I hope by “meeting of the mind”, you mean “confrontation”.
I mentioned this to my boyfriend and he said, “Wait, he won a gold medal for swimming and then decided he hates Jews?” Apparently he mixed up his Phelpses. 
Hmmm…I would have thought he would have been all over the deaths of Michael Jackson (he looked gay!) and Farrah Fawcett (she died of anal cancer! And there’s only one way to get that!) but I must have missed those protests.
Why doesn’t Phelps picket a Hell’s Angels funeral? Those are some wretched sinners, they are!
For the same reason anti-fur zealots don’t throw red paint on biker’s leather jackets: They’re crazy, not stupid! 
You’re probably right. But I stick to my opinion that they should be tortured. Maybe its the one exception I would make.
I would throw cacti off the cliff and dump acid down afterwards
Ok deal. If someone arrests him and puts him in jail and he’s still evil after prolonged re-education, then we’ll investigate anal rape 
Y’know, this whole line of thinking/questioning brings up what I think is actually a pretty important point. Intelligence does not necessarily translate into goodness or any other aspect of character. In fact, it might be possible to make the case that some of the most evil people in history have been quite smart. I know that our mission is to wipe out ignorance, but ignorance is not a sin; it’s just a lack of knowledge. These Phelps people know what they are doing. It’s like you say. They are not stupid. They are crazy. And I think it would behoove us all, really, to put into perspective the overall great intelligence that most of us possess as posters. (1) Being smart doesn’t mean you’re right. And (2) Being smart doesn’t mean you’re nice, empathetic, or any other high moral qualities.
No, Ted. I don’t. You’ve done your part to help exterminate the jewish religion. And you did it to spite others, to boot. Congratulations.
Phelps doesn’t have a theological premise. He just wants attention.
When do Fred and the Family leave for Mecca to do the “God Hates Muslims” protest?
If we all donate a quarter or so that’ll fund a one-way ticket on JetBlue.
Look, there’s only one member of the Phelps clan who is out-and-out evil, and that’s the Patriarch. You can almost literally see the malevolence and evil dripping off him. The others are just dumb kids raised in a crazy cult who don’t know any better. The vast majority of evil done in the world is not Evil for the sake of Evil, it’s just normal human selfishness and ignorance raised to a slightly higher degree.
The reason the Phelps clan gets so much press is because people love the feeling they get from hating the Phelps clan. It feels so good to hate someone hateable. It’s an indulgence of our worst side, and hey, these guys are so bad that it’s good to hate them! Except, you know, it isn’t. Hating them is an indulgence of the exact same vice you hate them for (hint: that would be hatred). It’s exactly like the preacher who rails on and on against pornography and sexual perversion. It’s wallowing in it while excusing yourself for wallowing in it because you pretend to yourself that you’re condemning it, not wallowing in it.
You know, maybe some people really do deserve to be sexually tortured to death. I don’t know, it’s possible. But even if there were someone who deserved it, no one would deserve to be the person who inflicted that torture. If someone is really too dangerous to be allowed to live, then they can be removed from society and put away somewhere where they can’t hurt other people. Not because they deserve (or don’t deserve) to be treated humanely, but because the rest of us deserve to be the kind of people who treat other people humanely.
I suppose this is a bit long winded as a response to typical internet tough-guy puffery and posturing, but it still needs to be said.
Since God obviously made gays, if Phred had a logical bone in his body he’d be waving a sign saying “God hates God.”
As for me, I’d get a sound truck, crank the amp up to 11, and blast the complete works of the Village People at them for the length of their protest.
Either that or Babs.
Fred Phelps got a lot of practice at looking evil when he played the preacher in Poltergeist.
His equally evil nutbar daughter Shirley takes over.
I’d donate a quarter or two to send Phelps & his clan to the Vatican with “God Hates Catholics” signs. Especially if the money raised was adequate only for one way tickets.
And this YogWhatever person sure seems to have some sort of unhealthy fixation on anal rape.
Maybe some people DO hate them. Maybe there’s a reason. Should it be so surprising that sometimes hate is met with hate? Everyone has that one button you don’t want to push. These creatures push them all, deliberately.
Of course they deliberately push them all! That’s the whole point! Fred and Shirley tell the kids that everyone in the world hates them, then tells them to hold up signs, and everyone hates the kids. It is done on purpose, and while it pisses you off, pissing you off is just a means to an end. The end is to keep the kids subservient and scared and dependent. And when you scream at and hate the kids, you’re doing exactly what Fred wants. He loves it when you hate him and his clan because he loves hate, which should be kind of obvious.
Strangely, I want Phred & co to continue preaching. I like my bigots out in the open where we can fight them with ridicule rather than worming their poisonous ways into positions of power and influence.
That’s another good point. That’s why I wish we didn’t have all these stupid rules about speech — especially so-called “hate speech”, which is about as well defined as “obscenity” and which protects some groups while not protecting others. I don’t think we should attract bigots, but at the same time, I don’t think we should be afraid to hear them out and debate them.