Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 11:58:32 -0400 From: "David B. O'Donnell" [ Ed. Note: Due to the relevance of this article, I am cross-posting it to the Belief-L mailing list. ] Perhaps this should be renamed the Phelps FAQ? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- [Anonymous Sender info omitted] Kansas minister fights a holy war against homosexuals By Brenda You Mercury Tribune Staff Writer Rev. Fred Phelps is not a popular guy. He is booed on TV talk shows, egged when he steps out to preach and watched by law officers at every step as they wait for him to do anything that will allow them to press charges. Phelps, a disbarred lawyer from Topeka, Kan., has reason to be hated. He pickets funerals. When two gay men in Kansas were killed in a car crash earlier this year, Phelps and his family marched around their funerals carrying signs decorated with slogans such as "Fags deserve death." The men were young and not public figures. Their families were devastated. But that was just another funeral in the life of Fred Phelps. Since then he has picketed the funeral of journalist Randy Shilts, who died of AIDS in February. Phelps' flock even traveled to Little Rock earlier this year to picket the funeral of President Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley, whom Phelps blames for leading her son--and thus the country--on the path to moral decay. And Phelps is planning to picket the funeral of "Bewitched" actor Dick Sargent, a gay activist who isn't even dead but is suffering from advanced cancer. "He could go at any minute," Phelps says. Phelps, 64, started the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka 38 years ago. The church, which claims a Primitive Baptist affiliation, has about 50 members, all of them family. Phelps has run for mayor of Topeka and U.S. senator from Kansas, and he's planning to announce his second campaign for governor, which will be decided in November. He has never received more than 7 percent of the vote. When he's not bicycling around the state to promote his political yearnings, Phelps and his family travel around the country protesting what he calls "the sodomite agenda"--that is, anything Phelps believes promotes homosexuality. At the Shilts funeral, Phelps and 12 followers picketed for all of 50 seconds. Phelps' supporters were so handily targeted with eggs and verbal abuse (and, they claim, one brick) that they piled back into their van before the last member had even emerged. To the chagrin of Kansans, however, the media coverage went far beyond one minute, and there on CNN was Phelps, wearing his bright red-and-gold Kansas City Chiefs jacket. The Kelley funeral received less attention, but after the picketing Phelps sent the president and the national media a fax containing a picture of Clinton and his mother with the words, "AntiChrist Bill Clinton & His Evil Jezebellian Mother." Phelps went on to explain that "Virginia Kelley is mostly to blame for Bill's moral/religious principles," which "have reduced our nation to a slime pit of sexual perversion." According to one of Phelps' 13 children, Shirley Phelps-Roper, the Phelps family spends about 30 hours each week picketing "the sodomite agenda"--at funerals, as well as parks, restaurants and retail stores where gays allegedly hang out or work. "We've been in 10 states," Phelps-Roper says. "We picketed the fag March on Washington, we picket fag funerals." Phelps-Roper, a Topeka lawyer, says her seven children also work long hours sending the church's venomous faxes. Why do they do it? "Because homosexuality is at the heart of the downfall of society," Phelps says. He seldom does print interviews--preferring to preach or fight talk-show audiences--but during a phone interview he was calm, almost pleasant, at least for a man who uses the words "fags" and "whores" ("Bible words," he says) in almost every other sentence. "Fags caused the demise of Sodom," he explains. "They destroyed the idea of one man, one woman, one lifetime. They have driven a stake into the heart of that." NOTORIOUS IN TOPEKA Such ideas and attacks haven't made Phelps a favorite in Topeka. "People here pretty well hate me," he says. "And I couldn't like it better. 'Blessed are ye when men shall hate you."' The 11 of his children who have stayed with the church and all 31 of his grandchildren also are hated. "The kids get a hard time at school, and they rejoice in that," the proud grandfather says. "They are celebrities." But not all the family rejoices over the notoriety. "Two of my sons left the church and moved to southern California," says Phelps, who no longer communicates with the sons. "They chose to enjoy the pleasure of sin." He notes that one son committed the sin of "marrying another man's wife" (a divorcee) while the other "is determined not to have children, the fruit of the womb." The sons, who have desperately tried to distance themselves from the family, couldn't be reached for comment. According to Phelps, funerals are the perfect time to persuade people to change their evil ways. "It's a watershed time. People are thinking about heaven and hell. We're trying to help them so they won't go to hell also. And I know, if those dead fags could come back, they would stand with me and say: 'Don't do what I did. You don't want to end up like me.' It's all there in Luke 16." Ironically, Phelps says he doesn't hate gays. "I have friends that are gay," he says. "Oh, they don't know I know they're gay, but I do. And I preach to them. When you care about someone, you don't let that person drive off a cliff. I just want them to change their ways and save themselves." F.G. "Chico" Manzanares, 60, a Wichita lawyer and longtime friend of Phelps' who attended Washburn University Law School