Apparently Fred Phelps' God is not too fond of Fred Phelps, either

By a narrow margin, the voters of Topeka decided tonight not to pass a ballot question that would have repealed the city's anti-discrimination ordinance. Already winnowed down from a more general, city-wide law against discrimination based on sexual orientation in hiring to a narrower measure against discrimination in municipal hiring, this ordinance - passed only five months ago - was at considerable risk for passing. Why? Because Fred Phelps wields lots of power in Topeka. Apparently, he's got a deck of cards' worth of posterity in the city - 13 children and 52 grandchildren - and when they, for example, picket restaurants for employing opening gay waiters, businesses feel the pressure and fire their employees in response. Oh, that this were hypothetical. Conventions and businesses flee and Topekans suffer the economic and social shame of being the hate capital of the U.S., and much of Phelps' homophobic antipathy only makes sane Topekans sympathetic to gays. Yet still they sign Phelps' petitions and, perhaps unconsciously, absorb his rhetoric and reflect his beliefs.

Kansans seem like fine people. I've asked Lolo, who has biked cross-country both north-south and east-west, where the people were nicest - she says they were most generous and friendly in Kansas; loathsome generalizations aside, I'm inclined to believe her. I believe that lots of the folks I heard wanted to respect what I had to say and wanted to think carefully about their votes. Yet I still spent a lot of the last two weeks talking to people who argued that gay people are 1% of AIDS cases but receive 60% of the tax dollars allocated to HIV/AIDS treatment (a ludicrous statement on both ends) so anti-discrimination measures would cost Topekans money, that gay men were great traveling companions but that discrimination was their fault because they were too "in your face," that one doesn't have to hate fags to think that they ought not to have "special rights," that gay is biological/not biological/a choice/a sin/a sinful choice, that Topeka doesn't need putatively expensive new laws to protect special categories of people. I had long conversations characterized by digressive nonsense. If I had a shoe for every person who talked about the supposed "sanctity of marriage" when debating the unrelated anti-discrimination measure, I would walk myself and all my homo friends to Montreal and start a brand new colony. It's really amazing how people stick to the illogic they've nurtured rather than opening their minds to reason - I mean, how do you argue with flat-earthers? And where do they get these ideas?

I guess I know the answer to that, and it's disheartening. It makes me livid, embittered, and dismissive, but ultimately it just makes me sad, because as a very smart and charismatic man once told me, each vote on a measure that affects gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people is a referendum on my right to exist. When all these voters bring up "special rights" excuses and "it might be expensive" excuses and "do we really need all these unnecessary laws?" excuses, they are more or less inline with the God Hates Fags squads. Underneath all these varying reasons lies a common thread: I don't deserve equal rights because I love the wrong person. Say this to me because I'm Chinese and me and 12 million best Asian buddies and the Ad Council will riot (or at least, organize a poorly-attended protest outside an Abercrombie & Fitch); say this to me because I'm a lez and all of America seems to think it makes perfectly righteous sense.

So that's why it makes me sad. All of this has been said before, more eloquently by other people and less blatheringly by myself, but tonight's positive outcome is nonetheless spurring me to pour forth all of this in hopes of somebody's compassion. My miraculously supportive dad called me last week and asked me why I wanted to devote my work to the gay. Why the gay and not the Chinese? Well, my first response was that I could and would advocate for both civil rights for gay people and for people of color. My second response was a melodious clatch of missed intonations and Chinglish vocabulary that tried to convey the desperation that my arrhythmic mash of earnest activist talk (see above) tried to convey in English.

As always, all my sentimentality was lost in translation.

Luckily enough, I found something that - even in Google translator - is side-splittingly unbelievable: Fred Phelps' praising the tsunami for purging the world of sodomites.

Money quote:"Not to mention the fact that those Asian countries weren't the only ones affected by the tsunami. Do you realize that among the dead and missing are 20,000 Swedes and over 3,000 Americans? Filthy Swedes went to Thailand - world epicenter of child sex traffic - to rape and sodomize little Thai boys and girls. 20,000 dead Swedes is to Sweden's population of 9 million as 650,000 would be to America's 290 million population. We sincerely hope and pray that all 20,000 Swedes are dead, their bodies bloated on the ground or in mass graves or floating at sea feeding sharks and fishes or in the bellies of thousands of crocodiles washed ashore by tsunamis. These filthy, faggot Swedes have a satanic, draconian law criminalizing Gospel preaching, under which they prosecuted, convicted and sentenced Pastor Ake Green to jail - thereby incurring God's irreversible wrath."

The Westboro Baptist Church takes on the tsunami