Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Here at this little dumping ground, we are fierce proponents of the First Amendment. Yes, freedom of speech is an important Constitutional guarantee, and today the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it again. Military families have no protection from the Westboro Baptist Church and its right to free expression. Fred Phelps and his family can yell "God Hates Fags" and publish profane statements about deceased combat veterans. Hey, it's how they roll, and the Bill of Rights rolls with them.

This is as it should be, readers. We can't erode freedom of speech.

So let's use it.

The Westboro Baptist Church (an embarrassment even to the real Baptists, who don't embarrass easily) is the platform for our nation's most despicable, deplorable, demented, and disturbed retro-hominid. Fred Phelps didn't just inherit some whack job gene from sewer rat parents. He got a boatload of defective DNA, a veritable buffet of poorly organized peptides. To call this Gollum a moron is an affront to morons everywhere. Phelps delves deep into the sludge pits where even the likes of Rick Santorum and Clarence Thomas fear to penetrate. To put it plainly, there's no new low to stoop to until Fred Phelps sets the bar. He is the final force in the universe of low.

Fred Phelps's god hates fags because Fred Phelps's god is a Great Beast. Yes, you can't really identify Fred Phelps's god with any known deity outside a few sparse Bible verses that were probably written by some saggy old priest somewhere who wasn't getting any. We won't even tar and feather Yahweh with Fred Phelps. Granted, Yahweh's standards are questionable, but He's not killing U.S. soldiers because of rainbow marriages. This lunacy arises from the mind of Fred Phelps, a creepy sick deviant who probably beats puppies with sticks and pulls the first spring crocuses up because God Hates Purple. Fred Phelps's god belongs to Fred and his family alone: a dirty deity doing dastardly dumbass deeds.

Fred Phelps and his family make China's one-child policy look attractive. If he was a crop, it would be time to rotate, plow under, and plant poison ivy. If he was plastic, he'd be the one piece you wouldn't recycle. If he was news, it wouldn't be fit to print. If he was a car, you would park him on a dark street and leave the keys in the ignition. If he was a fur coat, we would all move to Florida, and if he was a bathing suit we'd high-tail it for the Yukon. If he was gum disease, we would all floss.

Every bored god that ever was hates Fred Phelps. I have personally petitioned numerous deities to rain misery upon Fred's head. Every time he has a flat tire, it's the wrath of a bored god. That fungus under his toenails? A bored god from Borneo (thanks be unto Him). Even as we speak, Aphrodite is making Fred Phelps's wife uglier and Fred hornier. That pesky mud puddle Fred stepped in at his last military funeral? Sent by Chac the Rain God. You go, Chac!

May a thousand small but highly annoying calamities befall Fred Phelps over the course of a day, a month, a year. And let us, one and all, make note of where he gets buried, so we can expectorate and release flatulence upon his grave. We'll get a sign-up sheet and do it in shifts, like an eternal flame.

Go to hell, Fred Phelps ... if hell will have you. Don't ask me about your chances with that pantheon. I doubt if even the Devil would want your sick-ass company. So go and die in an existential way. Cease to exist, leave no trace, go to oblivion and don't return. Think of yourself as light leaving a star, and just travel across the universe without hitting anything until you reach a Black Hole with very, very low standards of what it will suck inside itself.

I'm Anne Johnson, and I have a First Amendment right to say that Fred Phelps is a demon spawn. It's a damned shame the rest of us have to share this planet with him. If I ever see him I will shout loudly at him, words I don't usually use. But I won't ask him to kiss my ass. We all know what those lips say, but we don't know where they've been. Touch my flesh with them? I. Think. Not.