Fred Phelps' gang to protest outside kids' funeral

I'd love to see a radio station offer them a radio interview, and when they show up, all of a sudden out of a doorway come a dozen or so relatives of servicemen and other people's funerals they've picketed.

With Louisville Sluggers in hand. Send these fuckers to the ICU for a few months to "reassess their outlook on life."

 

Put the bat down (for now), Starman. It's supposedly a telephone interview.

I don't care if they hit these people with nothing but tough questions -- we've given them a chance to reach the audience they want to reach. It's deplorable.

 

No phone interviews. Show up in person, THEN you can talk.

After the victims' families with the Louisville Sluggers get done with you.

May be a bit tough to talk through wired jaws, but that's life in the big city.

 

They should offer the interview on the day of or day after the funeral, and then just hang up on their asses once they start talking. What are they gonna do?

 

I once drew a sidebar for a Sen. Nancy Kassebaum's speech on campus for the student paper, so I thought I might walk up to this group of protesters outside with some amazingly obscene signs and see whether it's worth a story.

"And you are?" this tall man asked me, extending his hand to shake. I shook it.
"I'm Oz, from the University Daily Kansan," I said, shaking his hand. "And you are?"
"Fred Phelps, reverend of the Westboro Baptist Church."

At that moment, my stomach suddenly knew what it felt like to be hit my Mike Tyson in his prime, because it didn't feel the same for two days. Before that moment, I had only heard the stories about Fred Phelps. I had never seen them protest, didn't know just how raunchy the signs were. Had I known that was him or his cult, I would have never approached him. But I didn't know.

Knowing I shook hands with the devil, that rates as the absolute lowest moment of my life. And it's not even close.

 

Do stories stick with AP style and refer to him as the Rev. Fred Phelps?

 

I think idiotsnetwork is Fred Phelps.

 

I wish Phelps would come to my area and protest. There is just the right amount of crazy liberals/crazy rednecks in my area to make sure he wouldn't leave alive.

 

We can only dream.

 

our constitution guarantees sub-human scum like phelps the right to say what he wants.

while murdering him would theoretically be a service to the rest of humanity, we start sliding down the slippery slope immediately when we kill him for his words. then it's not too long before other things that you and i think and/or say are deemed worth of being killed for. it's already popularly accepted by many (though not all, for sure) that criticizing the war is tantamount to treason, so it's a short trip to effectively ending free speech guarantees.

not that i'd shed a tear if someone 'accidentally' ran him over with a hearse or doused his ceaser salad with draino, but as a society we can't condone this sort of thing.

 

Reminds me how I felt when I found out (thanks to this board, of course) that a SE I knew had been busted trying to hook up with a 12-year-old girl. Of course, the "12-year-old" turned out to be an undercover cop.

My sympathies for being stuck like that....did you end up talking with him?

 

Unfortunately, yes. For about two minutes, acted like a pro, reluctantly shook his hand a second time the moment the interview was done. As soon as stopped the tape recorder, though, I couldn't walk away fast enough.