Free Republic

BALTIMORE (AP) - The head of a fundamentalist Kansas church being sued over a funeral protest testified in Baltimore today. Fred Phelps of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church said he didn't consider whether children would see a sign carried by protesters with the words "Semper Fi Fags" and two stick figures that appear to be engaged in a sex act. Phelps says they needed to warn to the country to change its wicked ways. Under cross-examination, Phelps agreed his presence was NOT wanted at the funeral and he could have protested somewhere else. Phelps' group is being sued by Albert Snyder,...

If this is not the place for vanity posts I apologize, but it's quite breaking news either. I heard at my church today that the Westboro Baptist Church will be protesting outside of a Roman Catholic and an Episcopal church next Saturday and a memorial to fallen firefighters and another RC church on Sunday. These aren't to protest funerals, rather to protest against...well...I don't know. Apparently God hates homosexuals, soldiers, firefighters, Catholics, and Episcopalians, though I'm not sure in what order. We've been told that there will be police present and that the best thing to do would be to...

Westboro Baptist Church (WBC Chronicles - Since 1955) 3701 SW 12" Street Topeka, Ks. 66604 785-273-0325 Religious Opinion and Bible Commentary on Current Events Tuesday, November 21,2006 NEWS RELEASE (Supplemental info: background, photos, audio sermons & hymns, and video footage - available free at: wwn.podhatesamerica.com, hatemongers.com, and www.thesiensofthetimes.net) WBC to picket the funerals of school children killed in Huntsville, Alabama, when their school bus from Lee High School plunged 30 feet off a highway overpass - in religious protest and warning: ccGod is not mocked!" Gal. 6:7. God Hates Fags! & Fag-Enablers! Ergo, God hates Alabama and America because they...

Men and women of the Patriot Guard Riders have one main mission: Show respect for soldiers killed in war and shield the mourning families and friends from protesters. Protests and military funerals President Bush signed a law on Memorial Day banning protests within 300 feet of national cemeteries. Last month, he said it "ensures that families of fallen service members will not have to endure protests during military funerals." Florida law also states that anyone who willfully interrupts or disturbs a military funeral honors detail commits a first-degree misdemeanor. On Saturday, the men and women of this national motorcyclists organization...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A Kansas church group that protests at military funerals nationwide filed suit in federal court, saying a Missouri law banning such picketing infringes on religious freedom and free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on behalf of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, which has outraged mourning communities by picketing service members' funerals with signs condemning homosexuality. The church and the Rev. Fred Phelps say God is allowing troops, coal miners and others to be killed because the United States tolerates gay men and...

created: 3/8/2006 8:26:18 AM updated: 3/8/2006 8:29:11 AM SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) -- A Missouri State University professor says a new state law that limits protests at funerals is so broad that it should be overturned. MSU journalism professor Andrew Cline says a Kansas church's picketing at funerals for U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq makes him "nauseous." But Cline said Missouri's new law is so vague that it invites a legal challenge. The picketing has spawned legislation in Missouri and several other states to limit funeral protests. Last week, Governor Blunt signed into law a bill to ban the demonstrations....

Fred Phelps calls himself a Christian minister, but his actions resemble a self-styled hatemonger with no room in his heart for the love of God or the forgiveness taught in Christ’s Gospel. Phelps has been a preacher (defrocked), a lawyer (disbarred) and a Democrat politician (never elected). Now, at age 76, his “church” is a congregation consisting of his 13 children and 50 grandchildren in a tiny compound in Topeka, Kansas. He is also the epitome of everything the elitist secular left would love to believe about every Christian conservative in America. Phelps first foisted his annoying presence onto the...

States move to bar protests at soldiers’ funerals Fundamentalists’ picketing may provoke clash of privacy, free speech rights The Associated Press Updated: 8:48 p.m. ET Feb. 6, 2006 COLUMBUS, Ohio - States are rushing to limit when and where people may protest at funerals — all because of a small fundamentalist Kansas church whose members picket soldiers’ burials, arguing that Americans are dying for a country that harbors homosexuals. During the 1990s, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., went around picketing the funerals of AIDS victims with protest signs that read, “God Hates Fags.” But politicians began paying more...