with him in the 1960s, says that while he personally likes Phelps, he's in the minority. "The community does not like them," he says. Manzanares says that while he can still like Phelps ("You don't have to agree with everything your friends do"), he has distanced himself from him. "We are still friends, but I don't go around telling people that, because if I did, I'd never get off the phone. "I will say he is very honest, very dedicated to his beliefs, and he does not give up. But I will also say I know I don't want my funeral picketed." Adds Phelps, "Publicly, people say they hate me, but state politicians, City Council members, they call me regularly for my advice." Boston lawyer Mel Dahl, who writes a column that is syndicated to more than a dozen gay publications nationwide, has been a Phelps watcher for a long time. "Nothing would please me more than to have him drop off the face of the Earth," says Dahl, who is gay. "But I write about him because he is, indeed, newsworthy." UNINTENDED BENEFIT Dahl says that despite the hurt Phelps has inflicted on families of those picketed, he thinks what Phelps has really accomplished is to "galvanize a group of people. "He has generated a lot of sympathy for gays," Dahl says. "It's like the Nazis marching on Skokie. You don't have to love Jewish people to be offended by people with swastikas." Dahl says the people most hurt are those in Phelps' hometown. "There are a lot of people in Topeka who have lost jobs because of Phelps," Dahl says, recalling an incident in which an employee in a hardware store lost his job because the Phelps group picketed the store on a rumor that the employee was gay. "If they find a gay person working in a restaurant or store, they'll picket outside the shop every day," Dahl notes. "And even if the business owner supports gay rights, he has to think of the business first." When state charges, most of them for criminal defamation, were filed against Phelps last year by Shawnee County District Atty. Joan Hamilton of Topeka, Phelps challenged the state defamation laws in federal court and succeeded in having some of them declared unconstitutional. The case is being appealed, but the charges against Phelps in state court were dropped. Earlier this year, Hamilton charged Phelps and three of his children with 11 criminal counts, including defamation, disorderly conduct, battery, falsely reporting a crime, criminal damage to property and aggravated intimidation of a witness who was to go to court against Phelps in the earlier arrests. Phelps responded by sending the state media a three-page fax denouncing Hamilton as a "demon-possessed vixen," among other names, and by having his 11 children and five of their spouses, all of whom are lawyers, try to have state laws on phone/fax harassment and stalking declared unconstitutional. He lost that battle in federal court, but the county charges are on hold until his appeals in federal court are finished. If the laws are ultimately declared constitutional, Hamilton says she will prosecute the Phelpses on the charges. Phelps says that each time a member of his clan has been "put in the hospital" by angry Kansans, the district attorney has done nothing. Hamilton says police records prove this is untrue. "I will not ignore criminal activity," she says, "either by the Phelpses or against them. "They've filed charges, and my job is to make the determination whether or not the cases should be prosecuted," she says. "In some cases in which the Phelpses are the victims, I have prosecuted. In others, we haven't." To protect residents from Phelps, the Topeka City Council in 1993 passed a law banning picketing outside churches before, during or after services--a move that was made in direct response to his funeral picketing. The ban was supported by 47 clerics from 32 congregations and 13 denominations. Phelps also fought that law in court and lost--another decision he is appealing. Charges against Phelps concerning this law are still pending. PHELPS HAS PLANS Court battles are nothing new to Phelps. He was criticized by opponents during his political campaigns for filing excessive lawsuits, and the state Supreme Court disbarred him in 1979, finding that he had made false statements in court documents. Court records from the disbarment trial report that Phelps was "abusive, repetitive, irrelevant" to witnesses on the opposite side. Manzanares agrees with Phelps that he has been unjustly accused of many wrongdoings. "The state would do anything to get rid of him," Manzanares says. "Phelps will go to any extremes necessary to get his point across, but, as far as I know, he's never violated the law. And that family knows the law." The law has everything to do with why Phelps wants to be governor. He doesn't have strong plans regarding education or taxes. But he does have a strong plan regarding gays. "When I am governor, I will enforce the anti-sodomy laws of this state and use my position as a bully pulpit to bring down Bill Clinton and his fag administration," Phelps says. "I would persecute gays under the full extent of the law and prosecute media who encourage crime by promoting that lifestyle." One of his campaign platforms is to quarantine people with AIDS. Kansas Gov. Joan Finney has not commented on Phelps. "She never communicates with him. We never speak of him," says her spokeswoman, Ann Cook. Whatever hassles he goes through, Phelps says it's worth it, even if one--or all--of his children or grandchildren is hurt--or even killed--in the process. "But that's not likely," he adds. "We take great precautions." Besides the precautions, Phelps says he has God on his side. "People try to destroy my message, but it's all in the Bible. I'm a Bible preacher, and that means I'm a hate preacher."