The Right Reverend Fred Phelps of Kansas

I have always thought Fred Phelps, who previously was in full-assault mode against fags across the United States and is now occupied by protests at GI funerals, was a wacko. His traveling circus of fanatics parked in front of my high school about 4 years ago with a giant billboard of a fetus to protest abortion. Unfortunately for them, they didn't receive a great response. Students tossed Cheetos and sodas at the protestors who utterly disrupted the school day, and the local news media skewered the underwhelming effort. Rev. Phelps himself, after much hype, chose not to show up in the town President Bush Sr. called "Little Beirut."

But LeanLeft has a profile of Phelps that, while not challenging the image of him as being so far out of the mainstream that he is drowning in a side current, does make one think about the automatic assumptions we make in regards to extremists like Phelps. It turns out that, before Phelps found the Lord at 17, he was accepted into one of the military academies. And much more shockingly, he was a radical civil rights advocate who was a Democrat until the early 1990s, when he suddenly quit the party and began railing about the fags who were destroying our nation. Say what?

I'd highly recommend Lean Left's post--it is well-written while not avoiding the issues of Phelps' bigotry.

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