"The Most Hated Family in America"

Today, like usual, I was bored and messing around on MySpace. I saw where Dan of PlayRadioPlay! had posted a bulletin titled "New blog post! (About Westboro Baptist Church)." This bulletin linked you to the new blog Dan had written, entitled "Fred Phelps is a big dumb meany (and he doesn’t deserve to wear a cowboy hat)." I have previously read about and also blogged about Westboro Baptist Church, so I knew some about it. What he had posted that I thought was so interesting was a documentary filmed for The BBC. Normally I would sit and type what I think about this situation, but at the moment, I am at a loss for words on how to describe how disgusted these people make me. So, if you know about Westboro or don't care to learn more and just want to watch the documentary, skip to the bottom of the post, but if you wish to know a little before watching, I am going to post some information I got off of Wikipedia.com about the church....

The Most Hated Family in America is a TV documentary written and presented by the BBC's Louis Theroux about the family at the heart of the Westboro Baptist Church.

At the heart of the documentary is the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), a U.S. church group headed by Fred Phelps and based in Topeka, Kansas. It runs the website GodHatesFags.com, and GodHatesAmerica.com, and other websites expressing condemnation of homosexuals, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, and other groups. The organization is monitored by the Anti-Defamation League, and classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group has achieved national notoriety in recent years due to its picketing of funeral processions of US soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The church bases its work around the belief expressed by its best known slogan and the address of its primary website, "God hates fags", and expresses the opinion, based on its Biblical interpretation, that nearly every tragedy in the world is God's punishment for homosexuality – specifically society's increasing tolerance and acceptance of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. It maintains that God hates homosexuals above all other kinds of "sinners" and that homosexuality should be a capital crime.

Louis Theroux stated that the Phelpses are the most extreme people he has ever met. In an interview on the BBC website, Theroux gave his opinion on the teachings of Fred Phelps.

"I think that the pastor is not a very nice person. I think he's an angry person who's twisted the Bible and picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger, and he's instilled that in his children and they've passed it on to their children. Although the second and third generation are by and large quite nice people from what I saw, they still live under the influence of their Gramps."

Apart from their hateful protests, Theroux found them to be quite kind.

"It shows you what strange avenues the religious impulse can take you down. I think another part of the answer is that parts of the Christian Bible are pretty weird. There's a lot of weird stuff in there and when you take that and you add this angry, domineering kind of a father figure, which is Gramps, and you add that he has sort of separated them off from other people, other families and driven them to achieve a lot, and he was kind of a charismatic guy, and still is up to a point. He was a very verbal, very persuasive, an extremely compelling speaker. All these things added together combined to make a powerful influence."

After Fred Phelps viewed the film, he preached a sermon in April 2007 attacking Theroux, calling him "Screwy Louis" and a "jackass." [listen to Fred Phelps' sermon by clicking here]

"The Most Hated Family in America"