In a phone interview today, Shirley Phelps-Roper informed this reporter that a group of approximately 15 people will be coming to Buckhannon to picket at the memorial service on Sunday, January 15. They will be picketing between 1:15 to 2 p.m.Their website will soon be updated to reflect this, according to Phelps-Roper. The group will also be sending notices to law enforcement agencies to announce their plans, she added. Note: This article was written late last night after receiving a tip about this release. An editorial decision was made to put it in the paper to alert the area to...

Inside Grace Lutheran Church last Wednesday family and friends of fallen Ripon soldier Sergeant Andrew Wallace grieved. Outside, others stood with signs with messages including 'America is doomed,' 'God hates you,' 'Your pastor is a whore' and 'Thank God for dead soldiers.' The protesters were part of the anti-gay organization, the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), which believes God is punishing America for supporting homosexuality. "It was hard to take in," says junior Liz Molitor, who witnessed the protest. "I had heard about the group before, but I never imagined it all to be this graphic." The graphicness of the display...

SMYRNA, Tenn. (AP) - Members of a church say God is punishing American soldiers for defending a country that harbors gays, and they brought their anti-gay message to the funerals Saturday of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq. The church members were met with scorn from local residents. They chased the church members cars' down a highway, waving flags and screaming "God bless America." "My husband is over there, so I'm here to show my support," 41-year-old Connie Ditmore said as she waved and American flag and as tears came to her eyes. "To do this at a funeral is...

Free Republic Exclusive Fred Phelps, leader of the "God-hates-faXs" movement, is planning on crashing the funeral of one of our War Dead on July 4th. Why? To spread his message of anti-homosexual SPAM in the most inappropriate way imaginable. There's a time and a place for everything. He's a publicity whore, as far as I'm concerned. Here are snips from an earlier FR Report: "A SF SGT E-5, James Stewart, will be buried in St. Petersburg, Florida on July 4, 2005. It's wholly appropriate that he be buried on our nation's birthday, because Sergeant Stewart gave his life for our...

Marblehead police are readying for a possible hate group protest that threatens to mar the privacy and solemnity of a local man's military funeral. A radical Midwestern group has announced its intention to rally at the Marblehead funeral of U.S. Army Special Forces Staff Sgt. Christopher N. Piper, who died June 15 at Brooke Army Medical Center of wounds suffered in action in Afghanistan on June 3. The Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, proclaiming "thank God for IEDs" or roadside bombs, claims the attacks on September 11 and American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are God's vengeance on a nation that...

A Green Beret killed in Afghanistan will be laid to rest in his native Marblehead today as police brace for the anticipated arrival of a Kansas hate group. ``We're in Massachusetts now and we will be in Marblehead,'' said Margie Phelps of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church. The WBC has blamed the 9/11 attacks and deaths of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan on America's tolerance of homosexuals. The group, which recently demonstrated outside local Catholic churches and public schools it deemed tolerant of homosexuality, has threatened to show up at services today for Army Staff Sgt. Christopher Piper, who...

This just in: Millions of moderate Republicans and gay-terrified evangelical Christians and intellectually numbed conservative parents who thought they were doing some sort of good by blindly voting for Dubya and hence protecting their wee ones from swarthy Islamic evildoers who want to steal their kids' Kraft Lunchables and nuke Disneyland, all should be emerging from a deep fog of savage denial any minute now. Wake, they will, to the increasingly obvious fact that their beloved smirkin' president, the one who seemed to care about them so deeply just a couple weeks ago and who reached out to them and...

So here we are, staring down a rather historic moment amidst the sputtering ideological orgy that is the American experiment and if you're paying any sort of attention at all you're doubtlessly drunk on election hype and saturated with Bush/Kerry platitudes and you wish a white-hot death upon every screeching TV pundit who is right now analyzing yet another insidious national poll that seems to reveal everything and nothing at the exact same time. And Bush is out there right this very second stumping and sweating and blinking fast and defending his useless hideous little war and hurling snide little...

Secret societies? UFOs? The truth about what *really* happened on 9/11? The media cowers I get this a lot: Hey Mark, you're a rather weird, unconventional columnist, why don't you quit toeing the typical blasé journalism line and renounce the corporate-controlled news feeds and standard pop-culture drivel and instead write about the real truths, the real and sinister power structures at work in America and the world? Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones, and therefore suckle at the same tit of nefarious primeval Illuminati power and draw...

