Missing in action — the Rev. Fred Phelps

The small town of Bedias, Texas turned out in force to pay tribute to Bobby Twitty July 29. Twitty was a Marine lance corporal killed in a freak tire-explosion accident in Ramadi, Iraq.

There were also some visitors, like the members of the Marine Corps honor guard, or the members of the southeast Texas chapter of Patriot Guard Riders, who salute the memory of servicemembers without making commentary about the war in Iraq — or other issues.

Not there, despite advance rumors of his coming? The Rev. (or Revvvvvvv., if you want to imitate Rush Limbaugh) Fred Phelps.

Whatever your view about either the war in Iraq or gay rights, just about all people would likely agree that protesting at a young serviceman’s funeral isn’t the right way to make a point about a cause. Well, “most people” would not include Kansas pastor Rev. Fred Phelps.

Phelps and his Topeka, Kan., Westboro Baptist Church have made a reputation for themselves, since the invasion of Iraq, by the stridency of their protests about what they see as being wrong with America, and where they make these protests — at funerals of servicemen. Phelps claims American ills, such as the 9/11 attacks, are all due to its tolerance of homosexuality.

Actually, the “church” is the Phelps family and little else. And, the “Baptist” is honorific; the church is a member of no main Baptist denomination. Picture a fundamentalist Manson family getting high on “homo-hate.”

Fortunately for the peace of the Twitty family and others, it was just rumor; Phelps didn’t actually show up. The Twitty family got a funeral with peace, dignity and honor, as did his friends. That would not have been the case had Phelps arrived. His disruptiveness has been so great that some states have passed laws to restrict any such demonstrations at funerals, as has the federal government.

Such counterproductive protests remind me of a couple of very basic life principles.
One is the old cliché, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” And Rev. Phelps certainly seems to be vitriol incarnate, while his sugar bowl is empty.

Another is an extension of another old cliché: “Speak no ill of the dead.”

I know that I wouldn’t express opposition to the war in Iraq by protesting at someone’s funeral; that would be insensitive, above all, and also counterproductive. Besides, servicemen like Twitty aren’t there on a crusade against gay rights, the Revvvvvvv. Phelps’ bete noir.

Also, people like the Rev. Phelps and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and others who blame the Sept. 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on us as due to some American moral decline might want to read their Bibles, or their Tanakhs if they are socially conservative Jews, again.

Here’s what the book of Job says: “It rains on the just and the unjust alike.”

In other words, the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks can’t be used as some sign of any divine displeasure with the United States, whether over abortion, gay rights, lack of environmental stewardship or anything else.

If the words of Job aren’t enough, we can turn to the New Testament for the words of Jesus himself.

In the Gospel of John, some Pharisees bring a man born blind to Jesus. They ask Jesus whether the man himself or his parents had sinned to cause this, and Jesus said “Neither.”

If we do want to look at what Revvvvvv. Phelps calls sin, let’s look at all sin, or human shortcoming. Elsewhere in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells another crowd of Pharisees that only if they were without sin of their own should they stone a woman of ill repute.

And, in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, he warns people pointing at a speck of sawdust in someone else’s eye to first attend to the wood plank in their own. Lovelessness is the real problem, it would seem from this passage.

And, speaking of love, and quoting the Christian Bible one last time, let us turn to I Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous chapter on love.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal,” Paul says in the first verse of this chapter.

Rev. Phelps, you are a resounding gong and clanging cymbal. You are a tuneless, unmelodic piece of percussive brass disrupting grieving families’ lives.