Hate mongering funeral family has legitimate predecessors

Pastor Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church have protested the Academy Awards, gay pride parades, museum exhibitions, synagogues, the 2008 Sichuan China earthquake and more than 200 funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They gather outside memorial services waving provocative colored signs that read “God Hates Fags”, “America Is Doomed” and “Thank God For Dead Soldiers” and taunt mourners with chants and jeers.

The Topeka Kansas-based church has only about seventy members, nearly all of them related to Phelps, yet they have caused quite a stir. Patriot Guard Riders, a nationwide network of motorcyclists that congregate at soldier funerals to keep the peace, formed solely to counter the Phelps’s and the family has had several police confrontations and minor court appearances. Earlier this week they were issued a major one; the Supreme Court announced they will hear the case of whether the father of a Marine killed in Iraq can sue Westboro protesters for the emotional distress they caused him by picketing his sons’ funeral.

Funerals have long been fertile ground for protests, and not just in the United States. Two years ago in Greece, the funeral of 15 year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos sparked riots across the country. Grigoropoulos was shot to death by police while in the process of hurling a homemade bomb at a group of officers. A candlelight vigil for him was held in Athens and schools shut in honor of his burial. Students, teachers and parents marched on parliament, a protest that began peaceful but turned rowdy when youths assaulted riot police with stones and bottles. Thousands of mourners gathered at the cemetery itself, where rubbish bins were set ablaze and more stones were thrown. Police clashed with youths in Thessaloniki, the country’s second largest city, and in the western port town of Patras, rioters attacked the main police station with stones and petrol bombs.

Demonstrations at Greek funerals actually have somewhat of a history. Four decades ago, the death of politician George Papandreou became the occasion for a massive rally against the then dictatorship. Papandreou was a leftist leader who narrowly avoided assassination in 1921, escaped to Egypt in the mid-1930s, briefly served as Prime Minister during World War II and in the 1960s became known as an uncompromising populist. In a 1967 military coup he was arrested and a year later he died of a brain clot following surgery performed for a perforated ulcer. More than 300,000 Greeks lined his funeral route, shouting “Down with the junta” and “We want freedom”. Some mourners were arrested but there was no serious violence.

In 1998, in Iraq, protests erupted during a funeral procession for children whose deaths were blamed on the stringent U.N. sanctions that had been in place for eight years. Sixty small white coffins were transported atop a convoy of Baghdad taxis. State officials said the total child death count caused by the sanctions was more than a million. The mourner’s chants were eerily similar to those now used by the Westboro group. “America is the enemy of God,” they shouted. “There will be a price to pay for the blood of our children.”

In South Africa in the mid-1980s, funeral protests became such a popular tool of expression against racial injustices that the Apartheid government banned them. The controversial law prohibited mass funerals—funerals for those who died from injustices brought about by the Apartheid system were regularly drawing as many as 50,000 mourners—and required rites to be held indoors to limit attendance. The display of flags, banners or posters and discussion of politics was forbidden and only ordained ministers were allowed to speak at services. Nobel Peace laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu was outraged.

“Don’t rub salt into our wounds,” he said in a speech at the time. “Don’t trample on us. Where else can we speak? We are not allowed into your Parliament. When we want to speak to the state president, he says he does not want to speak to us. And when we try to speak to our people at our funerals, you restrict us…Please do not try to find points of confrontation and make worse a situation that is already bad. If [you] try to promulgate laws that are unjust, I am going to break these laws.”