Hate for Rent

by Jim Washburn

My old high school, Corona del Mar HS of Newport Beach, has been in the news in recent weeks, with a flap over whether its administration did or didn’t ban a production of Rent and whether that was or wasn’t due to it being gay-friendly, an odd consideration, since there’s scarcely a musical that isn’t downright gay-jubilant.

That was worked out, and the show went on, the world again made safe for song and dance and teens in tights. But wait: Never ones to miss a party, three members of the more-nuts-than-Tom-Jones’-jockey-shorts Westboro Baptist Church flew out from Kansas to protest the production. You might know them better as the "God Hates Fags" church, as that’s their most frequently waved sign, not to mention that the church’s chief website is godhatesfags.com.

It’s not just fags: these guys hate everything but hatred, and I’ll bet they’re working on that. They hated on me once. WBCers were protesting the Democratic Convention in LA a decade ago, and simply for existing within his plane of vision, WBC leader Fred Phelps shouted something garbled and nasty at me through his Tom Waits bullhorn and glared with withering malevolence, helped in no small part by him looking like the creepy mortician in the Phantasm movies.

Just how much hate do these guys have? To paraphrase Tender Fury, if hate was soul, they’d be James Brown. Check out this announcement on godhatesfags.com: WBC WILL PICKET THE GOD-CURSED SWINE FLU DEAD! (caps and boldface entirely theirs) That’s right, if your darling infant dies of the flu, Phelps and Co. will be there to shout at her little corpse on its way to hell, just as they’ve cursed and interrupted the funeral services of dead U.S. servicepersons who’d served in Iraq. God has damned the United States, you see, for allowing gays, abortion and divorce, and we’re all going to hell, but not before Phelps yells at us.

These guys are so whack they’re beyond satirizing. I mean, what can you add to a website that opens with, "Welcome, depraved sons and daughters of Adam" above a photo of shoes stamping on our flag? It’s too much hate for just one website, so they also have beastobama.com (He’s the friggin’ Antichrist. Who knew?), americaisdoomed.com and godhatestheworld.com, among others.

The latter opens on a marvelous interactive world map, with the instruction, "Click completed country to find out why God hates that country, and why this world is doomed." In South Africa it’s equal rights for gays, abortion and divorce; in Finland, gays, abortion, divorce and 16-year-old age of consent. Pakistan’s doomed because of their false religion, plus, "although Pakistan made sodomy illegal in the’90s, they do not institute God’s standard of the death penalty."

The section on Italy has a photo of a church member on a gondola, enjoying the wonders of Venice by holding up a sign reading "Priests Rape Boys." I cynically wondered if the WBC just bring signs everywhere so they can claim their vacations as a tax write-off, until I realized, ha ha, they don’t pay taxes! They’re a church!

So three church members showed up the other week in semen-drenched Newport Beach, but they apparently brought the wrong signs. There they were protesting the gayosity of Rent, waving signs reading "The Jews Killed Jesus" and "God Hates Israel," while Fred Phelps’ wife Margie trod on an Israeli flag. What gives? That’s like showing up at a teabag party with Sanka, or at the crucifixion without any nails. What sort of Christian forgets the nails?

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