God hates Freds

"The WBC not wanting people to picket ol' Fred's funeral is not a hypocritical move, it's a parking issue." -- Friend on facebook

Can we get this to +10 Troll?

Honestly, I'm not going to bother joining in with the celebration. It's what he and his hate-filled )*&%ed up ilk would have wanted. I'm just going to go about my life, same as I did before he died.

What I find interesting is that their hateful views overshadow the fact that they've basically made suing people their primary religious tenet.

It's also a kind of study to see if a religious movement, even one this small, can be structured to survive the death of its leader. I'll be interested to see how the 700 Club and Chick Publications can do when their figureheads eventually pass on.

They're making a movie version of Chick's famous anti-RPG tract Dark Dungeons.

Wait, where did I learn about this again...?

Yep. It'd be nice if that was his only legacy, but I wonder if his tracts will become nostalgia collectibles or continue publication for the next hundred years or what?

Might actually be worth celebrating his existence. He was one of the people that galvanized people against him. Making him the other probably caused a lot of people to become more active in the fight for civil rights, maybe even helped turn a few people from bigotry. Phelps himself was a great civil rights lawyer in the 60s. I don't know if something snapped in his brain, or if he truly believed that there is a difference so large between blacks and gays that you would hate one and love the other.

What was the price of all this good? I mean, he had a few inbred lawyer kids and nephews sitting in his big ass house on Sundays. They disrespected some families. They espoused hyperbolic hate (I personally think the phrase "fag-enabler" is hilarious because it's so silly). They sued people to stay open. At worst, I think it's a wash.

I suspect a judge made a pass at him, suggesting that "it would be a good 'career move'".

They sued people. Good people, most likely. And stole their money.

That is not balancing the scales.

Not that I don't believe you, but citation? As far as I know, they usually sued larger entities like the city of Topeka for not providing them enough protection during demonstrations.

From Nate Phelps, during his Reddit AMA:

"The lawsuits happen. Their lawyers, their litigious as hell. But the lawsuits are only there as a way to intimidate and protect themselves. They sincerely believe what they are preaching. Well my father sincerely believes it...my siblings have been told to believe it. I see a difference."

When asked how much they get from the lawsuits, the answer was:

"Not that much. The bulk of the money they use to travel around and picket comes from the 30% tithe they are required to give to the church. Remember this is tax free money. I've roughed out the numbers before after I learned about this from a nephew that left and it fits the $250 to $300 thousand dollars they say they spend each year.

That number has dropped precipitously in the last year or so though. I'm not sure why or what, but something major has changed recently."

According to Nate, the tithing comes from the work the family law office does.

Thanks, but I'm more looking for some case summaries that describe the suing of good people.

Finding the case summaries is difficult, as not all of that is online, it seems. I've got some media reports, though:

One example was the supreme court case where a guy they picketed sued to stop them from protesting at funerals. He lost, was ordered to pay $16k in court costs to WBC, and the WBC started a suit against him for $100k.

And here's the Southern Poverty Law centers timeline through 2001 for Fred and his firm/church, which includes many of their suits.

Yeah. That's basically the same stuff I've found. I don't find it to be very damning when the only high profile case that we found could be argued that the church is just defending itself.

As far as I have found, there are no specific cases easily found, he lost almost all of his frivolous lawsuits, and got disbarred.

Can you find records of those frivolous lawsuits? I'd wager you can't. Does that mean they don't exist?

The problem is they won in the supreme court to picket funerals, and that dominates search results. After they won, they made news everywhere by doing next to nothing but sue state governments and officials over anti-picketing laws. Then there's the problem of where his previous suits were filed and under what name. I find bits and pieces under "Fred Phelps," "Fred W. Phelps," "Westboro Baptist," "Westboro Baptist Church," "Westboro Baptist Church, Inc." and so on, but only from about 2003 forward. Nobody has gone and compiled them in a form that I can search with just Google, or the results from the supreme court completely overshadow any other results. From what his estranged son says as well as other accounts, I don't doubt that punitive lawsuits from the WBC exist, but they came about before court records were being digitized, and I neither have access to the Lexus-Nexus law database nor the inclination to drive to Topeka and look at everything in the City Hall.

You might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but their tactics and track record (that's available) indicates to me they'd sue anyone they thought they could win against if they successfully provoked a confrontation.

