Image by kristen.bouvier.
Go home, gaya hata — that’s what the UK said to the human stain on love and religion known as Fred Phelps. Here’s a snip from Anti-gay American cleric banned from UK for inciting hatred:
A homophobic American cleric who runs a website called God Hates Fags and was allegedly planning to picket a play showing in the UK has been banned from Britain by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith.
Fred Phelps had vowed to come to Britain with his daughter, Shirley, to picket a school play in Basingstoke, Hampshire, that promotes tolerance for gay people. The play, The Laramie Project, depicts the murder of a homosexual teenager, Matthew Shepard, in the Wyoming town in 1998. It will be staged tomorrow evening at Queen Mary’s College.
Phelps, who runs the Primitive Baptist Westboro church in Topeka, Kansas – most of whose congregation are members of his family, including his 13 children – has bought a plot of land in Laramie where he plans to build a memorial celebrating the murder, despite local opposition.
He and his family cause outrage by picketing the funerals of American personnel killed in Iraq, on the grounds that they were serving the godforsaken US. They wave banners and sometimes trample on the Stars and Stripes to show their contempt for their country. His publicity-seeking behaviour and vehemently expressed views are condemned by all mainstream denominations in the US.
A posting on Phelps’s companion website God Hates the World this week stated: “God hates England. Your Queen is a whore. You’re going to hell.” (…read more, guardian.co.uk)
Preach it, brother Mikey.
I went to Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX and during the winter of 2003-2004 Fred Phelps came to picket outside the Buddy Holly Center because there was a display of rock and roll history that included a pair of Elton John’s glasses. The local ministers in this Bible Belt town told their congregations not to provide Phelphs with food or shelter.
This happened in the same week they refused to let Geert Wilders enter the country. Kind of takes the schadenfreude off it for me.
What happened to the left defending the free speech rights of the undefendable? Don’t think you need to anymore because you’re winning now? As Agile Cyborg said, the pendulum swings, fast and hard, and not in a good way.
I’m really disappointed in all the people who decades ago, when in the minority, defended free speech but now defend only their own right to speak and support campus speech codes and mandatory sensitivity training for everyone that annoys them.
I know it’s a cliche, but you seem to have forgotten this: When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing, because I was not a trade unionist….
Screw it, I’m not typing the rest. Google it.
Suzy, think hard and take back your gleeful post. What England just did is just as bad as what the post office did to DH Lawrence.
I am evil, wicked and excessively anti-god but I don’t like this. That pendulum can swing back the other way real damn fast.
A memorial celebrating murder…
That’s what Jesus would do?
ICK!!!
At last, an opportunity to be proud to be British!
Maybe we could just strand him somewhere in the Atlantic on a weird island that moves backwards and forwards in time… oh wait, I think someone thought of that idea already.