To hear about Heath Ledger\u2019s death yesterday evening was shocking, but to hear this morning that the Reverend Fred Phelps, keeper of the God Hates Fags website, announced that his anti-gay group would be picketing Ledger\u2019s funeral because of his involvement in the Oscar-winning \u201cBrokeback Mountain\u201d was even more shocking.
\nI suppose it shouldn\u2019t have been.
\nPhelps and his group from Kentucky\u2019s Westboro Baptist Church have become infamous for their tasteless antics; first gaining infamy for the picketing of hate-crime victim Matthew Shepherd\u2019s funeral. It is despicable enough that the group would picket a funeral, even if they strongly disagree with the deceased\u2019s former lifestyle, but Phelps\u2019 group has expanded their distasteful displays — shouting obscenities and shaking hate-speech filled placards — to events not even tenuously linked to issues of homosexuality: Funerals of fallen soldiers and the victims of last year\u2019s Minnesota bridge collapse. Sure, some of those soldiers and Minnesotans may have been gay, lesbian or bisexual, but Phelps\u2019 group is disrupting those funerals not because of the personal practices of the deceased, but because the group believes deaths of U.S. service persons in Iraq and the failure of the bridge are \u201cpunishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.\u201d Apparently those deaths had nothing to do with booby-traps and structural weaknesses. Go figure.
\nNow they want to disrupt the funeral of a man who played a gay man in a movie; a truly genre-busting and important film, but a movie nonetheless.<\/p>\n