Fred Phelps Will Protest Anything

The late, lamented Aaron Sorkin TV show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip featured a controversial sketch (on the show within the show), entitled "Crazy Christians." I'm not one to tiptoe around such irreverence as it regards religion (the religious tend to disrespect my lack of belief, after all). But if that sketch had focused more narrowly on the Reverend Fred Phelps (sic) of the Westboro Baptist Church (sick), there would be no controversy. Virtually everybody thinks they are Crazy Christians.

Phred has been protesting anything to do with gay people (and I mean anything), but has branched out of late. It wasn't until he started sending his followers (read: his family) to military funerals, that he drummed up mainstream ire. Whatever tangential relationship those deaths had to gay people left people scratching their heads. And it just gets crazier, as you shall see. . .

[Excerpt]

Fred Phelps Is Coming
By Eric Black , Minnesota Monitor

Rev. Phelps says God hates Minnesota, the "land of the sodomite damned."
The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., plans to stage protests at funerals of victims of the 35W bridge collapse to state that God made the bridge fall because he hates America, and especially Minnesota, because of its tolerance of homosexuality.

[snip]

Reached at the church, Shirley Phelps Roper, who is both the daughter of the pastor and one of the attorneys for the church, said that America, and Minnesota especially, have alienated God by its tolerance for homosexuality, and that the bridge collapse was an act of God's vengeance. She said:

"The bridge stood in place by the word of God and it fell by the word of God...Each of these little events is just a harbinger of the coming destruction of this American experiment. We are delivering the final call of the doomed nation."

Read more at: tcdailyplanet.com