The DWR Sunday Disservice – Send Yourself to Hell

And speaking of religion, Fred Phelps died earlier this week. I’ll just quote this (the context is an anti-marriage equality ad from a few years ago, but the main point remains relevant):

Or, more to the point here, the anti-gay bigot [Phelps] whose church’s freedom to preach his gospel of hate has never been threatened, circumscribed or interfered with despite the vicious and despicable things he’s made it his life’s work to go around saying at the worst possible times in the worst possible places.

So it turns out that the litigious old bastard has at least one useful social purpose. The unimpeded, undiminished work of his infamously evil anti-gay “ministry” emphatically disproves every Scary Story promoted by anti-gay religious groups who claim that recognizing marriage equality or including sexual orientation in existing hate-crime or anti-discrimination legislation will lead to Christian ministers being thrown in jail for saying they believe homosexuality is a sin.

[…]

But the point here is that Fred Phelps is a free man. His only legal troubles stem from instances of direct physical assault — not from the hateful content of his beliefs. So when the folks at NOM insist that their opposition to same-sex marriage is a matter of “religious liberty,” the liberty they’re talking about has to be the liberty to exceed the Fred Phelps standard — the liberty not just to restrict membership on religious grounds, or just to preach against homosexuality as a sin, or to condemn and denounce homosexuals as people hated by God, but the liberty, apparently, to go beyond all that, beyond anything even Fred Phelps has imagined.

Fred Phelps is a free man, so if you think your freedom is going to be restricted [by marriage equality], you must be planning to outdo Fred Phelps.

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