". . .and we shall call it the Church of Psychotic Bastards."

Fellow travelers, a new purveyor of hateful buffoonery has wandered into the Vagabond's path, giving me the tough choice of stepping on the low life form and befouling my shoe, or giving it a wide berth and letting it crawl on unmolested . . . Well, it is about time for a new shoe purchase so here we go!

This latest creepy life form is none other than Fred Phelps, the founder and hateriarch of the Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka Kansas. Fred and his stadium capacity sized family are absolutely unique figures in today's polarized world. They make no distinction based on religious, political, gender or sexual preference lines whatsoever. They hate everybody not in the Westboro Baptist Church and, given that its membership is a mere 71 people (60 of whom are reportedly related to Phelps), odds are YOU are on their list. You may have seen these whackaloons in the news over the past decade, spewing their toxic brand of fire and brimstone at such diverse groups as gays, fallen service members, Jews, political figures and pretty much everyone else. They proudly maintain several websites run by the church with names such as, "god hates fags dot com," "god hates America dot com" and so on (I made a conscious choice not to insert hyperlinks here). After damaging my brain cells reading their ignorant rants, I searched a few more reputable sources and I must say that even my jaded self was amazed at the level of interest such a small group of weirdos has generated. My background reading can be found here and here.

It seems that Fred's central premise is that (let me see if I can get this right), "fags are evil, the entire world either are fags, accept fags or haven't done enough to eradicate fags." There, I think I've managed to distill the thought to it's essence. Someone should tell Fred that brevity is the soul of wit. It would save all of us a lot of time. Of course, we would have to explain the concept of wit to Fred, thus canceling any accrued time savings. Also, I would like to point out the quotation marks around the sentence containing the derogatory slur commonly used by ignorant pigs to refer to members of the gay and lesbian community. Not my thinking, fellow travelers!

Fred's latest target is the worldwide population of the Jewish faith. It would seem that Fred's opinion of Jews is a bit colored by the fact that he believes them to be enablers for homosexuals, in addition to subscribing to the normal and pathetic conspiracy theories that have dogged members of that faith for centuries. With stunning originality, Fred and his (to use the term VERY loosely) congregants have added Synagogues and Jewish faith centers to their target list for protests, carrying protest signs with such enlightening phrases as "God hates Jews" and "Jews killed Jesus." This from the same guy that routinely prays for MORE dead U.S. soldiers and Marines, was a pen pal of Saddam Hussein before he issued him a post mortem condemnation to hell (nope, I'm not kidding . . .read the supporting articles), and has condemned everyone from Bill O'Reilly to Coretta Scott King in the same foul breath. Even the late Jerry Falwell called this guy a "first class nut." If Jerry Falwell calls you a nut, I'm thinking you've got some serious, get treatment immediately type head problems.

What bothers me here is, these poisonous, hate spewing morons are afforded protection under law as a religious organization, despite the fact that they routinely violate the regulations governing that protection. They routinely engage in political action, haunt the funerals of fallen heroes, deface and destroy the flag, spew hate at anyone who isn't less narrow minded than them (the rest of the world population, as I stated before) and, well . . . engage in all manner of asshatery! Enough! The IRS would be doing everyone a favor if they would just end the ability of these morons to dignify their actions as the operations of a church.

Hey Fred, as a self styled man of God and fundamental christian, why don't you try reading the New Testament? You know, the part Christ was in? You might be surprised.

My apologies to Eddie Izzard for using the title quote for this subject, but given the fact that Eddie is a transvestite, as well as a brilliant comedian, I'm thinking he won't mind.