The AntiWar movement in the USA has some unlikely allies. The typically leftwing granola eating well-educated recyclers who actively stump for peace have been joined in Nashville by activists campaigning with a complementary message: that God (in whose name military action has been invoked) hates the USA !
Perhaps this is a clever slogan challenging the fundamentalist doctrine of President G.W. Bush?…
Naaah.
Reverend Fred Phelps and his Kansas congregation believe God hates the USA because the country condones homosexuality. To express his displeasure the Holy Creator has been blowing up American soldiers in Iraq, which arguably the omniscient Great One would know (being omniscient) is the best way to encourage regressive legislation and hate crimes, which apparently he endorses. It’s certainly endorsed by the Kansas parishioners who sport signs reading: Thank God for Dead Soldiers. Rev. Phelps has been making headlines (again) with his “congregation” of about seventy people whom are mostly relatives, supplemented by other like-minded folks. That is to say, other raging inbred bigots. They’ve been protesting to draw attention to their cause.
Sure their message is slightly convoluted (America went to war in Iraq so God would have a platform to punish not homosexuals themselves, but United States lawmakers?) It’s tough to follow. But fortunately they’ve chosen high-profile venues to stage their protests.
Funerals of dead soldiers.
Now, I hate war in general and particularly I hate this unjust, profit-driven debacle of idiotic, narrow-minded, death-toll-raising-retardedness as much as the next granola eater. But dead soldiers + protesters of any sort is an equation that doesn’t add up to anything other than unspeakable cruelty i.e. something that Jesus definitely would not do.
However, Phelps and his family of fuckwits have been travelling to funerals of dead young men and women to promote the Good Word. That’s un-fucking-believable. I would argue that people who go to war are either stupid, ill-informed, blindly patriotic, desperate, naïve, have played too many first person shooters, or some combination of the above; but when somebody has died for something, well I think that’s about the time to try and convince somebody still living that they’re making a mistake, rather than trying to convince somebody who presumably has already realized, in that split-second their life flashed before their eyes, that they’ve made a mistake. And the families deserve peace.
If the Rev. Phelps can be considered a soldier in the Army of the Lord than I would certainly thank God for one dead soldier. You know who I’m thinking of.
And God, if you’re listening, and Phelps has it all ass-backwards, as I suspect he does, to really drive the point home about how hate crimes in America are unacceptable, maybe you could raise cab fares in the Bahamas so American tourists will really feel the pinch and thus perhaps be more sensitive to alternative lifestyles when they return home from their holidays.