From my Pastor guy:
Jonah –
-Not sure how pertinent this is (and I liked the point that municipalities should be free to regulate obscenity with a heavy hand; sounds about right to me, conservatively speaking), but worth noting in my mind:
Fred Phelps is not, by almost any standard definition, a pastor.
He’s a disbarred lawyer who attended a couple of Bible colleges from which he did not graduate, went on to law school, ended up in that field and then disbarred, for cause, then realized that in Kansas it wasn’t that hard to get congregational status for an operation with a building and some family members on Sunday mornings. His financial program is routed through Westboro Baptist, which is not affiliated with any religious body, Baptist or otherwise. Likewise, Fred has no standing, ordination, or recognition from anyone as a minister, other than from the couple dozen, almost all direct relations, who worship with him when he’s in town on Sundays.
None of this, by the way, does Fred deny. He plagued our town for a couple days years back, which led me to dig around online and end up in a “conversation” with the nasty old man. He’s asocial and somewhat manic, but I’m not qualified to diagnose — but I’d say he’s not crazy. Just mean, and enjoys it. You don’t have to carry clinical credentials to see that, like obscenity, for what it is.