Look, I’ve been hanging around with fundies intermittently for the past thirty years. I spent half of the '90s teaching at an evangelical Christian college.
But I never heard of Fred Phelps before finding the SDMB. And I’ve never heard of him anywhere but here.
There are lots of nutcases in the world, as we’ve lately been reminded all too emphatically. I’ve seen far more than my share of Christian religious zealots. But if nobody hears about these loons, they really don’t make much of an impact. If Pat Robertson had a following of 183 people in the greater Virginia Beach area, he could say all the garbage he wanted, and it wouldn’t trouble me. What makes it necessary to track Robertson and make sure his craziness is exposed to public view, is the fact that tens of millions of people take Pat seriously.
I don’t know how many people take Fred Phelps seriously. But I doubt that very many people outside of Kansas would hear about him, but for this board. He doesn’t need the sort of outrage we regularly focus on him. Most of us aren’t from Kansas, and no one’s gonna come up to us and tell us why Phelps is right, so we don’t need to be ready to quote chapter and verse to the contrary. In fact, we don’t need to think about him at all; the most effective response to him, if you don’t live in his backyard, is to ignore him.
This doesn’t apply to any Kansas Dopers, obviously, but it doesn’t seem to be Kansans that are starting the threads about him. It seems to be everyone from everywhere else.
There are losers and nutcases at all points of the political compass. I can’t think of any lunatic of little importance that receives the attention that Phelps gets.
If he’s showing up in your area, or on your news, then I’d say feel free to speak out against him. But if he’s not, and you’ve got to seek out his site to find out what crackpot thing he’s saying now, then you’re just giving him far more importance than he has on his own. Give it a rest, OK?
RTFirefly, with all due respect, just because you hadn’t heard of Fred doesn’t mean a lot of other folks hadn’t. What about the coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, when Fred and Co. picketed the funeral of Randy Shilts? Or Matthew Shephard. The Secret Service knows him because they made him back off when he tried to picket the funeral of Virginia Clinton, mother of our former President. When a national road company performing “A Chorus Line” came to Topeka THEY knew about him, because the manager of the group came out and was taking pictures, and gave two of us counter-picketers free tickets to the show. I could go on, but you get my drift. I think maybe you were just expressing a tiredness with all the crap going on lately, and that we can all understand.
I heard of Fred Phelps and “God Hates Fags” long before there was a Straight Dope Message Board, or even before I discovered the old SD board on AOL. I’ve been keeping an eye on his activities for at least 6 years now; the radio station at which I was working managed somehow to get on one of his fax lists.
I think you’re a little off-base here, RT. Just because you’ve never heard of before the SDMB doesn’t mean nobody else has. Certainly people who work in the media have been hearing from and about Phelps for a long time.
I thought this exact same thing back when the ‘chick’ threads were all the rage here. And I don’t mean the first few where people criticized the general principal of the cartoons, but the continued follow-up post, “Look!! Another Chick Track”, or whatever it’s called.
Until I came here, I never knew or even heard of these people. You could have said Fred Phelps or Jack Chick and I would have said, ‘Huh? Who?’
But I come in here and bam!! “Look at this shit!” “Here’s another one folks” and “Do you believe this!?!”.
I always kept thinking that broadcasting about these guys only spreads the word. The obvious problem with that thinking is that you can’t restrict against it- it’s not against the law.
You know what I mean. You can’t talk about obtaining drugs or building a bomb, but you can talk about other things with impunity- and rightly so.
If you ask me, RTF, it’s the price you pay to learn. That is, in the pursuit to learn, you’re of course going to learn about unsavory types that you might otherwise have never heard about within your circle of friends or influences.
What can you, or should you, do about it?
What I do, is look at it as the crap that it is, and ignore it.
I first heard about Phelps about 5 years ago on a programme on UK television called “Passengers”, but Jack Chick was totally new to me when I heard about him here.
One: I’d first heard of Phelps in regards to the Matthew Shepherd situation. And I’d been reading Chick Tracts for a decade before I’d heard of Cecil or the Straigh Dope. Just a datapoint.
Two: RTF said:
**
and I have to respectfully disagree. The sort of evil shit that Phleps spews can and will spread if left unchecked. And the best way to combat it is to mock it. Ignoring evil is never a good solution, IMHO.
We have a local talk-show host, Jewish and somewhat conservative who is great at debate, who, every few months gets a neo-Nazi on his show. He then calmly and savagely dissects each point, leaving the Nazi looking like more of an idiot. Like clockwork, each time this host does this, a representative of the ADL calls in and takes a similar position to RTF’s, that by letting the neo-Nazis on, the host is giving them free publicity.
The talk-show host’s stance is similar to mine: by ignoring them, you’re letting them go unchallenged and they gain an aura of legitimacy. By mocking them, by making people laugh at their views, you “delegitimize” and marginalize them.
I heard of Phelps and his bunch of merry hatemongers during the coverage of the funeral of Matthew Shephard. I further agree that we should not let his hate go unchallenged. Someone described him as “a walking hate crime” and I concur.
That said, I will make a donation to the Houston-area AIDS foundation in 'ol Fred’s name. People should not be forced to suffer because of the hate of a single man.
FTR, I’ve know about Fred Phelps for a very long time. I saw him on Ricki Lake when I was very young. I remember very distinctly that he called a bunch of people “fagots” and the whole audience called him on it, and he backpedaled and said “Well, fagots isn’t bad. It’s a bundle of sticks! It says so in the Bible.”
Good save.
Ditto what everyone else is saying, RTFirefly - you must lift up the rocks to expose these vermin to sunlight lest they overrun your garden, and by doing so, they are exposed for the vermin they are.
And I daresay people like matt and I have a personal vested interest in loonies like Fred. I mean, once matt becomes the Canadian Prime Minister, he will be the one to demonstrate to Fred how to properly burn the Canadian flag.
I’m still wondering how I managed to not hear of him; like I said, I’ve reason to believe that I know a bit about who’s who in the fundie world.
Of course I heard about the vile filth who picketed Matthew Shepard’s funeral - but I must admit the names of those responsible slipped by me at the time.
I still have to respectfully disagree somewhat with Fenris’ general point:
If their audience is essentially zero, they can’t gain anything when you ignore them: I don’t have an ‘aura of legitimacy’ because the news media aren’t paying any attention to me; I’m just one of millions of people whose activities haven’t risen to a sufficient level of notoriety to be considered newsworthy.
That’s where I assumed Phelps was. On that matter, I’m clearly wrong. Mea culpa.
Another datapoint: Check the counter on Phelps’ site. It’s a BIG number. Not all of those hitting it are dopers, nor members of his congregation. It’s possible that the counter has been jiggered to bump his numbers, but I’m not going to take that chance.
Examining and debunking hatemonsters such as Phelps is like lancing a boil: Ugly and painful, but necessary, lest the infection spread.
I built a database to facilitate your work. Did you decide to take the job? If not, we need to keep looking. If so, we’re all waiting on you to tell us what to do over at the MPSIMS thread.
Click the link in my sig to see the resources you have available so far.
Didn’t he also say, God hates gay people, and some man in the audience-who said he was gay, stood up and said, “For you to say God hates anyone-YOU are going to Hell!”???
BTW, I don’t see how letting people know about Chick is bad-I mean, after all, most people with half a BRAIN can see what a nutbar the guy is.