Good. I'm glad he's dead. I wish he could die more times. I begrudge him the time he had.

The thumb pic tweakes a little pet peev of mine. If you fall in lava, you'll mostly just sit on top and burn. Most lava is more than three times denser than water and several hundred thousand times more viscous. If you manage to stay upright for a while, say half an hour or so, you would sink up to your mid thighs and stop. The mass of the lava displaced by your feet, calves, knees and lower thighs would equal the rest of your body mass above the surface. The glowing, flowing lava you see is 1300 to 2200 degrees F, though, so not much of you is actually going to last long enough to sink even that far. Cremation is usually done at the low end of that range, and gas is a much poorer conductor of heat than liquid stone. Ok. End of pedantic rant.

To be fair, Phelps was pretty dense.

Much like with creationism, the assumed behavior of lava with physical objects was based on supposition and not a lot of actual data, even when one's religion involved tossing virgins into volcanoes. By the time people who measured things and wrote things down got involved, the tropes were established.

Besides, it's not like the opposite isn't believed. Walking on water, indeed...

As Tennyson put it in The Vision of Sin:Every moment dies an asshole
Every moment one is born.

Okay, so blockquote isn't supported. MESSING UP MY POETRY. Thank you, SE.

What, really?

Rather than beep
Or a rude error message:
These words: "File Not Found".

Errors have occurred.
We won't tell you where or why -
Lazy programmers!

Yes, really. That's bad and wrong.

Steele, have you been parsing HTML with regex? Bad steele.

Just to be clear: that 'Lazy programmers' stuff is not meant as a dig at steele, just some copypasta to test the blockquote behavior.

"A church statement said March 16 that "membership issues are private" and that eight unnamed elders lead the congregation."

I imagine a bunch of people in hooded robes made out of bedsheets with denim overalls worn over them.

I imagine a church with just eight members.

http://www.tmz.com/2014/03/20/fred-phelps-dead-westboro-baptist-church

+10 troll

Just want to point out that while Phelps and his little inbred church are obviously assclowns, their tactics are so ludicrously extreme that they are mere spectacle, with zero influence whatsoever over the ongoing actual discrimination of LGBT folks in the USA.
As pointed out in a previous thread, it's the mainstream conservatives (and the official Republican party platform)- the ones who say 'I don't hate homosexuals, some of my best friends are...' that are truly worthy of contempt.

I agree that mainstream conservative homophobes deserve contempt. I respectfully disagree that Phelps and crew had no influence.

The WBC has this bizarre belief that anything horrible or tragic that happens, death especially, is all the work of an angry god punishing those around them for some kind of misdeed. Soldiers die in Iraq? It's because the US doesn't execute the gays. People die in a hurricane? It's because the US doesn't execute the gays. Kids die in a school shooting? It's because the US doesn't execute the gays. So on and on and on...

I wonder how they're rationalizing his death? Are they applying their same toxic ideology to themselves? Or are they hypocritically brushing it aside as some old fart just dying? They don't seem to be propping him up as a martyr, that's for sure.

Not to ascribe too much logic to these assholes, but dying of natural causes at 84 doesn't really qualify as 'horrible or tragic'. We all die sometime after all.

If he was truly one of God's Chosen he would have lived to 1,000 like people supposedly did in the Old Testament.

Those ages in the old testament? Divide them by lunar cycles instead of solar cycles and you get quite normal elderly ages. 1000 'age units' / 12.3 lunar months in a year = ~81 years. That's a good innings.

While that certainly makes sense, looking at the wiki page of that Methuselah feller says that this would mean Enoch, his father sired him when he was 5.

No one ever said the bible made sense.

tl;dr Will WBC protest at Fred Phelps funeral?

...sorry. Couldn't help it...

He spent his life hurting for dick, forever hungry, aching unsatisfied. Little wonder he was so angry, felt his God hated him.

If there's any justice in the world, Fred Phelps is now just a carcass rotting in the ground.

Good news! There is no afterlife!

I think we all are. In the long run.

If there is justice, he is in heaven. God let him in and forgave him for all the evil shit he did, and made it very clear how incredibly wrong he had been all along. "No, Fred, the only Hell is the one you put yourself in. But the fact is that you have to stay here for all eternity with all these good homosexual folks as your equals."

So, I don't know if anyone watched Rick and Morty on Adult Swim, but this just aired tonight.