sigh I keep tellin’ ya, Fred, you keep missing the low-hanging fruit! What about the Hell’s Angels? Crimes, booze, drugs, brawling, fornication, all-around impiety even in the name – yep, those are some wretched sinners right there! Westboro Baptist needs to picket some Hell’s Angels’ funerals! Come on, Fred! Man up! You know the LORD wants you to!
The world would be a better place if we, and the media, just ignored these assholes. Seriously, how many of them are there? A couple of dozen? I can’t just bring myself to give a flying fuck, and getting outraged about every new incident seems completely pointless.
I am getting to where it is difficult o tell the difference between Phelps and the more prominent board liberals here. So much hate, so little intellect. Der Trihs, Fred Phelps, Senor Beef…birds of a feather. All blinded by hatred, incapable of seeing anything objectively.
While I agree with you in theory, in practice it’s damn hard to ignore screaming, chanting assholes at the funeral of a local soldier that was killed in Afghanistan. The Arizona victims are just another ploy for media attention that they don’t deserve.
I hope that the continued media attention will allow people to see them for the horrible people that they are and finally tune them out. Their 15 minutes of fame expired a long time ago.
The Hell’s Angels hate fags, too. Birds of a feather and all that. Professional courtesy.
Well, i admit that i’m not completely up on their exact tactics in all instances, but the cases that i’ve read about, and that i’ve seen on the news, suggest that (a) they don’t usually scream or get in people’s faces, and (b) in many cases, they are actually quite a long way away from the event itself.
There was a case in Maryland a few years ago, where they were sued by the father of a dead marine after protesting at the funeral. In the court case, it became clear that they were actually hundreds of yards away from the funeral itself, and that the father who brought the lawsuit had not even noticed them on the day of the funeral. He only found out about their presence from other funeral-goers, and from the media that reported the presence of the Phelps clan.
It could be that they are more “in-your-face” at some events, but in the cases i’m aware of, they basically stand there with their stupid signs. This doesn’t make them any less odious, but they’re just another little group that draws attention far beyond what their numbers and their support and their influence warrant. I think we’d all be better off just ignoring them.
God, you can be a fucking idiot sometimes.
IIRC, a couple of years ago the Phelpsters were allowed in at least one case to succesfully extort media attention in exchange for not showing up – i.e., we’ll grant you a half-hour interview if you don’t protest the funeral. Which sounded dumb to me, that’s just giving them what they want; I have not heard of that sort of move lately. I do believe they also do a lot of merely announcing that they’ll show up at X or Y event, just so they get reported about, and then not show up or at most sent one loser to stand on the other side of the highway a block from the cemetery with a “God Hates” plackard.
I’d ignore them. Or do the “for every “GHF” sign we spot we’ll donate $500 in WBC’s name to P-FLAG” counterproposal.
The Westboors have a record of carefully staying just barely this side of what the Letter of the Law says regarding their protest activities. One of their strategies is apparently to see if they can goad someone into assaulting them or violating their rights, and then threaten to sue and seek a settlement
They are only doing this to get attention. If people would just **ignore **them, they’d go away.
Actually, i think they’re crazy and committed enough that they wouldn’t go away. But there’s still no need to devote so much attention to them.
We run Jack Chick threads, don’t we?
Phelps’ mission is already accomplished - getting his name in the news by announcing plans to protest. Actually going ahead and doing it is a waste of time and energy.
We need to get the Phelps clan and the Scientologists to fight each other.
The blowback from the Giffords shooting really has you shaken, doesn’t it?
Dude, that’s awesome. After asking for more substance in your completely insubstantiated drop-by insulting in the other thread, you decide not to reply there, but instead to start sniping at me in other threads.
Please, start a pit thread about me or something. Let’s do some intellectual boxing. I would crush you like Ivan Drago vs an infant with polio.
The funniest part is that you’re holding me up as an example of the board’s extreme liberalism, but I’m not even a liberal. I’ve probably voted for 3 times as many republicans as democrats, and most of my views aren’t in line with the democratic party.
But your tiny little brain says “well, there are only two sides to the issue, and he’s criticizing my chosen political tribe, so he must be a liberal!” when in reality I’m one of the few people on this board that isn’t rabidly partisan. The decline of the republican party into apocalyptic rhetoric, catering to racists and crazies, and just flat out lying is a big reason why I’m distancing myself from them even if my political ideals generally line up with what they claim to stand for (but actions speak differently).
We can discuss this more when you stop acting like a little girl and actually pit me, instead of sniping me across various threads.
I don’t know why people get so upset about this idiot. So he and his family are going to stand around outside a funeral with a bunch of moronic signs. Why does anybody care what they think or say? Their opinions mean less than nothing. They’re trolls. Phelps’ whole goal is to get a reaction. The best way to deal with him is to ignore him.
That is unfortunate, but that difficulty is a symptom of decay in your mind, not theirs.
Yeah, you definitely don’t wanna end up in the Fred Zone.
You know what? The next time you have a though like this? Keep it to yourself.