EDGE 10.0: A Decade in Westboro Baptist Church Coverage

In celebration of our tenth anniversary, EDGE is proud to run the latest installment of "EDGE 10.0: The Decade in," a retrospective series of features looking back on the past ten years of headlines, politics, personalities, trends, music, film, parties, etc... written by Editor in Chief Emeritus Steve Weinstein, and the current editorial staff at EDGE.

In the 10 years since EDGE's founding, as the leading LGBT news source, we have covered every story without fear or favor. That includes the good (marriage! End of Don't Ask Don't Tell! Out pro athletes!); the bad (bullying; LGBT in-fighting over trans protections; "conversion" camps); and the ugly ("Barney Fag"; waitress faking hate note; Russia). But our year-long voyage into the rediscovery of EDGE's history and reportorial tradition would be sadly incomplete if we did not include the downright weird.

That, of course, would be the Westboro "Baptist" Church in Topeka, Kan. Is this family cult begun by batshit-crazy patriarch Fred Phelps, this tight-knit band of despisers of all things to all men our worst nightmare, with their ubiquitous message of "God hates fags" and "down with America"? Or is their message so perverse, their tactics so universally despised that they have actually been a boon to the LGBT rights movement by forcing our enemies to side with us in opposing them and gaining us new allies - like bratty frat boys?

Regardless of how you approach their shenanigans, the Phelps clan's first mention on EDGE came in 2006, with columnist Cam Lindquist, who argued that free speech only is truly free when it defends the indefensible; Westboro should not, he wrote, be denied the obnoxious privilege of picketing the funeral of soldiers who died to defend their freedom to picket the poor soul's own funeral.

You've got to hand it to Westboro: It really knows who to get the brain molecules moving.

Westboro first burst into the public's eye when members protested the funeral of slain Wyoming gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1997. In 2007, EDGE reported that Fred Phelps wanted to add his own memorial to the local ones for Shepard that would alert the public how Shepard entered Hell the day he died.

Never shy about piggybacking on a juicy news story, Phelps' followers announced they would picket Larry Craig, the Idaho GOP senator disgraced for airport bathroom-stall hijinks. The next year they planned to picket funerals of high school students who died in tragic circumstances. Because Hell is a big tent, apparently.

"They say there's no such thing as bad press," Killian Melloy noted the next year in a story on how Phelps would picket a play about himself. And a rape victim. And actor Heath Ledger. And Boston Latin School. Because ... well, because it's there, dammit.

Jewish houses of worship presented Phelps' attention in New York and New Jersey. Also Holocaust museums, because, according to a statement, "heartless, merciless Jews" deserved it for being more sorrowful about the death of six million of their brethren than the awful wrath of Jesus Christ when He returns.

That was in 2009, when Phelps also went after Lady Gaga and hockey games, among other assorted targets. But 2009 also marked the year the Phelps got some of their own back, in a delicious counter protest mounted by frat boys at the University of Chicago. Students not only carried fun signs but one fraternity greeted the protesters in their underwear with songs like "It's Raining Men" and "I'm Coming Out" blaring from loudspeakers.

Britain may have acted in good faith when it denied Westboro entrance to their nation. Maybe that's why the Phelps family went high tech in 2011, with the announcement that they would picket Apple founder Steve Jobs via iPhones. Or they were using the devil's own tool to fight the devil. Either way, what Melloy called a "smack down between two elements of the fringe right" occurred when Westboro and the Ku Klux Klan got into a cat right over Memorial Day 2011.

Westboro, it seemed, was too crazy even for the Klan.

After the Klan and frat boys, Westboro officially went from national outrage to national laughingstock. A lesbian couple tied the knot across from the Topeka church. Aaron Jackson, founder of a group called Planting Peace, bought a house across the street also and painted it rainbow colors. Jackson said he got the house for a song, since no one else wanted to live anywhere near it.

When Phelps himself went to his presumable great reward at the hands of the maker whose work he promoted so assiduously in this earthly realm, his estranged son was among those who greeted the news with a collective "Meh."

By the time the remaining Phelps family members still in the fold (by force, according to those who escaped), announced plans to picket the funeral of Robin Williams, no one took much notice. Phelps' moment appeared to have past.

For this writer, however, the capstone to the whole Phelps/Westboro only-in-America silliness had to be when insult comic Lisa Lampanelli, told Westboro would protest her Topeka concert, offered $1,000 to the GMHC for every member of the church who bothered to show up. The comedian donated $44,000 to the New York AIDS service organization.

Leading chants of "We're here, we're queer, we take it in the rear," Lampanelli led a decidedly un-gay crowd in a boisterous party across from the scattered remnants of a group that either doesn't know it's descended into High Camp or is in on the joke.

The Westboro Tabernacle Choir