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OK, so Is it just me, but does anyone else think the most offensive person in this whole video is Michael Moore. Thanks for putting gay people into your own handy stereotype Michael…
It’s just you.
Yup, just you.
try not to cry about it!
apparently your as half witted as westboro church members
LOVE LOVE LOVE this
wouldn’t you be more mad at the gay men that went along with it?
SO funny , and I think it worked , because I havnt seen much of fred since then, now it seems he just sends the rest of his family out to do his dirty work.
I actually got to interview Phelps’s Grandson a few years ago when I was working on a documentary about the Catholic Church covering up decades of priestly pedophilia. It’s beginning to look like I could have made a career doing that if I had had a little insight.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was having it’s annual meeting in the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas back in 2002. the Director of the documentary and I drove to the hotel and that’s where I saw the those Westboro Christards with their “God Hates Fags” signs.
This may sound bad but I actually got excited when I saw them. I said: “Look! It’s Fred Phelps!” The Director didn’t know who they were so I had to tell her about them. She had told me that she wanted me to interview protesters so I was actually glad I had some really evil bastards to interview aside from the guys wearing turtlenecks that were protesting for foreskin restoration.*
I was disappointed to learn that Fred Phelps wasn’t present for this protest as he was off somewhere hating on some other group of people whose mere existence was apparently enough send Phelps’s inbred God in to spastic fits of rage.
I really wanted to see him to because Fred Phelps is one of those very rare people who look and act like a cinematic representation of evil. He looks just like that evil preacher from Poltergeist II and he IS an evil preacher! So I had to settle for interviewing a third generation spawn of Phelps’s dynasty of hate and douche baggery.
*The turtlenecks were an embellishment I couldn’t resist but there were people there protesting for foreskin restoration.
Does anybody happen to know if (the legendarily litigious) Phelps family tried to sue anybody over this?
I think Fred Phelps is probably a homosexual himself. It really seems to me that the people who are the most outspoken and hateful towards gays are people who actually struggle with homosexual thoughts, tendencies, feelings themselves. Think about it… Other people are sometimes a mirror for us and we see in them things we hate about ourselves. It’s easier though to hate someone else than admit we really hate ourselves.
There was a fascinating interview I read with one of his sons who escaped. Thoroughly recommend looking it up.
Thanks I’ll check that out. I have read a good bit about his church and followers since I’ve been following the story of Al Snyder and his infamous battle against Westboro after they protested at his son’s funeral. I’ve actually seen Westboro in action locally and my husband has been a part of the Patriot Guards attempt to silently block these people at such occasions.
I don’t know what Michael Moore is talking about with regard to sodomy laws. In a 2003 Supreme Court decision, all sodomy laws were invalidated. Even before then, only I think ten states still had valid sodomy laws, and even those were rarely ever enforced. Obviously I think they should be officially taken off the books, but saying that people can still get prosecuted for sodomy is just false. Also, many of these laws technically apply to both homosexual and heterosexual couples.
Looking at the age of Phelps there I’d guess this clip is 10 years plus old.
Yeah, I think this was part of his TV Nation show.
That was some good TV, my favorite was when he had Jeanine Garafolo storm a snooty “private” beach with a bunch of people from the projects.
Yep, found it! This segment never aired however, too racy for the late 90′s I guess.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0800198816/
Based on the fact that Moore says that the Matthew Shepard murder was the previous year, this would have aired in 1999.
LOL freakin hilarious!
While I agree with the stance of this video. In my opinion demonstrations like this only further entrench people like those in the westboro baptist church. I imagine it was perceived as an attack of Satan upon their organization and served as a “supernatural” validation of their own beliefs.
But do you really think anyone in the Westboro is going to change their mind upon seeing nice, non-confronting gays? I mean, it hasn’t worked yet. I have absolutely no problem with people actiong over-the-top and trying to be offensive to people this extreme precisely because I see no possibility of them changing their mind (so it won’t push them any further in than they already are.)
I don’t think the audience is Westboro, either. Of all the protests I’ve seen against them, the ones I think are best are the ones that make them look ridiculous, either through good-natured mocking or by showing such grace, love, maturity or goodwill that they look like hateful rabid idiots, like the high schools that raise money, send it to causes Fred would hate, and have the organizations send him thank you notes. I imagine the goal is to have observers to want to identify more with the counter-protesters than with WBC, even if the observer might originally have had anti-gay opinions.
I found this wonderful, as did my teen daughter who recently came out. Rather than reinforcing stereotypes, I got the message “Your hate won’t make us run and hide. We do not accept your assessment of us. Deal.”
I agree with the above two posters, and I don’t think people like Westboro can get any more entrenched anyway. They’re too far gone, tactics aren’t particularly important when dealing with them. What’s important is to say “no, we don’t accept what you’re saying”.
Moore seems to have lost some of his humor since this was made, although the ‘fill up the bag’ stunt in “Capitalism” was cute. When people are acting like assholes, I thank Moore for showing up and breaking the tension, even temporarily. Nasty people deserve to be mocked by clowns.
Indeed. He’s certainly since lost all of his journalistic integrity – some of his tactics over the last few years have been worthy of Fox Noise.
Micheal Moore loves to “mainstream rebellious”
the more people “persecute” the westboro church, the more they’ll think they’re right. they are a cult, and one of the major sociological markers of a cult is the persecution complex.
i don’t know why people even bother with the phelps anymore. they are a novelty act, albeit an offensive one.
it is suiting that the most anti-intellectual, dogmatic, and crazy group of “christians” are being confronted by the most anti-intellectual, dogmatic, and crazy film maker.
Thanks for posting this, don’t think I’ve seen this clip before (although I was a fan of The Awful Truth).
Here’s a great documentary from 2007 about Phelps and Westboro that I watched on Tuesday (the same day this vid was posted on here actually, more proof of the existence of coincidence, not god, haha).
Fall from Grace. From IMDB: “The first feature-length documentary to explore the hate-filled world of Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS.”
A lot of offensive material in the video, but that’s the idea: exposing Phelps and his cohorts for what they are. The funeral protests by Westboro Baptist and interviews with two of Phelp’s children who escaped (literally) from Phelps and the church were particularly interesting and revealing.
I would have liked it more if the film would have been more critical of religion broadly instead of just Phelp’s brand of it, but I think the documentary does a good job at what it sets out to do.