You know it's true. You know if, say, San Francisco had just been blasted by not two, not three, but fully four lethal trailer-park-eating earthquakes, why, the Right-wing Bible set would be yelping with barely disguised joy. Of course they would. They'd be jumping up and down and saying I told you so and pointing to Volume 18 of "Left Behind" and claiming that this was, of course, God's wrath upon the sinners and the gays and the heathens and sodomites and the tofu eaters and the Toyota Priuses and the yoga studios and the anal sex and the incense...

Aww, screw it. I mean, really. You just gotta love this thing. You just gotta love the fact that some semitruck company somewhere called International Truck and Engine Corp. is now coming out with what they claim is the world's largest production pickup, called the CXT, all 9 feet high and 8 feet wide, a whopping 21 feet long and 14,500 pounds and 18 million excruciating earthly groans of it. And in most states that don't give a crap for their roads or the environment or any human life that might be existing in the various passenger cars surrounding it,...

I have a good friend who believes, gloomily, bitterly, resignedly, that not only are we in for four more years of painful and cheerless BushCo-branded tyranny and misprision and aww-shucks dumb-guy shtick, but also that we are actually at the beginning of a long, brutal, fear-based Republican juggernaut that will last a good 16 more years, at least. Because this is how long it will take for the current horrific conservative cycle to play itself out, and this would resemble a more typical and historically proven 20-year pendulum swing, in this case one toward neoconservative right-wing hate and homophobia and...

This is the great thing about rabid fundamentalism. You really just don't have to give a damn. Take the environment. I mean, isn't it just a little pointless to care so damn deeply about the air and the soil and the water and the stupid little disposable animals on this silly spinning ball of expendable rock when the Second Coming is imminent and a blood-soaked fire-breathin' Jesus who looks remarkably like Mel Gibson will return very soon to smite the heathens and the gays and the vegetarians and the Francophiles, and who will rescue all those who worship patriarchy and...

I am searching for a few good things. Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is. And you say to yourself, these things, these radiant gems that live outside the mass-media miasma, I need them because they provide some balm, soften the fact that the nation feels massively off track and blinded and war torn and...

Bunny-curdling screams were heard throughout the Beltway last week and Laura Bush herself got all flustered and confused as vice president and noted hunk of rabid warmongering neoconservatism Dick Cheney broke ranks with his party of other hunks of rabid warmongering neoconservatives and admitted, in public, that he thinks gay people are, you know, mostly OK. Sort of. A little. In small doses. "With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they...

And isn't it funny how at least 13 members of Congress have actually requested that the United Nations monitor this year's U.S. presidential election, just because, just in case, just to ensure there's no voter rolling and election rigging and chad hanging and outright shameless Florida reaming like last time? And isn't it even more funny how, when firebrand U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, from Florida, brought the issue up on the floor of Congress, she was actually shouted down by the Republicans, scolded that she was out of order and told her comments should be stricken from the record? And...

So then a largish envelope comes in the mail and it's from my mother and it contains a single, well-used comic book sealed in a plastic Zip-Loc bag, a book from my childhood she found in a storage box in the garage in our family's cabin getaway up in northern Idaho. And my mother, being smart and attuned and with the times as she is, she noticed the comic's title, and the main characters, and her eyebrows went up and she thought I might want to see it. Here's why: It's a Spider-Man comic. It's from 1976. It's in excellent...

How good and refreshing and inspiring is it, in these war-drunk, anti-everything, BushCo-ravaged times, to discover a gem of pure unadulterated free-thinking humanity and funkiness and animal tenderness sitting just outside the teeming city walls? How life affirming and encouraging is it to stumble, quite randomly, quite unexpectedly, across what is probably the funniest, most caring, most quirky, most unexpected, most hugely popular, intensely local veterinarian in the entire Bay Area even though I can't verify that because I've only been to like, two, but I'm willing to risk saying it anyway? I am here with an answer: It is...

Semi-clever, ultra-wealthy Bush supporters suddenly donating piles of money to the Nader campaign in an obvious attempt to steal votes from John Kerry? Pshaw. Ptouey. Child's play. Tip of the iceberg. A mere distraction. We ain't seen nuthin' yet. This is the time of desperation and anxiety. This is the time of hysterical Orange Alerts and imminent al Quada attacks coming from outta nowhere at any minute and violating our children and kicking our puppies and badly denting our Honda Accords. And yes, this is the time of election-year political tactics coming from the increasingly anxious Right that will make...

