I'm new here but this caught my eye.Originally Posted by Lady's Human
Unfortunately, the situation with Fred Phelps is not that simple to resolve. He had the police and city government of Topeka cowed for years with a barrage of lawsuits (he's a disbarred lawyer and nine of his kids are currently lawyers). When the local government grew a spine and started fighting back, he looked for another way to get attention and discovered that picketing would do the trick.
The press covered the Westboro Baptist Church pickets at various businesses and churches in Kansas for awhile but then lost interest and stopped covering them as a story.
By your theory, that should have caused Phelps & family (the Westboro Baptist Church is 80+% Phelps family members by blood and marriage) to fade away.
What really happened is that Fred Phelps then upped the ante. He started picketing funerals of people he thought (correctly or not) had died of AIDS in Kansas. When the press stopped covering that, he started showing up at funerals in other states. The press covered it a little, not much, and then ignored him.
So he upped the ante again--he showed up at the funeral of the victim of a vicious hate crame, Matthew Shepard. That got publicity and the press covered him for awhile, then they started ignoring him again.
So Fred got another idea--he started picketing the funerals of victims of other disasters like the World Trade Center bombings. After the Iraq war started, he picketed the funerals of soldiers.
The man is a whore for attention and he's a genius at figuring out ways to up the ante so he can't be ignored. Simply ignoring him just doesn't work. Fighting back does work but it's a tricky thing to do without unconstitutionally restricting the rights of others as well.
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