Pastor Fred Phelps

The Week’s Most Wasteful, Disgraceful, and Distasteful Headlines

DEATH OF A HOMO-HATING LION
Westboro Baptist Church Pastor Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps, perhaps America’s greatest performance artist of the past generation, has gone creaking into the afterlife. The former lawyer, civil-rights activist, and Democratic candidate lived 84 years, his loins issuing forth 13 children and 54 grandchildren, many of whom followed in his holy mission to hoist picket signs and taunt gaybirds and lezzies under whatever rock they could find them. Although homosexuals and their dutiful enablers worldwide were sharpening their fangs at the prospect of picketing Phelps’s funeral just as he and his family had done for so many dead AIDS victims, a Westboro spokesperson said there would be no funeral, at least not a public one. The day after his death, Phelps family members were yet again on Topeka’s streets, publicly taunting rump-wranglers and sodomites.

Continuing to trumpet the simultaneously unprovable and unfalsifiable allegation that Phelps was afraid of homosexuals”€”i.e., “homophobic””€”rather than disgusted by them, many in the LGBT “community” celebrated his passing with the glee of dancing rabbis at the Chabad Telethon. “Fred should spend all eternity with one cock up his ass, another in his mouth,” wrote one compassionate and loving rainbow warrior on Facebook’s Fred Phelps Deathwatch page. According to Mediaite, there was “bipartisan unity” across the political spectrum about the notion that Phelps was going to hell because God obviously hates people who hate fags. Clearly none of them have read The Holy Bible, because it unambiguously states that God hates fags.

BISEXUALS GET IT FROM BOTH SIDES
Back in the freewheeling 1970s, bisexuals were seemingly as ubiquitous as Elton John’s chest hairs. In the humorlessly harsh and increasingly polarized years that have intervened”€”during which time the homosexual lobby went from demanding the government get out of their bedroom to insisting that the government and all non-homosexuals be dragged into their bedroom and forced to watch”€”gazillions of “gender identities” have blossomed, yet the palette of possible sexual orientations has been reduced to a strict binary pair: You’re either straight or gay, and there are to be no ifs, ands, or butt plugs about it. If you’re a man who claims to be bisexual, you really want to only be with men and are thus a self-hating traitor to the gay community. If you’re a woman who claims to be bisexual, you will eventually wind up with a rich man who sweeps you away on a white steed, and you are thus a self-hating traitor to the lesbian Reich, and we all hope he dumps you for a man.

This has hurt the tender hearts and gentle feelings of the “bisexual community,” whose Village People-style leather chaps are still chafing at the fact that Web giant Google blocks the word “bisexual” from autocomplete although it eagerly suggests phrases such as “gay rights” and “gay marriage” when you may be innocently seeking synonyms for the word “happy.”

The New York Times reports that bisexual activists, when they aren’t actively being bisexual, are on a “Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists.” The article, which is so long that even a bisexual with tremendous sexual stamina would be able to finish off multiple partners in the time it takes to read it, hints at what might be at the crux of modern bisexuality denial”€”if one has a choice to flit between partners of both genders, it suggests that sexuality is not a genetic trait fixed at birth, which may undermine political movements such as the endless agitation for gay marriage.

WELFARE: UNFAIR FOR THE UNWELL WHO DON’T FARE WELL?
An ongoing American fraud is the media/educational/government complex’s stubborn insistence that “welfare fraud” is a figment of the right wing’s constipated imagination. We are told that Ronald Reagan (Boo! Hiss!) was an evil meanie for suggesting that welfare leeches exist during his first presidential campaign, and we are assured that welfare only exists to help struggling people who really want to find a job but are constantly oppressed and demeaned by vampiric CEOs who refuse to pay them $100K a year for wiping tables at Wendy’s. And if you dare suggest that a certain quotient of unskilled layabouts and wastrels abuse the system, you will be slapped in the mug with the term “corporate welfare” by those who can’t tell the difference between the government seizing less of your money because you were productive and the government rewarding you with money for being unproductive.

Despite all that folderol, last week a pair of “Scottish aristocrats” from Minnesota was charged with allegedly siphoning $165,000 in welfare benefits while owning a $1.2-million yacht, a six-bedroom lakeside home, and driving a $30,000 Lexus. The couple, Colin Chisholm the Third and Lady Andrea Chisholm, also allegedly had $3 million in bank accounts while receiving food stamps.

The state of Louisiana has announced emergency regulations that would prevent welfare recipients from using federal benefits “at lingerie shops, tattoo parlors, nail salons and jewelry stores.”