If you’ve been on the boards for a while, you probably know that Fred Phelps is a well-known anti-gay protester often seen picketing people’s funerals, perhaps most famously at the funeral of Matt Shepherd, which was dramatized in the play The Laramie Project.
Anyway, I got to thinking the other day that maybe someone should picket his funeral. He’s not planning to die any time soon, but he is 75, so it’s got to happen eventually, and maybe someone ought to start making plans.
Any ideas? I’m thinking signs with “God hates straight people” or “Thank God for [whatever ends up killing him].” I don’t know the Bible too well, but I vaguely remember a verse saying not to mix two different types of cloth together. If we could prove that Phelps ever wore a 50% cotton, 50% polyester shirt, we could condemn him for that, or for some other minor sin prohibited in an obscure passage. I know some other dopers will have better ideas. So…?
Frankly, I think the best thing to do with Fred Phelps and his followers is to ignore them. Picketing would draw media attention, and these asshats have had more than their share of that already.
pinkfreud echos my sentiments, let him rot, I’ll not give the attention he (and his followers) craves by picketing his funeral. I think the net etiquette aphorism “Don’t feed the trolls” aptly applies to Phelps and his ilk.
Get a bunch of grungy hippies and people with a lot of Communist memorabilia (Soviet flags, red banners, Che T-Shirts, pseudo-shrines to Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, etc.), gather at the funeral, and make a big show of mourning Phelps. Have signs reading “Phelps is dead, but his GLORIOUS MOVEMENT LIVES ON!” Tell all the reporters how you agree that stamping out homosexuality will advance global Communism, and bring about the downfall of the decadent capitalist western imperialists, etc.
Maybe it wouldn’t change anyone’s minds, or discredit anything. But it’d be worth a cheap laugh or two. Which, at the end of the day, is really the most any of us can hope for in life.
TJdude825 can speak for himself but I suspect that you guys are misinterpreting the intent of the OP and taking this way to seriously. I doubt that he’s looking for real solid plans that will eventually be carried out, it’s just fun (and possibly cathartic) to think about it and invent scenarios. Ranchoth has the right idea.
Probably the most aggravating thing you could do to him is offer him the love Jesus preached, but Phred was not capable of offereing. Imagine him looking down (or Up) and seeing you praying that he learned to truly love as God intended before he died. THAT would burn him up!
Meeting his hatred and intolerance with more of your own is simply a waste of your energies.
Couldn’t someone organize a broadway musical number with top hats and tails and dancing girls, all elaborately mourning his loss? I mean, it’s long past time that God Hates Fags got set to Rogers & Hammerstein.
