Proud to be an American (or, Why Fred Phelps Can Suck It)

You may have heard of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist "Church." (I say "church" because it's actually a hate group.) They got started on the road to national notoriety by picketing at the funerals of gay people, including Matthew Shepard. I'm not linking to their original website, but it's called "God Hates [Insert Derrogatory Name for Gay People Here]."

Since they're really big on picketing at funerals, they moved on to picketing at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. OK, let's tell it like it is: They say nasty things at soldiers' funerals. Soldiers.

This was really big fodder for their next website, "God Hates America." Fred Phelps is apparently blessed with divine connection to God Himself (or Herself) and therefore knows that the following people are in hell: Gerald Ford, Coretta Scott King, and most outlandishly of all, the Pope and the Amish children who were killed in Pennsylvania.

Let's review. According to Fred Phelps, every tragedy in the world is linked to the sin of homosexuality. And because homosexuals in America are not immediately put to death, God hates America. And that's why some little girls in Amish country are in hell.

All this has come to my attention because apparently Westboro was planning to picket at the funerals of the students who were murdered at Virginia Tech. You see, Fred Phelps thinks they're in hell too. I imagine, though he hasn't said this, that he thinks a special section of hell is reserved for the Holocaust survivor who was murdered while he barricaded the door so that his students could jump out the window. And since I'm home alone, I had nothing else to do with my rage except scream at the computer, "FRED PHELPS, WHAT AN ASSHOLE!!!!"

I hate that Fred Phelps fills me with hate for him for being so filled with hate. Isn't that the essential paradox of tolerance? And having just finished Julia Scheeres' Jesus Land for the second time, her amazing memoir about having grown up in the racist South with intolerant parents and black brothers, I believe it's not helpful, maybe even a little dangerous, to turn the other cheek. Which is why I just don't have it in me to ignore Fred Phelps and his messages of hate. He's not entirely doing things like this simply to get a rise out of us; he's doing it because he genuinely believes that his God hates America and everything America has come to stand for.

I believe in free speech, and that's why my ideal America is a place where when Fred Phelps spews his nasty, intolerant rhetoric, Americans of all different backgrounds and beliefs -- all of whom God hates, according to Fred Phelps -- rise up in response. In fact, I do believe that even people with whom I disagree vehemently about foreign policy or gun control or civil rights could get together with me on the fact that Fred Phelps is a jerk. (Case in point: Even Bill O'Reilly hates Fred Phelps!) If our tolerance in the face of difference is wrong -- if our grief in the face of tragedies like Virginia Tech is wrong -- if our sorrow at the deaths of U.S. soldiers is wrong -- if we continue to pray to God even in the face of Fred Phelps' warnings that He hates us because these things are wrong -- well then, Fred Phelps, I don't want to be right.