Taking It to the Limit, One More Time

Westboro Baptist Church goes to New York

Can the man sink any lower?

After all, we’re talking about a fellow who pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, shouting that they are being punished by God for somehow helping America in its “fag-enabling” ways. A man whose own children have accused him of beating them viciously with a mattock handle. A “pastor” who has celebrated the deaths of coal miners trapped beneath the earth, children killed in school bus accidents, even the thousands murdered on Sept. 11, 2001. The language he employs in his sermons attacking homosexuality — versions of which have been hissed at passing children by his followers — is so disgusting that it is unprintable in the major media.

But now Fred W. Phelps, who runs the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas, and the infamous GodHatesFags website, has taken another step down into the slime. His latest, posted last week on Friday the 13th, is “Thank God for Dead Boy Scouts.” The WBC Video News production opens to the strains of a hymn.

Then Phelps launches into it. It turns out that God isn’t really so angry about “enabling fags.” No, it’s the persecution of Phelps that drew his ire.

“Thank God for the four dead Boy Scouts,” Phelps starts out, referring to the Scouts killed by a June 12 tornado at a Scout retreat in Iowa. The boys, Phelps said, were “killed by an angry God in retaliatory vengeance against Nebraska and Iowa for their persecution of Westboro Baptist Church only because we preach the gospel to them. You lifted your hands against the Lord’s servants and, just as he promised, God avenged his servants by using his favorite weapons — his killer tornadoes — to kill your kids. Get it through your thick heads. God hates Nebraska and God hates Iowa. …[Y]ou can expect more and worse wrath from an angry God. … Westboro Baptist Church will picket the funerals of the four dead Boy Scouts. Amen.”

Had enough yet from the man who also runs the Catholic-bashing PriestsRapeBoys website yet? Well, there’s always YourPastorIsAWhore, a website that’s still under construction. “Your pastor is a whore,” Pastor Phelps writes in the promotional blurb now occupying Westboro Baptist Church’s latest site. “You know it’s true.”

Hatewatch