"BoBo? It's Syndee. You ready, girl? The convention starts in an hour, and the senators are salivating!" "Hi, Syn! Almost ready! Just finishing my makeup. Hey, which outfit you think I should wear tonight? My red, white, and blue glitter spandex halter with the peekaboo panties, or the red vinyl skirt with the Velcro tear-away crotch and the big picture of the M-1 tank on the butt?" "Oooh, I'd go with the tank, Bo. This is the GOP convention, girl! These Republicans love their war, you know? It's all about big phallic missiles and manly howitzers and 'weapons of ass...

Are you there, God? It's me, George W. Come in, Almighty. Do you read me? It's about 8:00 pm and it's just after my last bubble bath of the day and here I am again, kneeling here in the Oval Office all by myself in my most favoritest PJs, the funny ones with the little M-1 tanks and baseball players all over them. I gots some problems, Lord. Look, I've done everything you asked. I've been good. Haven't I? I take the message to the people, don't I? I spout that evangelical born-again crap in pisswater Podunk conservative churches across...

<p>Let's get this straight. Ronnie Reagan allowed AIDS to flourish for years after it was discovered and did next to nothing to stem its virulent, lethal tide, and wouldn't even utter the word until the end of his term, when it was too late. Ronnie Reagan denied the existence of the nation's homeless problem that he largely created, and then blamed the problem on not enough people caring to get out there and get a job as he meanwhile slashed civil services and assistance for the poor.</p>

When last we left our sneering caped crusaders, Rummy had testified under oath that he didn't really know who ordered what at Abu "Tortures R' Us" Grhraib prison, and George "Wha Happun?" Bush was mumbling into his hand puppet about how he was utterly shocked and aapalled, and was blaming the whole thing on "a coupla bad apples" and gul-dangit, he weren't gunna stan' fer it. And while he still loved Rumsfeld like a drunken frat brother and swore Rummy was doing a "superb job" and stood by him 'til or impeachment they do part, something must be done and...

It was just like cocaine -- but without the rehab and the stroke and the painful deviated septum. It was that mad tingling heart-stopping hormone-soaked high school rush you enjoyed when you finally worked up sufficient nerve to pick up the phone and call that insanely delicious guy/girl you had that mad inexplicable unrelenting crush on because, well, you just had to. Remember? And then it happened. You heard the click and her voice uttered this mellifluous "Hello?" and time suddenly stopped and your breath caught in your throat and your stomach leaped into your eternity, and you hung up...

I get this a lot: Mark, how can you write about light fluffy inconsequential things like dogs or yoga or car design or sex or music when there's so many vile gut-wrenching soul-curdling life-threatening atrocities and gang rapes and beheadings and Rumsfelds happening in the world right now that deserve immediate attention? How the hell can you possibly write a whole column extolling, say, the virtues of single-malt scotch or of having sex in the backseat of small luscious European cars, when BushCo is right this moment ravaging the planet and eviscerating the human spirit and the environment is teetering...

Just in time for your morning breakfast sausage, it's all-American rape and torture and rampant entirely condoned military sadism. Mmm, patriotism. The pictures are worth a thousand disgusted moans. It's all flag-draped coffins and dog chains and forced masturbation and pistol whippings and miserable bloody hooded Iraqi men -- not terrorists, just men -- with wires attached to their fingers and genitals and made to stand up for hours and days on end until their feet swell and their lungs collapse and their livers fail, and you can hear our stunned death-drunk nation cry: Hey, whatever happened to our nice,...

BMW drivers have more sex. Astonishing, this headline, ripped straight from the pages of an upstart German car magazine for men called, quite Germanically, Men's Car, so you know it must be authoritative and irrefutable and dorky and niche-y and almost entirely pointless. So it must be true. Basically, the survey claims that Bimmer owners claim they get it on more times per week (2.2, to be far too exact) than Audi owners or Porsche owners or Mercedes owners or VW owners and much more than those poor sorry Volvo people, because, well, it's a Volvo, fer Chrissakes, and don't...

