On the Death of Fred Phelps

I feel vaguely obligated to preface this by recognizing a few blog-related points -- the first, that I've been steadfastly declining to post here, which I'll blithely bullshit sell as the product of some sort of artistic reticence, or something like that. The second point is one informed by my previous attempts at blogging, which, outside of an adolescent deadjournal (adolescent here used with all its grimy subtexts), have been consistently irreverent: I'm no good at writing about my life. Maybe it's something to do with how there's no darker mirror than one's mundane habits lain bare, or the skeletal tally of all our yesterdays or some other stupid crap. Or maybe I'm just feverishly guarded, or who knows. I will admit to being a little impressed and, if I can say so without offending, surprised at how openly and securely Mme. C blogs about the personal particulars of her days. I wouldn't, for better or worse.

The third is that I'm drunk, which may be a necessary condition for me to actually sit down and blog without stopping myself every five feet. So if you read this and find yourself wondering why it feels as though I'm typing this while steering a bumper car down a waterfall, you no longer need to wonder why.

The fourth is that I'll be touching on something political/ideological, and I have a bad habit of forming strong opinions and striking a coarse tone in writing about them. For which I apologize in advance, if you choose to read on, hoping that I won't actually gravely offend.

Fred Phelps died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know. In case you don't recognize the name, either because you don't read the news or don't find much joy in cataloguing horrible things, Fred Phelps was, for most of his infamy, the presumed patriarch of the Westboro Baptist Church, one of our nation's leading wretched hives of scum and villainy. These are the bizarre ur-perverted Christians (of whom there are apparently only forty or so, made to seem more numerous by their media coverage) who stand on rainy days and hoist rainbow placards which read, for example, GOD HATES FAGS, or THANK GOD FOR 9/11. If there is a God, I doubt even (s)he understands where the WBC is coming from.

Still, they've caused a big stir over the past, say, twenty years. One of their more widely-reviled habits is picketing funerals. For example, they famously picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepherd, a 21-year-old kid who was beaten to death in 1998 because he was gay.

Incidentally, did you know that it wouldn't be for another eleven years that the federal government would respond by expanding hate-crime law to include crimes against sexuality and gender identity? Obama signed that bill in 2009. Five years ago.

Anyway, imagine a gang of lunatics assailing your loved one's funeral with signs telling you that God hates them and is sending them to Hell. There's the WBC.

I'm glad Fred Phelps is dead. Not only that, I'm glad he was put in hospice, and I'm happy to simply imagine that he did not issue any DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) orders, as most people don't, and therefore received the best of modern medical life-sustaining techniques, in all their invasive, rib-breaking, throat choking, brain damaging splendor. 

I'm very happy about this, and in a kind of opposition to pronouncements like the following, which I copy from a friend's feed but leave otherwise anonymous:

"I want to hate [Fred Phelps] for perverting the Love of our God into something awful. I want to bring him back from the dead so I can beat him up. But God taught us to find strength in forgiveness and love, not to turn to our hate. Fred Phelps taught people to hate. And I refuse to be like Fred Phelps. I hope he can find repentance and forgiveness. Plus, if he can, so can we all."

As kind and progressive as such an idea sounds, and as accepting as I am of it as a way for any individual to process Fred's deadness -- if any processing is required -- I have no patience for it as a prescription. I've seen enough people express joy and relief at Fred's death only to be stoppered by somebody sidling up and saying "you should not find joy in any death" that I want to write down some expression of response: "shut up. Don't tell people not to celebrate when something that kills them dies."

I do this a little uncomfortably, because like I said: I don't entirely want to say that it's wrong to simply forgive and move on if that's how one best processes things. But I do think it's a problematic tack, and that the summary above strikes me as childishly naive and skimpy on the devilish details.

Fred Phelps did not simply teach people to hate. Learning to hate is endemic, and is just as much a part of being human as learning to love, or lust, or eat food that isn't poisonous. And I add that last item playfully, but I don't think it's unrelated -- hatred is how we understand, viscerally, the deleterious things in life. We hate corruption, we hate disease, we hate threats toward children; nobody much bothers to argue that we shouldn't hate those things, except by defining 'hatred' as a kind of exclusively corrosive and pointless style of 'dislike,' which is to me a very silly definition. And, crucially, although we hate those things, we also commonly fail to properly identify them, and thus end up hating things we shouldn't hate or accepting things we should reject violently.

Phelps's sin was not in teaching his followers to hate, as though he were a Sith Lord in a spacefaring fairy tale, but rather in teaching them to condemn the things that most of us want to protect: the weak, the vulnerable, the innocent, and the honored. And if I make the affair seem more subjective by describing it thus, then good: morality is not objective, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. 

So really I think that most people do not hate Phelps because he hated other people, but rather because he hated people that we love, did so unapologetically, and made a spectacle of it.

The question of how to respond to his death, then, is both personal and political. If forgiveness is one's personal coping method, then fine -- but why demand that others forgive Phelps as well? I probably shouldn't get as messy as asking what forgiveness even means, practically, but I do think it's a generally-accepted truism that 'forgiveness is for the forgiver.' 

The crude fact is that it would be terribly easy for me, a young man who by birthright has never had to suffer bigotry from any quarter, to 'forgive' the trespasses of venomous demagogue and vulgar showman. Yes, I forgive you, although you barely had anything to do with me personally. I wash my hands of whatever unpleasant feelings the news of you might have offered me, and I'm done. 

Is it that easy for everyone? It isn't just forgiveness that's for the forgiver. When you're talking about the dead, everything is for the living. And when you're talking about a man whose life work was one of abuse and oppression, forgiveness isn't merely distancing, it's regressive. It ignores the poison.

Phelps spent his life insisting that the LGBT community, among others, were scum, were damned, were undeserving, and in doing so he perpetuated and strengthened a wider cultural and systemic bigotry that didn't need the help. He should be repudiated in death -- by our own moral commandment (and we require nothing more), he deserves it. He deserves to have his own funeral picketed, to have free and unthreatened people whom he hated dance on his grave; he deserves to have his name dragged through the mud again and again until it cannot possibly be cleaned. 

And not because of the man. The man is dead. We can't hurt him. But because the idea of Phelps, and everything he promoted, is outrageously toxic, and nobody should forget that.

--

OK. In other news:

  I'm taking the last week of March to go on a road trip with the lady. The plan is to careen down to Myrtle Beach by way of Kentucky. I'm terribly excited to not go to work for a whole week.

  That's about it. That's maybe all the talk about my life that I can muster for now. It's also almost 1:30 and i'm exhausted and need to work tomorrow. I'm probably not even writing in complete sentences anymore. This probably isn't English. I'm probably dead.