Fred Phelps, Closeted Fag?

The Supreme Court has decided to review the case against "Pastor" Fred Phelps, the lunatic preacher responsible for the ugly, hateful, and completely un-Christlike protests at military funerals.  The $5 million verdict was overturned by an appeals court.

I must admit to being torn on this one.  As you can see from the picture above, these people are full of hate and anger and their signs and chants are offensive on every level except that of the lunatic right wing Xtian fringe.  Even so, these worthless pieces of shit are entitled to free speech of some kind.  But should that free speech include disrupting a private service?  Should someone be allowed to cause severe emotional damage to grieving relatives?  Difficult questions, obviously, or this wouldn't have made it to the Supreme Court.

One thing I am not torn about is that Fred Phelps is a horrible man who deserves a long and painful death.  He and the people that support him are a waste of carbon.  When they die no one will protest because the people they have actually harmed (as opposed to the invented harm of homosexuality against them) are better people than they.  And as is always true with these people, Fred Phelps is obviously a closeted fag (see picture below).  Self hate is the ugliest type of hate, especially when it is aimed at the rest of the world.

"You can't preach the Bible without preaching hatred."

"God doesn't hate them because they're fags; they're fags because God hates them."

This is crossposted from the MOPod blog.

Adjusted for Stupidity

From The BBC 4 News Quiz:

About a survey on the belief in evolution and the age of the earth:

"I think what you need to do with a survey like that is that figures need to be adjusted like we seasonally adjust unemployment figures. We should adjust surveys for stupidity. Essentially, so, according to raw data, one in three Britains believes God created the world in the last ten thousand years. But adjusted for stupidity, noone believes that."

This got huge laughs on the BBC. I wonder how it would go over on an American quiz show.

My one argument with this clever joke is that I think the adjustment should be for ignorance as opposed to stupidity. In my opinion the vast majority of people that believe the earth is literally from 6,332 to 6,579 years old (timeline here) really are stupid but they are also ignorant of the facts and the vastness of the evidence that proves the earth is, in fact, incredibly ancient. Ancient as in the incomprehensibly vast time span of 4.5billion years give or take 1%. There is this other group of people who are not stupid, who have seen the facts, and who remain ignorant nonetheless. These people are willfully ignorant. More often than not this type of person uses this willful ingnorance to manipulate and control the actual stupid people, reinforcing the "us v. them" mindset that is essential to the control of a cult. The truly stupid ignorant people that believe the Bible is a literal history of life on earth are also told, by the willfully ignorant, that if they doubt the Bible they will go to hell.

Sorry to end a humor post on such a down note. I live in the state with the creationist museum so I am perpetually ashamed of my fellow Americans whose brains are so effectively controlled by the most evil, hateful, and willfully ignorant humans in the world. But for a smile, here's a picture from inside the creationist museum:



Parenting FAIL.