I love animals. All animals, especially dogs. And zebras. And snakes. And deer. Dolphins. Birds. The Olsen Twins. Ron Jeremy. Even cats. It's true. Cats are perhaps my least favorite but even so I recognize that they, too, are one of Goddess' little creatures and some are even friendly and funny and adorable and absolutely not always the aloof indifferent uncaring soul-sucking demons they often claw your face off to let you know they so very are. Plus, kittens are just way cute. Cats are good. Cats are OK. So who wants to see one of the happy furballs get...

Thank you for your time, Mr. President. Just a few questions, purely for clarification, so the American people might understand you better. I know you're busy, packing for another vacation or something. This won't take but a few minutes. Here, have a soda. Let's begin: 1) Mr. President, if a train leaves San Francisco at 10 am carrying 1,000 happily gay happily married couples and travels at 85 mph for three hours, while at the very same moment a train departs Crawford, Texas, loaded with 2,000 vaguely miserable Christian fundamentalists and nail-wearing fanatics of "The Passion of the Christ" and...

Can you hear the outcry? Can you feel the snippy puritanical heat? Can you feel John Ashcroft's hot, predatory breath bearing down on your life and your box of vibrators and your adult DVD collection and snatching away your copy of "Weapons of A-- Destruction #2" and smacking you across the face with a Bible, all before skipping off to the dungeon to feed the flying monkeys? Because while 9/11 and the process of gleefully decimating your civil liberties via the USA Patriot Act may have delayed him a few years, Ashcroft & Co. is back on the anti-porn warpath,...

There comes a time. There comes a time in every raw dumb imperfect beleaguered human's life when s/he has to face the music and pay the piper and fess up to his or her crimes and misdemeanors and blatant careening flubs and heartless gaffes and whoa where the hell was my brain that time sorry sorry sorry. We all do it. We all smack our palms to our foreheads and trip on our own ideological shoelaces, and we are exasperating and thoughtlessly cruel without knowing it, running roughshod over our noble or ignoble intentions on a daily basis because, well,...

Perhaps you, like so many across the planet, are more than a bit baffled by the runaway success of "The Passion of the Christ." Perhaps you, furthermore, are more than slightly disturbed that millions have flocked to this bizarre ultraviolent blood-drenched revisionist flick and that so many actually believe its story to be absolutely true, and that it just surpassed "The Return of the King" in total box office and is the No. 8 most successful film of all time and it was No. 1 again across BushCo's flyover states during Easter weekend and has sold 650,000 books and 125,000...

<p>Everything is interwoven. Jesus tongue kissed Mary Magdalene, a lot. Potent juicy mystical secrets are everywhere, if you know where to look. Organized religion is the worst possible answer.</p> <p>What supposedly sacred truths are available to us are all relative to those who hold the power. Often, just behind the facade of things is a huge hunk of gorgeous convoluted magic you would do well to lick. Meanwhile, the divine feminine is right there, winking, sighing heavily, waiting for you. Like, duh.</p>

CASPER, Wyo., Oct. 28 — Five years after University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was killed, touching off a national dialogue on gay rights, an anti-gay hate group wants to put up a monument to Shepard’s murder in hiss hometown. The city doesn’t want it, but it is caught in a legal tangle that involves, of all things, the Ten Commandments. AT SHEPARD’S FUNERAL in his hometown of Casper, Wyo., an anti-gay hate group demonstrated in a park across the street, led by the Rev. Fred Phelps, a Baptist minister from Kansas. Now members of Phelps’ group are back in...

CHANGING OF THE GUARD Skeletons rattling in Frist's closet? Ethics expert says ties to hospital chain potential conflict of interest for Lott heir Posted: December 21, 2002 6:30 p.m. Eastern © 2002 WorldNetDaily.com Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist will almost certainly be elected majority leader when the senate votes on a successor to Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott next month. The choice is a happy one for President George W. Bush, who views Frist as an effective ally; Frist has even been discussed as a possible replacement for Vice President Dick Cheney on the ticket in 2004. The heart surgeon’s quick rise...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- A national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today expressed outrage at a Doug Marlette syndicated editorial cartoon, headlined "What Would Mohammed Drive?" showing the Prophet Muhammad driving a nuclear bomb-laden truck similar to that used by Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.SEE: http://www.cair-net.org/images/mohammeddrive.gifThe Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called for an apology from Marlette's syndicator, Tribune Media Services, and from his employer, the Tallahassee Democrat.The cartoon is apparently a play on a recent light-hearted public debate over what kind of car Jesus would drive. Its publication comes following worldwide outrage over...