To all depraved sons and daughters of Adam

The UK’s Daily Telegraph seems to have been having a lively email exchange with those nutters in Topeka who run the Westboro Baptist Church – a dysfunctional family called Phelps.

The Phelpses run the God Hates Fags website (which at the moment welcomes you with “Welcome, depraved sons and daughters of Adam”) and claims that the Almighty does just what it says on the tin: hates fags.

(We’ve chosen a picture of student demonstrators kissing in front of Phelps nutcases back in 2000. Well, in view of the diatribe you’re about to read, we had to redress the balance somehow!)

The Westboro lot plan to picket a production of the anti-homophobia play The Laramie Project at a school theatre in Basingstoke, Hampshire, here in the UK, tomorrow.

The Laramie Project is an award-winning play (on which a film was subsequently based) depicting the life and death (in October 1998) – at the hands of homophobic thugs – of Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming. You can read about the tenth anniversary of that here.

Yesterday, the Telegraph published the full text of the email exchange it’s had with Fred Phelps’s daughter (I think she’s his daughter – judging by the nature of that family you’d think they were so inbred that Fred is his own mother), Shirley Phelps-Roper.

Here’s just a part of it. All the ugly capitalisation, the grammatical errors and the dodgy punctuation are in the original. Roper-Phelps was asked why they objected to The Laramie Project, and this is her response:

We don’t object to it, we see it as a glorious preaching moment. It creates a PERFECT backdrop for us to help YOU connect the dots. From the least to the greatest of the people of the UK, including your lamenting and rebellious and disobedient Gordon Brown. You taught your children FOR GENERATIONS now that God is a big fat liar and that HIS standards are on the table to dispose of. You BROKE their moral compass.

The prophet said - WHAT WILL YE DO IN THE END THEREOF. That is to say for you rebels - WHAT will you do when you get to the end of this road of your filthy disobedient manner of life and find that you have incurred the wrath of God and you find that his promises to make your people to be ALTOGETHER WORTHLESS, GOOD FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! And what will you do when you all land in hell FOR EVER where the worm that eats on you NEVER dies and the fire is NEVER quenched and the smoke of your torment ascends up for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever - never ending. So we go to the place where the Laramie Project is playing and you look at us, then you look at the so-called “counter-picketers” and the young people that you have taught that they can live like the very devil himself and it is JUST FINE, because even though the Bible CLEARLY says that God HATES people and it is a perfect hatred - a determination to send the UNREPINENTANT to hell for ever.

So I say - you can look at the faces of each of these groups, and you see that these young people of WBC [Westboro Baptist Church] - as you already know, have no confusion and they have bright shining minds and they are happy and well adjusted and content, living sober, righteous and godly in this present world, while you are busy in GREAT lament over the fact that you have a 15-year-old girl having the baby of a 13-year-old boy (who was 12) when they embarked upon this glorious plan, because YOU brutes taught them that God is a liar. Now suddenly you see that they have NO standards! And then you can add to this pleasant little happy UK family moment that another 13-year-old boy has arisen to dispute paternity! Oh yea baby - you UK rebels truly have it goin on! You are like the Doomed american rebels - just a big shameful MESS!! I say we are dot connecters! THAT is our job! We use the Laramie Project to tell you unambiguously and unapologetically that your DUTY is to fear God and keep his commandments and that you are required to give the glory of all his judgments that he is executing RIGHT UNDER YOUR NOSE, TO HIM! The God Smacks are HIS WORK!

Wow! That’s tellin’ ’em.