I have long held the belief that Fred Phelps is a big homo himself and this theatrics are intended to assuage his own guilt and shame.
this = his
Nah. Fred Phelps always shows up where he can get the most publicity. He’s a publicity junkie with a pile of lawyers behind him.
Goes right along with his not being a Christian. He's a huckster that funds his little cult with lawsuits, nothing more.
Phelps is an active Democrat candidate.
I hold the suspicion that his “religious” protests are a ploy to slur the conservative Christian opposition to homosexuality. It is the most cited example of “hate”. But his party affiliation is rarely discussed even though he has run for office several times.
His antiwar stance also gets less play in the press.
There are rumors that Phelps used to bite pillows when he was in college, but I never cared enough about him one way or the other to research into it. He always reminded me of the preacher in Poltergeist II.
“I have long held the belief that Fred Phelps is a big homo himself and this theatrics are intended to assuage his own guilt and shame.”
That is a good guess. Fred Phelps is trying to prove to himself, that he is not homosexual. So he does one of these outrageous breaches of civility, to show how much he hates gays. Then, Phelps continues to have homosexual urges. The result is, Phelps is caught in an endless cycle of hate demonstration, followed by a relapse of his homosexual urges, ad infinitum.