The Most Hated Family in America

[Brett L]

It was a BBC special.


This is part 1 of 7. You'll see the rest of the parts to the right hand of the page. I'm sure most of you guys have heard of these people. I just watched the whole thing and I can't believe people like this are in the world.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2fUyJQgRuM

[rdolan]

the good ol "Phelps" family in Topeka. They used to picket all over town when I lived there. every once in awhile they'd picket the community theatre i used to work and perform at.

if anyone wants to rent a ryder truck, i know where they live.

[Landmine]

My first show at K-state was HAIR, and they were there to picket. They are evil evil folk. I saw them protest no less than 20 different events while at K-state.

[Sleeps]

It's a joke to try to talk to them. Some friends and I tried when they were protesting some speaker at K-State. They are impossible to reason with...arguments are recieved with scorn and responded to by raised voices, just like in the video.

I feel sorry for the journalist.

[Arnie]

Thanks for posting this Brett. The reporter, Louis Theroux, is one of my favorites. He's the son of the writer of the Mosquito Coast, and had a series on BBC for a while that was rerun on Bravo where he would try to immerse himself in a different American subculture every week. It was often funny (Wrestling, Porn, UFOs) and sometimes tense (Militias, Black Nationalists), but he would always try his best to find the human face of these groups, not just make fun of them or trap them. I've been curious what he's been up to since.

I've only had a chance to watch the first half of this so far, but I've really been enjoying it. The family is infuriating and, I guess I'd even say evil, but I enjoy his attempt to try to figure them out.

[Landmine]

The reporter is so good. Calm, quirky, funny...a perfect foil for the Phelps clan.

Fun Fact: I made it to the final round of an MTV reality show for a prank i had planned on the phelps crew, i had 3 phone interviews... It never came to be. It would have been awesome, they make me hate.

[Landmine]

Worship the Rectum?

Really?

oh my....

[Gass]

This, honestly, makes me sad.

[Chip]

This, honestly, makes me sad.

Yeah, I decided to stop watching the interview shortly into it. I've seen this family's "work" before.

It was about at the point that I was thinking "I hope one of them dies and their funeral gets picketed so their family gets a taste of their own medicine" that I decided I didn't want to be infected by their hate and shut it off.

-Chip

[moon_shoes]

What really boggles is that they picket, not as a means to convince anyone of their argument, just to let everyone know that they are going to hell. Amazing.

I feel terrible for the children in the family who don't understand at all.

[Edison]

I feel terrible for the children in the family who don't understand at all.

It's a cliche' but it's true; people have to be taught this kind of hatred and that's just what this family is doing. They're raising children that are blindly ignorant and literally hateful toward others who don't believe what they believe.

It's tantamount to child abuse, and it'll come back to haunt them somehow.

I like to assume that this kind of family cult insanity just dies on the vine, because they're far too intolerant and judgmental of any 'outsiders'. For this gene pool to survive they'd have to find and marry partners crazy exactly in the way they are (unless they find a way to justify incest).
They can carry on the 'good work', but they'll probably have to keep making loads of babies to 'indoctrinate'.

[katewrath]

This was beyond fascinating. I turned down the volume during the opening footage, because I already knew the kinds of things the Phelps group says. (They picked my little sister's graduation at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I guess they heard she was on the field hockey team and jumped to the obvious conclusion. Kidding! I know not all field hockey players are lesbians. Some of them are bi.)

I took great comfort from the knowledge that they are universally loathed and condemned wherever they go. It really gives me faith in humanity that so many people would go out of their way to to reason/debate/scream at these people.

Also, a chilling glimpse of how an Us/Them dynamic can be taken to the furthest possible extreme. You hear it in everything the say, the way they turn everything into "You're wrong, I'm right." If you ever wondered what it would be like to live in Nazi Germany, or how people ever agreed to the internment of Japanese Americans...feast your eyes on human psychology at work.

We're all coded with an inescapable desire to protect ourselves, particularly against a perceived threat. I've worked in a number of offices where my coworkers got along, friendly but no more than that. Then came some perceived threat--layoffs, a jerk transferred in, etc--and you would have thought we were blood brothers.

The specifics of what the Phelps family says and does is beside the point. They're all in the grips of a powerful belief that the world is out to get them. And everytime someone whips a Sonic cup at their kids, they get confirmation of that. The girls say it over and over: "Who would marry me?"

