Without meaning to, the late hatemonger did one good thing for tolerance in America.
It’s official: Fred Phelps is dead.
Phelps is known–not best-known, but only known–for running the Westboro Baptist Church, a monomaniacal and family-based group dedicated to only one thing: hatred of gay people. Phelps will be remembered only as the GOD HATES FAGS guy, and he does not deserve to be remembered as anything else, but there’s more than one way to frame that legacy.
When the WBC first became known in the 1990s, it was just for being hateful and awful and doing public protests. The turning point for them came with their picketing of the funeral of Matthew Shepard: that brought them a level of notoriety and attention that they’d never had before. The first archive.org snapshot of their website is from 1999, and it shows the beginning of their evolution. At this point, they’re still pushing a lot of ugly nonsense about gay folks, and protesting at a wedding and religious conventions, but they’re starting their move to funerals.
The key is that it’s pretty offensive to picket a religious convention for not being hateful enough, and it’s even more offensive to picket someone’s wedding, but picketing someone’s funeral is beyond the pale. It’s despicable on a whole new level. And that’s the only reason they did it.
The Westboro Baptist Church was composed mostly of Phelps’ family, and Phelps’ family was composed mostly of lawyers. And they supplemented their income with a continuous series of lawsuits against cities and individuals, all related to their picketing activities. It’s the old trip-and-fall scam married to an agenda of hate: offend people hard enough, and someone will do something you can sue them for.
In 2005, someone at WBC had the bright idea of picketing the funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they’d died serving a country that didn’t hate gay people hard enough. Does this make any sense? No. Did it get them attention and lawsuits? Yes. Mission accomplished, as someone or other said back then.
Fred Phelps’ case demolishes at a stroke all the asinine persecution fantasies of all America’s preachers of hate.
|
Let Phelps, then, not be remembered as a sincere hatemonger, but as a second-rate con man, amplifying his natural hatred into something that would provide a living from lawsuits. Ironically, it was one of those lawsuits that provided the one good thing Fred Phelps leaves behind him.
In 2006, the WBC picketed the funeral of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, a Marine who’d died in Iraq. Cpl. Snyder’s father Albert then sued the WBC for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and various other claims on the theme of “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”
Snyder lost initially, and a judgment was levied against him to pay the WBC’s court costs, just as planned. A series of appeals followed, with one verdict after another being overturned, until the case made its way to the Supreme Court as Snyder v. Phelps, where a landmark 8-1 verdict upheld Phelps’ right to be a contemptible, bottom-feeding piece of crap.
That decision is the positive legacy of Fred Phelps, a man who in life did nothing else worthy of remembrance.
Snyder v. Phelps upheld our nation’s legacy as a land of tolerance, in that we can even tolerate a two-bit crook’s attention-trolling nonsense. Phelps was the reductio ad absurdum of free speech, doing everything within the law to be as offensive and horrible as possible, and as such he finally found some value: as a test case of our principles.
Snyder v. Phelps is what we can cite every time some scaremongering right-wing liar starts talking about how “preaching the Bible is considered hate speech today” or whatever variant of that line they’re trying. We can simply ask “Are you as hate-filled and cruel as Fred Phelps? Because if not, then you’re lying about the threat to your rights of freedom of speech and religious expression.” Fred Phelps’ case demolishes at a stroke all the asinine persecution fantasies of all America’s preachers of hate.
Let that, then, be his legacy. He proved the worth of the very principle he opposed: that a free society can tolerate even the seemingly intolerable. He set a legal precedent that makes liars out of all the wannabe-Phelpses out there. Against his intentions, this despicable excuse for a man left behind something good in the world, and remembering that, instead of the things he’d prefer to be remembered for, may just be the best revenge.
Photo—Associated Press
It speaks volumes about the quality of this website that the reactions to Phelps’ first impending death, now acutal death were, from authors and commenters alike, were of an equanimious and dignified sort. We all realize clearly that De mortuis nil nisi bonum is just not possible here, but still level heads were kept all around. There is a couple of female-oriented websites I read where it turned into a festival of glee, verbal fist-bumps and triumphant animated GIFs by the bucketful. As much as it may be deserved in some cases, righteous aggression is always ugly and disturbing to… Read more »
Amen to that.