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5 Facts You Never Knew About Westboro Baptist Church Founder Fred Phelps — Nathan Harden
The liberal media’s favorite useful idiot is dead. Fred Phelps, media darling, Westboro Baptist Church founder, just got his withered mug plastered across the homepage of the Washington Post website just now. A suitably prominent obituary for someone the media will no doubt sorely miss.
Managed to get through it dry-eyed, somehow.
I picked up a few interesting facts in the obit that I bet you’ve never heard about the much-maligned Phelps:
1.) He was a lifelong Democrat.
2. ) He was such a popular Democrat that he won 30% of the vote in the party’s Senate primary in 1992.
3. ) Westboro “Baptist” Church was not affiliated with any official Baptist denomination.
4.) Phelps was reportedly thrown out of the Westboro church last year.
This is a sad day for the left-wing media. Who is going to be the media’s proxy for religious America now? Now that a man who led a backwoods congregation of a couple dozen extended family members is dead, who can serve as the living representation of Christianity for every liberal news publication in America?
Here’s one final surprising fact about Phelps:
5.) Phelps made his living as a very active civil rights lawyer in the sixties and seventies, defending black children and others who were victims of racial discrimination.
Fact number five shows there is a redeeming quality to be found in almost everyone. Nevertheless, while few of us will mourn Phelps’s passing, this is a sad day for many in the Democratically-aligned news media. All the God-hating media hacks out there deserve our deepest sympathies today. I think Matthew Schmitz of First Things said it best:
Shoutout to all the journalists who, for the sake of discrediting Christianity, became Fred Phelps’ willing publicists.
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) March 20, 2014
Published in General
Do you think GLAAD will picket his funeral?
The best outcome is that everyone simply ignores his funeral. Make it as though he never even existed.
We knew his church was not affiliated with any official Baptist denomination. What we are curious about is why he was thrown out of his own church. Has any media reported why?
Do I get a prize if I already knew those five facts?
The obit is worth reading as an artifact of our time. You’d expect the paragraph on his civil rights legal cases to begin with the word “Incongruously”–which it obligingly does. To the Post, civil rights and gay rights are part of the same continuum: if you’re against one, you must be against the other. A genuinely curious journalist might’ve investigated what the big difference was that Phelps saw in the two causes; but it’s easier to chalk it up to some kind of cognitive dissonance.
But then there’s this bit of dissonance from the Post, at the mention of “Matthew Shepard, the college student who was tortured, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyo., apparently because he was gay.”
There must have been a whole editorial meeting behind that word “apparently.” Will the Post’s glimmer of doubt open it up to charges of hate speech? Last I recall it was simply an assertion of fact that poor Shepard was killed for being gay. Has the contrary argument in the recent book on the subject, largely dismissed in the MSM, been quietly assimilated by it?
Nathan Harden:
This is a sad day for the left-wing media. Who is going to be the media’s proxy for religious America now? Now that a man who led a backwoods congregation of a couple dozen extended family members is dead, who can serve as the living representation of Christianity for every liberal news publication in America?
————————
I’m putting $5 on Terry Jones
I remember overhearing a conversation between my boss and a coworker; he was reading something from facebook regarding the WBC guys picketing someone’s funeral, and his paraphrase was “the Christians are going to be out there picketing,” etc… Unbelievable ignorance that leads to a fairly believable bigotry, and a media that is not ignorant, but who chooses to actively mislead and stoke the fires. Well, I honestly don’t know if I would say that Phelps himself is any more morally abhorrent than the reporters who loved him so much. I think not.
All the normal feelings for WBC aside, the news of his death does sadden me. Today this man met his Creator and had to account for the things he claimed to do in the name of his Lord. While I’m glad that he cannot personally warp the mind of those around him any longer, I am sad that he did not get to hear the words “Well done, good and faithful servant!” this day.
It is a terrible thing to meet one’s Creator and account for all one has said in His name.
Das, I’ll take that bet. I’ll win because, a) Monty Python was awesome, and b) he’s not American, and c) probably not even a Christian.
Ah, fun with common names.
My brief foray into the waters of other internet fora indicates the author is being attacked for having a big ego, and the book is being attacked for being shoddily sourced. I don’t the energy to chase it down more than that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Matthew_Shepard&oldid=600476450#Post-trial_media_attention
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/10/18/2802871/book-matt-prove-size-stephen-jimenezs-ego/
Archie, speaking of common names, how are you on the guitar? ;)
He looks like Ted Turner.
He looks like the crazy old guy from “Poltergeist II”.
That picture looks like he’s been burned, which, if I were more presumptive about such things, I would say was rather appropriate.
Hopeless. I didn’t realize that my namesake of “Hee Haw” fame even played the guitar. BTW, I called a cigar store in TN once to check on a back order, and when I said my name, the nice gent who took my call paused, asked me to repeat it, and when I did laughed uproariously for 10 seconds or so. It was odd, to say the least, and didn’t seem to be a good example of southern manners. But when he collected himself, he said, “I’m very sorry sir. But I must tell you that Archie Campbell of Hee Haw was a personal friend of mine, and so it was like he was playing a joke on me from beyond the grave.” So I instantly liked the guy.