Forgive him if you want, but the ultimate payback is to cut him from our conversations and lives
SILENCED | Fred Phelps, the leader for many years of Westboro Baptist Church invaded military funerals and protested Jewish, LGBT and AIDS organizations. Phelps died Thursday, but his family said there will be no funeral services for his detractors to protest. Above, his family protest in front of the Dallas Holocaust Museum in 2010. (David Taffet/Dallas Voice)
EMERSON COLLINS | Contributing Writer
Fred Phelps Sr., the patriarch and founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, died. The hate-fueled antics of Westboro have been media fodder since the Phelps landed in the national news by picketing Matthew Shephard’s funeral in 1998 with their now infamous “God Hates Fags” signs.
In the years since, they have continued to clamor for press and attention by picketing the funerals of everyone from soldiers who died in combat to Michael Jackson. They scream and foam at the mouth; the more random the correlation to their supposed beliefs, the greater the attention the collective national consciousness has given them. They are lunatics, hatemongers and now they are famous — because we made them so.
The announcement that Phelps was on death’s door has been greeted across the social media world with cheers, enthusiasm and a heaping helping of mockery and derision. The greatest refrain is a collective call, whether serious or not, for protesting his eventual funeral as the tiniest bit of returning what Phelps spent his life dishing out. The Facebook pages of the LGBT community and its allies resemble nothing so much as a raucous celebration equivalent to a rousing musical refrain of “Ding! Dong! The witch is dead!
I’ll admit my own reaction is not very charitable. I understand the desire to rejoice at the silencing of a voice so strongly filled with hatred and vitriol. Phelps has been denounced and ridiculed by everyone from the most prominent LGBT advocates to politicians, Baptist organizations and Christians across all denominations. His demise feels like a final comeuppance where believers of all stripes can imagine his incredibly awkward velvet rope moment at the pearly gates with more than a little bit of glee.
And yet I wonder. Not about the collective, and correct, consensus that the world is a slightly better place without this man in it. That is undeniably true. I wonder about the impact of our reaction on us.
I’m certainly not suggesting any tears be shed. That obligation can be left to the few members of his church and family who still align with his belief system. It just seems that the notoriety we give a man who doesn’t matter in any real world way will provide him some validation in his final days. We are giving him that gift by reacting to him once again. He can, and likely will, hear our enthusiasm for his demise as a reinforcement of the validity of his life’s work. Our acknowledgement tells him and his meager followers that their work matters.
Do we gain anything in coming together to acknowledge our collective strength in the face of the death of someone who became a laughingstock so very long ago? Is it just a celebration of the fact that there is a little less hate toward the LGBT community in the world when he shuffles off this mortal coil? Or does celebrating death, any death, create in us something that need not be there?
Is answering this gloom and doom sidewalk prophet wearing apocalypse-driven sandwich boards with hate positive in any way? Or, are we just reflecting back a funhouse mirror version of the same kind of hatred he spit at us? This isn’t a political battle where the result of our words and actions will impact the real lives of LGBT people. This isn’t Russia, or Uganda or the many other places where there are leaders whose passing would make being LGBT in those nations a little less dangerous. Celebrating the results of that kind of anti-LGBT leader’s death would be about real world relevance and change, not simply a revelation in a pathetic man’s final breaths. Phelps is a clown, a joke and a lunatic screaming with no audience to hear his words beyond the sight gag and the spectacle.
Rather than tap-dancing on his grave and coming up with every joke to post on Twitter, late night TV and every comedy special in the coming weeks, what if we just forgot him?
Certainly there is no forgiveness to be given. He hasn’t asked, and only the families of those whose funerals they disrupted and others damaged by their work could offer forgiveness. I couldn’t do it, but that’s up to them.
Forgetting. That’s the worst thing we can do to Fred Phelps Sr. and his entire cadre of maniacs. We can just stop saying his name. We can stop reporting and responding to the activities of Westboro.
The photos are catnip to editors, but what if we threw them all away? What if we struck the names Phelps and Westboro from the national dialogue and media?
Permanently. What if we had told Fred Phelps Sr. we were going to do that, so he carried that knowledge to his grave?
Rather than throwing a party and laughing at his irrelevance, let’s make it permanent and real. Of course, I’m contributing to his infamy by writing this piece.
But, I’m committing now. Fred — you’re not worth my time. Our time. And that goes for Marjie, your children and the entire church. I will not mention them, I will not make jokes at their expense, and I will no longer allow them to receive a response or a reaction of any kind.
Let’s give the Westboro survivors a fate worse than death — irrelevancy. Let them picket where they choose, and let’s refuse to see them. Let them make their silly signs, and let’s refuse to photograph them.
Let them scream their mantras, and let’s refuse to interview them, answer them or notice them at all. When their heads finally explode, there will be no one around to notice.
Mr. Phelps, as you head to meet your maker and hear his thoughts on your life, the only thing I have left to say is “Forget You.” You will not be remembered.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition March 21, 2014.