Paring Down The Prepuce II / Fred Phelps Sings!

Astute readers may note that today is Friday. More astute readers may note that today's post is thus two days late on the every-Wednesday schedule that this blog has followed for most of its existence. This is by design, because I have decided to downshift Holy Prepuce! from a weekly to a whenever-I-damn-well-feel-like-it-and-no-whining-because-it's-free schedule.

This change will, of course, inconvenience those among you who visit the blog on the web each Wednesday for your weekly toke. Your dedication makes me happy with each mid-week spike on the usage stats, and I apologize. But I can promise that if you sign up for the email service, or subscribe to the site feed, updates will be yours as they happen.

Two factors have influenced this decision. First, I am starting a new job and so will have different demands on my time and the predictability thereof. Second, I have come to realize that arbitrary self-discipline is overrated; and it is sometimes OK to peel off the gimp mask and whisper the safeword.

Now then:

The mad, mad world of virulent anti-gay Christianism got a little more fun Wednesday, when a student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University was arrested for cooking up a batch of homemade napalm in preparation for Falwell's funeral. Mark David Uhl allegedly planned to use the explosives against the Rev. Fred Phelps and his congregants from the Westboro Baptist Church.

Westboro Baptist, you may remember, is the organization that attends gay funerals toting banners with such charming slogans as "AIDS cures fags," and "Fags die, God laughs." The group also protests at productions of The Laramie Project, and maintains an online clock ticking off the days that Matthew Sheppard, the young gay man on whose murder the play is based, has been in Hell.

More recently, the church has taken to protesting at the funerals of U.S. service members killed in Iraq, on the theory that God smites soldiers out of hatred for America's tolerance of homosexuality. Of course, there can be little doubt that Phelps' vitriol stems from his own repressed homosexuality, since no human being in history outside of a Queer Studies department has spent as much time obsessing on the subject of gayness.

In any event, Westboro Baptist announced that it would protest at the funeral of Jerry Falwell. Now, you might think that Phelps would be a fan of Falwell, fellow travelers as they were on the anti-gay hate-mongering circuit. But there you would be wrong. According to Phelps, Falwell "split Hell wide open the instant he died" because he espoused "false doctrines like 'God loves everyone,'" and believed in free will. (Phelps is an old-school Calvinist and as such believes in strict predestination.) So, Westboro planned a protest, Falwell supporters planned a counter-protest, and Mark David Uhl planned to napalm the whole thing.

But all of this is old news for finger-on-the-pulse information mavens such as Holy Prepuce! readers. What may interest you more is something I discovered while browsing through Westboro Baptist's website, GodHatesAmerica.com. (Lest you think the church insular, it also maintains GodHatesCanada.com, and GodHatesSweden.com.) No, it's not their list of the recently-damned-to-Hell; although that is certainly informative, including as it does Coretta Scott King, Gerald Ford, and all 31 Virginia Tech shooting victims.

What caught my eye--and ear--is that Westboro Baptist has a choir. And you will be pleased to know that this august ensemble has made its recordings available on the Internet! So as a public service and for your listening enjoyment, I present Westboro Baptist's adaptations of several patriotic standards. (Clicking on a title will launch the corresponding .mp3 recording.)

Original	Westboro Baptist Version
God Bless America	God Hates America
Proud to Be an American	Ashamed to be an American
This Land is Our Land	This Land is Fag Land
America the Beautiful	Wicked Land of Sodomites
The United States Marine Corps Anthem	Semper Fi Semper Fags

Classic!