Posted on 05/05/2010 2:36:50 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
Editor's note: To accurately portray the subject of this article and his critics, offensive language is quoted.
(CNN) -- He is the leader of "America's most hated family," a gaunt, craggy-faced preacher who displays "God Hates Fags" signs at the funerals of American troops, gay men and AIDS victims.
For at least 12 years, the Rev. Fred Phelps has led his Topeka, Kansas, church on a cross-country crusade against gays and lesbians. That crusade ignited a legal battle that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
But there is another Phelps that few know. He was a "brilliant" civil rights attorney in the 1960s who would take on racial discrimination cases that no other lawyers would touch, say longtime African-American civic leaders in Topeka.
He fought for the rights of blacks, they say, with the same passion he now reserves for the condemnation of gays.
"I don't know him anymore," says Joe Douglas Jr., an African-American activist in Topeka who became the city's first minority fire department chief.
"I see him out there, and I hear the venom that comes out of his mouth. If you had asked me in the '60s if he would do this, I would have said never."
The Rev. Ben Scott, president of the NAACP's Topeka branch, says he never heard Phelps talk about homosexuals during his work as a civil rights attorney.
"I didn't even know he was a preacher," Scott says.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
The most hated man in America.
He’s a democrat.
Nice of CNN to drop their censor.
Something I read in the past 5 years alleged that Fred Phelps was a racist. CNN’s “history” doesn’t jibe with being “for” civil rights.
This smells of an attempt to draw comparisons with the 1940s-1960s civil rights movement to the push to redefine homosexuality as a normal psychology and “not a sin”.
The media doesn’t like to bring out that he’s run for office several times as a Democrat and once was a friend of Al Gore.
Phelps smears Christians and those who continue to call homosexuality a sin. Perhaps it is all a Rat Ruse.
Phelps hates America and himself.
Yeah. To them “fags” is the f-word.
But “tea-bagger”?
Nothing wrong with that, right?
The takeaway line about Phelp’s “cult”
“Most of the members of Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church are members of his large family. Phelps has 13 children; 11 are attorneys.”
1. a leftist agent provocateur trying to make fundamentalists look stupid,
2. a scam artist looking to sue everyone who gives him a well deserved punch in the face
or 3. really serious about his beliefs and a major league Clymer about it.
I had read before where Phelps was in fact a Civil Rights advocate.
But when you consider ANYTHING that CNN reports.... You know you have to doubt it.
Near the bottom of the article, his estranged (atheist) son says that his father would make racist comments about black people behind their back. And the Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked him as making antisemitic comments.
It’s an attempt to knock down the religious black community’s resistence to same sex marriage and other homosexual agenda items.
Tie the “civil rights movements” together.
Brain injury?
another interesting thing is he set himself up as a State Chairman of an AL Gore for President effort back in the eighties when Gore first sent up a trial ballon for that office.
Could he be a Self-Hating GAY MAN???
Did he take any European trips with a Rent-a-boy? LOL
1 and 2
Phelps hasn’t changed at all. He’s the same puke now he was back when he was getting his picture taken with the Algore.
“Booooooooooooy!”
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