Don't get me wrong. I think it takes a powerful streak of mental illness to think up such brilliantly confrontational techniques as picketing military funerals and creating signs with two stick figures committing sodomy. Somebody in the Phelps family has a genius for contrarian thinking.

But I also think they are an object lesson in how easily any of us can turn on someone/thing if we see it as different or threatening to us. (Exhibit A: Interaction between fans at a USC/UCLA football game. Exhibit B: Me, the months directly before and after the 2004 election.) I think it's a mistake to think the difference is the problem. The real problem is our response.

[LoLo]

It's obviously been said already, but this is so disturbing I can barely handle watching it. It makes me so angry...like Chip said, it's really hard to want to continue watching when all it makes me do is HATE these people. They just spawn terrible feelings wherever they go. These people are truly awful.

[Bowman]

On one of Michael Moore's old TV shows ("TV Nation" or "The Awful Truth"), he packed a tour bus full of flamboyantly gay people and drove it right in front of one of the Phelps family pickets. Hilarity ensued.

[kremidas]

I hate that anybody gives these people any air time, it just gives them an opprotunity to spread their message louder. Notice how the Westboro members always wore T-Shirts with their website URLs in front of the cameras.

They are insane people that shouldn't be taken seriously at all or paid any mind. Our attention to them just emboldens their sense of self worth. They see our unanimous and loud condemnation as proof of their point.

This is what happens when you believe everything you read.

[EdO]

I hate that anybody gives these people any air time, it just gives them an opprotunity to spread their message louder. Notice how the Westboro members always wore T-Shirts with their website URLs in front of the cameras.

They are insane people that shouldn't be taken seriously at all or paid any mind. Our attention to them just emboldens their sense of self worth. They see our unanimous and loud condemnation as proof of their point.

This is what happens when you believe everything you read.


I think it's fascinating to watch them. I haven't as yet figured out exactly what this message of theirs is. I understand that God's angry, and that God hates fags, but I'm not clear on what they want us to do about it.

Also, they're not insane people. They're brainwashed people. Or less dramatically, they're programmed. The old man is probably suffering from some mental illness, but the family are just regular people who have been drilled with this angry philosophy for so long that they're scared not to believe it.

Getting angry over these people is pointless. I think, in time, they'll come around. It's not a very strong strong structure as cults go. Our outrage is fueled by the media coverage, but only if we let it.

[ritty]

I may have shared this story before, but it was on the old board, so what the hell. Anyway, it's about the cleverness and ingenuity of some teenagers back home in KC. The backstory: The rabbi at my family's synagogue was public about his condemnation of the Boy Scouts of America's decision regarding gay scoutmasters. Phelps and crew decide to come picket the synogogue at the Friday night services when the rabbi has indicated he will be giving his sermon about this topic and renouncing his own experiences as a scout. So, the kids in the youth group come up with what I thought was a genius idea: They held a fundraiser. They got pledges from congregation members to donate $X per member of the Phelps crew picketing. The more Phelps protesters, the more money raised. The charity of choice? AIDS research.

[ladym]

They held a fundraiser. They got pledges from congregation members to donate $X per member of the Phelps crew picketing. The more Phelps protesters, the more money raised. The charity of choice? AIDS research.


This is absolutely brilliant!

I just had to comment on this because I found this interview to be so damned FASCINATING!

I personally am glad that these people are getting air time.
A/ I like to know that there are people like this in the world, it makes me feel more educated in my own opinions. Not that I am more EDUCATED, but that I know what differences there are of interpretation and opinion when it comes to issues of morality and spirituality. It also helps me to consider how people can become so single minded in one's beliefs. A good reminder, even for a liberal, to keep an open heart to all sides of an issue so that you are never in rank or file.
B/ I think the fact that they preach against America "the fag country" is so fitting to me, because it is only BECAUSE they live in AMERICA that they even have the right to do these things. If they lived in another country without the freedom of speech and were protesting the dead soldiers of their own army... they would probably be put in jail.

I am of the opinion that I am willing to give these people their freedoms in order to have mine and I find the rebuttal to their message to be an inspiring one. For instance the afore mentioned fund raiser.

What makes me REALLY SAD, is that these people seem really NICE and LOVING... to each other. They don't seem like hateful people to the interviewer. I mean they let him into their home for several weeks. Very interesting to me that they could have so much hate for the rest of the world.

Hmmmm.
Love you guys.
Understanding in all things.