More on Phelps & Co.

This picture is from an April demonstration put-on by Phelps in Texas.


Libby Phelps, left, and her sister Sara Phelps, joined other members of Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kan. Saturday in protest of NT's production of The Laramie Project.

Do you think these children are thinking for themselves?

Here's a quote from that article;

"We are here to send a message, which is repent or perish. We're standing on the flag because it's a symbol of fagdom."
Charles Hockenbarger, a member of Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kan.

Apparently it's okay with right-wingers to trash the flag depending on the agenda behind it because I haven't read any condemnations of Phelps and his supporters.

How prevalent among the fundies is this idea that 9/11 and tragedies like the shuttle explosion are acts of God?

In the second Des Moines Register article I linked in my previous post there's this passage;

Sunday's protests began at 7:30 a.m. at St. Luke's, where Keokuk Pastor Dan Holman, 57, an anti-abortion activist, and others yelled messages at the members coming for morning worship. He said all five of the churches the group visited were pro-gay.

"It's a pro-Sodomite church," he said. "I'm standing up with (Phelps' group) against sodomy. God's judgment begins in the house of God."

Dan Holman has not always lived in Keokuk. He moved there after meeting and marrying a deranged individual and neighborhood pest named Donna Benson who forces her beliefs upon our local citizenry in the shape of a van she plasters with huge pictures of fetuses damaged by D & E abortion, or as the rhetorically inclined refer to it, partial birth abortion. She's been all over the state in this thing even admitting at one point that she staked out elementary schools despite the fiercest protests to her agenda coming from the parents of children in that age group. It will be interesting to see if this attention seeking woman will finally take down her horrid pictures now that Congress has banned the procedure. I doubt it since her campaign has always seemed to be more about her than her cause.

But back to Holman. He's involved in one of the more radical groups in the country known as Missionaries to the Pre-born. To give you an idea why they've earned this distinction here's an excerpt from an older article about the group;

In 1995, Randall Terry, the founder of OR joined the ranks of those issuing revolutionary pronouncements, and distributed a rough draft of a book called The Sword embodying these ideas. He told an OR gathering in Kenner, Louisiana that they may have to "take up the sword" in order to "overthrow regime that oppresses them." He called for a theocratic state founded "on the Ten Commandments," and a "culture based on Biblical Law."

The Revolutionary Theocratic Party

Terry has for several years been a leader in the far-right U.S. Taxpayers Party (USTP), whose presidential ticket in 1996 (Howard Phillips and Herb Titus) also called for "resistance" on the part of "lower magistrates" to Supreme Court decisions that they feel are "unconstitutional" --namely Roe v. Wade; the striking down of Colorados Amendment 2 (which would have banned local gay civil rights ordinances), and the decision which required the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute. USTP was on the ballot in 41 states in 1996.

Another USTP leader, Rev. Matthew Trewhella of Missionaries to the Pre-born made news when in 1994 he announced that "plans of resistance" were being made against the federal government, and called for the formation of church-based militias. The Wisconsin USTP openly sold a militia manual which argued that people should "spring immediately and effectively to arms" because of legalized abortion. Thus it was unsurprising when later that year, Newsweek reported that a man who lived in Trewhellas basement in 1990, had planned a "guerrilla campaign of clinic bombings and assassinations of doctors," but left the movement before acting on his plans. Trewhella claimed no knowledge of these plans.

What say ye, right-wingers? Is it okay to plot against the government so long as one does it in the name of God?