinsky’ “Rules for Radicals.”

The one all the teabaggers have been reading?

Hence, in the face of zero supporting evidence, “Tea Party” conservatives, Constitutionalists, pro-life and pro-family Americans, and generally any patriot who disagrees with the Obama administration are smeared with “hate’” broad brush.

Zero supporting evidence?

Grandma and Grandpa; your fireman neighbor; school teachers; pastors; butchers; bakers; and candlestick makers are now “potentially violent right-wing extremists.”

Interesting that he goes straight to a nursery rhyme about naked dudes just cold tubbin’ it up together. Now we know where they strategize.

They are, as Mark Potok, Huffington Post columnist and SPLC director puts it, “…shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism,” and are widely linked to “hate” and “vigilante groups.” (Knock it off, Mark. With the exception of your fellow moveon.org-types, the vast majority of Americans aren’t biting.)

Ooh, Mark, Bam Bam told you to “knock it off,” and if you haven’t heard, he has a totally macho “right hook.”

Nonetheless, every once in a while, as it goes, “even a blind squirrel finds a nut.”

What the hell are you doing with a blind squirrel in the bathtub? Rub-a-dub-dub, indeed.

While I rarely agree with the Mark Potoks of the world, today, on at least one issue, I find myself doing so. Cult leader Fred Phelps and his Westboro brood of “God hates F-gs” fame are infused to the marrow with pure, unadulterated hate.

Agree. Wait, let me guess, he’s about to say he and his boyfriend Peter LaBarbera are different from Phelps somehow. Watch this, this is the “right hook” I was talking about:

I pray that Phelps and Co. will both repent and seek Christ’ redemption for the harm they’ve caused people like the Snyders. I also pray that liberals will repent. By lumping together with Phelps those who recognize traditional, biblical sexual morality, homosexual activists and the left-wing media trivialize true hate.

See, instead of lumping people who hate gay people together in the same boat (spare us the B.S. about “loving the sinner and hating the sin,” because it’s unscientific, dishonest, and utterly in denial of reality), we should lump the anti-gay haters who are most honest about their bigotry in with…liberals! Surprise right hook land on liberals!

Indeed, many Americans — perhaps most — adhere to the biblical notion that all sexual conduct outside the bonds of marriage between one man and one woman is sexually immoral.

Oh, really, Bam Bam? How do you then explain the fact that 95% of Americans have had premarital sex? Are they all acting outside their belief systems, or is it that most people really don’t buy into that Religious Right asshattery anymore?

(Sorry liberals, that’ just the way it is; nothing personal. Despite disingenuous bleatings to the contrary, such beliefs are typically as far removed from hate as Phelps is from cuddly. Every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology hold this to be true. And as with all absolute truth, it just is.)

Nope, I just proved you wrong. Also? “Thousands of years of history” actually don’t show that people don’t have sex out of wedlock, and human biology doesn’t say a word about “premarital sex,” so really, what the hell is Bam Bam talking about? “Absolute Truth”? Ha. Prove it.

Oops, forgot what kind of audience he’s writing for again. Made-up crap pulled out of one’s abundant nether regions that serves to regurgitate wingnut food back into wingnut mouths is a GO!

So, Fred Phelps aside, every time you hear some lefty like Anderson Cooper or Keith Olbermann despicably refer to Bible-believing Christians as “homophobes,” or who call grandma a “teabagger” (slang for a vile homosexual act), consider who the real haters are.

Um, the ones who write columns full of ad hominem, fact-free, link-free nonsense that target all LGBT people as immoral god-haters, maybe? Also, I had no idea that “teabagger” (a name they gave themselves, remember…that’s how old these people are, that none of them had any idea what it actually meant) was a gay term. Does it have something to do with the fact that ladies are discouraged from using their mouths for any reason in Fundamentalist circles?

Whenever Mark Potok, Rachel Maddow or some liberal politico in Congress attempts to equate conservative Joe to a “right wing extremists” or a “domestic terrorist,” contemplate who the true bigots are.

Usually we reserve those terms for the people throwing bricks through the windows of Congressional offices, the ones who phone in death threats to liberal congressmen, and, you know, Christian militias who want to kill police officers. The fact that mediocre wingnuts like Barber are so upset about the usage of the words is more revelatory about them than it is about us.

