Im incredibly conflicted about the death of Fred Phelps and the comments just a simple post about it has engendered on my page. My close friends insist that we shouldnt celebrate his passing, and I have no intention to. But Ive never understood the phrase dont speak ill of the dead, as if death itself were some rare disability that unfairly afflicts a tortured few, and not an inevitablity that awaits us all. Were all going to die. Isnt it our individual responsibility to live our lives in a manner befitting how wed like to be remembered when were gone? Perhaps sentiments like these are driven by a suppressed recognition that so much of what people say about recently deceased public figures is either exaggerated or disingenuous, a result of sadness and grief overtaking sober perspective and analysis. Maybe some of us balk at a closer examination of our behavior around the newly dead because we fear the outing of uncomfortable truths when it comes to the accuracy of the eulogies we give them, both positive and negative. The only thing Im sure of is that to call Fred Phelps evil gives him too much credit. He was a politically incompetent graffiti artist in a field packed with far more dangerous and destructive bigots. I submit to you that his actions were not as demonstrably destructive to the lives of LGBT people as those of a media personality like Governor Mike Huckabee, whose slick rhetoric provides a platform for any bigot who believes that only those who subscribe to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible are entitled to equal protection under the law, a man who has used his position and prominence, in concert with other politicians and so-called religious leaders, to push the bogus position that acceptance of Christianity means we must all accept the right of certain Christians to enforce discrimination in the public square. If there were a metric for establishing the number of LGBT suicides triggered by a homophobic public figures words and deeds, who would come out the real winner - Phelps or Huckabee? And if Huckabee was the winner in such a scenario, would it be as easy to hiss venom on his memory ? Or would we hesitate because a bunch of our relatives voted for him and he wore nice suits and didnt look typecast as the guy who runs a cannibal outpost on the Texas prairie? Or maybe, by that time, Huckabee and his ilk would have survived to pass into a kind of grudging acceptance on the issue of gay rights, having lightly disavowed his past actions and comments, regardless of how much real damage they did? If so, then there is something I do feel comfortable mourning today. The fact that Fred Phelps didnt live enough long enough to feel the pressure to take it all back.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 22:39:53 +0000
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