Open Letter to Rev. Phelps: Go To Hell

Who needs right wing attack dogs when you've got handy dandy dainty in drawers Rev. Phelps and his crew of lunatics ready and willing to chime in.

In a pamphlet they've just published called "Open Letter to Cindy Sheehan, In Answer to her Question to Bush: 'Why did my son die in Iraq?'," they've got some solid answers.

I'm not going to reprint any text from the piece because if the AntiC is Googled, it will be dealt with in context, not out of.

But I want to point out that Phelps is the central extremist in American Evangelicalism, or whatever it is he calls it, today. He has no purpose other than, apparently, to spew hellfire invective without any purposeful thought. Westboro is full of condemning hatred, and does nothing to counteract that perception; it's just simply clear.

These are the guys actually protesting soldier's funerals with homosexual epithets and hatred.

They are isolationist, eliminationist extremists.

But I do want to point out, as we have pointed out in the past, that their central theme of radical homophobia based on religious "moralism" is something deeply shared in the vein of the modern mainstream religious extremist. Lots of people we know and love have shared thought that is only an invective away from being Phelps tried-and-true:

Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell on 9/11:

PAT ROBERTSON: Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population.

JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well yes.

JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur...

Bush's push for a Constitutional amendment restricting Marriage from homosexuals

Sen. Rick Santorum's thoughts on Liberalism [and homosexuality by extension]:

Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

The Moral Majority of America, a fabricated system of Moralist reductionism, attempts to restrict and force upon us the constraints of their religious texts taken out of context. In fact, Phelps wants you to do just that: take the Bible out of context [read his flier!].

For every one reference to being condemned to hell for a man kissing another man, we need to throw at them 10 references to healing the sick, tending to the poor, neighborly love.

Ms. Sheehan, and to all the families who have tragically lost anybody in this tragic war, please know that Phelps is not actually talking to you. He's talking to the deep hatred in his heart; that's about it. It's a PR trick; he wants hits on his website [and we're giving them that] in order to feel better about himself when he sleeps at night. But he's not talking about you. He's talking about all of us.

And we reject him.