The palpable irony is that leftists — with their slanderous name-calling, harsh judgments and ad hominem attacks — are, in truth, more like Phelps than those they falsely accuse.

Oh, something is palpable, but I don’t think it’s irony.

Anyway, Bam Bam, sorry your bestest fwiend is still on the hate group list, quite deservedly, and that the SPLC is sticking by it. Wingnuts tend to think that if they bellyache enough that people will roll over to serve the psychological needs of their parallel reality, and sometimes it works, but the American people are starting to wake up to the harsh reality that fundamentalist Christians are actually not very nice people, in the way they meddle and want to take away rights and liberties from people they’ve never met, and who never want to meet them, but who they live amongst as a consequence of living in a secular, open society.

It must suck having every pretense of your worldview summarily disproven, but them’s the breaks. Get a new worldview that’s supported by reality, and maybe we liberals won’t be so goshdarn mean anymore.

Progress demands a vigorous, open and honest debate. “Progressives” should quit the empty name calling and stop running-scared from true progress.

True progress, in this instance, is best defined as “a return to the Christian Dark Ages,” before thinking people started discovering things and learning, etc. And I’m not sure how to end this, because that’s how Matt ends his column, abruptly and without any resolution or proven thesis whatsoever, so, um…

Here’s a really good song by Jill Sobule about people like Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera. I have it on good authority that she really, really loves that sissy picture of Bam Bam at the top of this post.

TOPEKA — In a stunning about face, the Westboro Baptist Church announced today that their decades long campaign against gays, soldiers, Jews, Catholics, American flags, joy, and Lady Gaga was all an elaborate prank. “We were just fooling!,” said Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of Fred Phelps and frequent spokesperson for the group. Phelps-Roper added “Psych!” and did a little dance.

The about face came as a surprise to gay activists and anti-gay leaders alike.

Linda Harvey, of the anti-gay MissionAmerica, reached for comment on Thursday, said “Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on! I’ve been marketing a watered down version of…a prank?” Evan Hurst of gay rights organization Truth Wins Out was more measured in his reaction. “Really? That’s sort of LOL, now that I think about it,” said Hurst, dryly.

For the Phelps clan this coming out party is a blessing on many fronts. The patriarch of the clan, Reverend Fred Phelps, heaved a sigh of relief and said that coming clean will offer him an opportunity to make the last fifth of his life count. “I’ve always wanted to join the Peace Corps, or maybe mentor at-risk children. Maybe I can do that now.” Clarifying his true opinions on fags, he added, “That’s kind of a mean name, don’t you think? I mean, I don’t actually know any fags, but that Ricky Martin seems like a nice enough boy.”

For her part, Shirley Phelps-Roper dreams of being a judge on American Idol. “I just want to encourage all those fag singers to…I mean, no, sorry…old habits die hard! Anyway, that Simon Cowell is a dick, right?”

Activists on both sides of the debate over homosexuality remain confused as to the purpose of the Phelps clan’s decades-long ruse, but all agree that their decision to pursue other opportunities is a net positive for the country.

A statement from a cadre of right-wing leaders released in response to the developments with the Phelps family reads, in part:

We have always condemned the Phelps family for saying all of the things we actually believe in such a clear manner, without obfuscation. We look forward to continuing our work defending the traditional family with all of our euphemisms intact, so that we may hurt gay people and their families under the guise of Christian love.

A press release from the National Organization for Marriage simply reads: “Whew!”

Evan Hurst had a slightly different take on the organization’s changes:

Well, at least the Religious Right won’t have such an easy time artificially separating themselves from the hatred they espouse. No longer will anti-gay hatemongers be able to say “No, we’re not haters, we don’t do all that mean God Hates Fags stuff!” They may have to start actually owning the untold pain and suffering they cause millions of families.

Analysts predict that it will likely take at least a thousand years and untold millions of dollars to make restitution to the myriad numbers of people affected by the Phelps’ prank.

So, do the Phelps clan actually believe that God indeed loves fags?

In response to this question, Rev. Phelps became flustered, scratched his chin and said, “God? Never heard of him.”