ku student making phelps documentary (UPDATED: phelpses loved it, film time)
The kid actually “spent a year” with the Phelpses — whether that means he lived with them, visited them every day, or popped in for some of their key functions is not clear from reading this story alone.
I wonder if Ryan Jones read the Topeka Capital-Journal’s bio series Hate for the love of God, or former C-J reporter Jon Michael Bell’s Addicted to Hate (which the C-J reportedly declined to publish, citing credibility concerns) before he started. It sounds like the documentary takes a different angle than those two — and the pictures probably tell more about Fred Phelps and his spawn than the words do.
Four of his children are licensed attorneys in the State of Kansas, at least one works for the State (in the Department of Corrections, I believe). When I worked at the Capitol, I passed by his family’s law offices every day. Phelps himself was disbarred over 25 years ago.
If it runs at Liberty Hall, I’ll probably trudge over the leftover nutritional-yeast-covered popcorn husks to go see it.
UPDATE THE SECOND: I violated my personal rule (never visit any site which doesn’t publish RSS feeds, because it or its underlying organization sucks) and checked the Web site Topeka Capital-Journal (which, along with its underlying organization, sucks) to see this: Church faithful applaud film.
But laughter was the most common response throughout the film. When footage showed a Westboro member stomping and kicking the American flag, the audience laughed. When a young Phelps child spoke on camera about wanting to kill gays, the room erupted — though a churchmember later said the church didn’t condone murder. The biggest laughs came when Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten said, “I don’t have any quarrel with their picketing.”
Jones asked himself in the J-W story if he was doing the Phelpses a solid by giving them a platform, and the answer is “Yes”, at least as far as they’re concerned. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to see it. It’s instructive on several levels — as a reminder of what free speech means for one, and as a reminder of why he and his band of detritus are so widely hated.
The Phelpses are like a horde of poo-flinging monkeys; their reaction to their own members flinging poo is much the same as their reaction to… everything else, which is to jump up and down, hoot like gibbons, and fling more poo. It’s what they do. Asking “why” yields no answers.
The Phelps documentary trailer (35MB, 2:34)BARBITURATE-POPPING, POO-FLINGING DADDY OF UPDATE: The film will be played at the University of Kansas’s Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union at 19:00 on Wednesday 29 November. Admission is free. I smell an evolution field trip coming on. If you want to go, send me e-mail.
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