American Terrorism

The UK is willing to use the laws of libel and slander to protect its citizens from violence-provoking hate speech. Given that, the UK media has been going after a number of fundamentalist evangelists who have had no shame about publicly announcing that London *deserved* to be bombed in the 7/7 attacks.

What follows: more about Fred Phelps, the evangelist who has the UK mad with rage. Excerpts from the 2001 documentary film Fred by Steve Drain
, courtesy of the Topeka Capital-Journal:

Watch below as Phelps encourages homosexual Christians to mutilate their bodies "with a rusty piece of barbed wire."

As UK judges and lawyers have rightly decided, such speech represents *not only* a gross interpretation of Christian scripture, but an act of terror in itself. It ought to be outlawed in America. Phelps ought to be taken to court for slander to protect the good names of other Christians. It's true, we believe in dialogue and dissent and discourse within the church. But we don't condone acts of terrorism.

It's cowardly to merely sit back in its face, as so many Democrats have, and wait for one's enemy to hang himself; these churches may be the fringe, but they're misrepresenting the face of religion in the media; they're misrepresenting America in the UK; they're misrepresenting the Christian attitude towards sex towards both gays and straights, whom we would much rather encourage to respect their bodies and enter loving relationships with each other than listen for a *moment* to the kind of abusive nonsense Fred Phelps is spouting.

Let's envision a better America: one free to discuss loving relationships between all sorts of individuals, one free to promote education, freedom, and kindness; one where such incendiary acts of terror are dismissed as the madness of small-town crooks, as substantially daft as the claims of UFO watchers; blown off as nothing but hate-filled fluff, and not given a moment of time to articulate a message that represents *either* America *or* the Christian church.





Watch excerpts from a sermon delivered by Fred W. Phelps Sr. at the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka.

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