CHAPTER ONE
"Introductions All Around"
A TIME magazine article from 1950 hangs framed on the wall. It's about a college student's crusade against necking on a campus in Southern California.
That student's office in Kansas today is aclack with fax machines and ringing phones, but the chair behind the great mahogany desk is empty.
When the former campus evangelist finally bursts in, he is trailed by grandchildren-so many sixth-grade secretaries-gophering, sending faxes, fetching papers-and a glass of water for the reporter.
Thoughtful. It's 93 outside.
"Sit down," says Fred Phelps, rumored ogre, with an effusive Southern graciousness. "But I got to tell you, you know we're going to preach the word, the same thing I've been preaching for 46 years, and it's supremely, supremely irrelevant to us what anybody thinks or says. "You get a little bit of this message I'm preaching, you can't ask for anything more. God hates fags-that's a synopsis."
Phelps, 63, a disbarred lawyer and Baptist preacher from Mississippi, is on a mission from God. His face lights up like a kid's on Christmas morning when he talks about how the nation is reacting to his anti- homosexual campaign. He contends the Bible supports the death penalty for sodomy:
"I'm not urging anybody to kill anybody," he adds, then matter-of-factly explains how his interpretation of the Bible calls for precisely that:
"The death penalty was violently carried out by God on a massive scale when the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire and brimstone," says Phelps. "I am inclined to the view that the closer man's laws come to God's laws, the better off our race will be."
Phelps has found the national spotlight by disrupting the mourners' grieving at the funerals of AIDS victims. His followers carry picket signs outside the services with such stone-hearted messages as GOD HATES FAGS and FAGS=DEATH.
Last spring, he and his tiny band traveled to Washington....
full:
Read "Penguins in Bondage": http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
--------------------------------- How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger’s low PC-to-Phone call rates. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061009/8f9fa80b/attachment.htm>