To Speak for the Dead,<\/p>\n
or<\/p>\n
Warts and All: Fred Phelps, an (at best) mixed legacy, and how we remember ourselves<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Note: I do not endorse Fred Phelps or the Westboro Baptist Church, their actions or their views. \u00a0I cannot repeat that enough)<\/strong><\/p>\n Fred Phelps is dying, and the general consensus on the internet is that this is a good thing for humanity.\u00a0 And there are a lot of people in the world who will be better for his passing.\u00a0 But there is another side that people often don\u2019t know, and it bears remembering as we consider the life of this hateful man.<\/p>\n The startling fact is that if Fred Phelps had died in 1980 he would have gotten all but a hero\u2019s funeral, and if he had died in 1975 there would probably be a memorial to him on the grounds of Washburn Law School\u2014the law school that he and I share as alumni.<\/p>\n Long before he was known for protesting soldier\u2019s funerals, and even before he was known for turning a routine courtroom examination into a medieval ordeal, Fred Phelps was a noted civil rights attorney.\u00a0 If you go to the Phelps Chartered building in Topeka you can find a fascinating array of pictures of Phelps in civil rights marches, and the man himself proudly said that he helped litigate Jim Crow laws out of Topeka and out of Kansas.<\/p>\n During his law career, Phelps represented African Americans in a variety of struggles against injustice and unfair laws.\u00a0 He fought school systems and American Legion posts, Kansas City Power and Light and Kansas Universities\u2014Wikipedia has a whole list, some of which I had heard and some of which I hadn\u2019t known.\u00a0 He was given an award by a chapter of the NAACP in Bonner Springs, Kansas and by the Greater Kansas City chapter of Blacks in Government.<\/p>\n He was extremely religious all this time, and probably held the beliefs that would come to define him later in life.\u00a0 But he was doing good work in a cause that nearly everyone would agree is just.\u00a0 He was probably always corrupt in the ways that would lead to his disbarment, but he was using the skills he was taught in order to fight the good fight.\u00a0 And he was reportedly physically abusive, but would not have been the first public figure who had positive works in public balanced by horrible ones in private.<\/p>\n To Speak for the Dead<\/b><\/p>\n So what is the point of bringing this up?\u00a0 It is certainly not to defend Phelps, his views, or his actions.\u00a0 I do not, cannot, believe in a God that rejoices in anyone\u2019s death or one that hates anyone for a sexual choice.\u00a0 I will never condone violence against family members, or anyone save in very limited circumstances.\u00a0 I have no desire to see a statue built to a man of hate in the halls of an institution that taught me to love justice.<\/p>\n But as a culture we have no room for complex people, and that is to our detriment.\u00a0 We paint over the warts of our own history to provide heroes that are unfailingly good, and villains that are unfailingly bad.\u00a0 We remove the humanity of our own past so that we can provide a tidy narrative, and in doing so we rob ourselves of a true connection to the events of the past.\u00a0 There is no man or woman who has lived that does not have some sympathetic quality, some kernel of shared human experience that deserves to be remembered.<\/p>\n Fred Phelps is not a demon.\u00a0 He was not birthed from pure evil, and will not return to whatever lies beyond with a legacy that is purely evil.\u00a0 There are lives in the world that are quantifiably better because he lived.\u00a0 And while it may never balance out the damage that he has done, it still deserves to be remembered.<\/p>\n And the other side is that there is no good person who has ever been without evil, or at least pettiness and smallness.\u00a0 Whether because of the limitations of their time (for men such as Jefferson who spoke so highly of equality and yet kept slaves) or because they were simply human (Henry Ford built the modern world, but was shockingly anti-Semitic even for his time).\u00a0 When we tell stories and histories that sanitize them of their flaws we remove the things that allow us to identify with them.\u00a0 We turn men like Washington into gods astride the world, and men cannot identify with gods.<\/p>\n It was ironically in the words of another man now noted more for his bigotry than his works, Orson Scott Card, that we can find inspiration for this.\u00a0 At the end of Ender\u2019s Game<\/i> and the books that follow it, Ender becomes a Speaker for the Dead.\u00a0 He founds a group of people who come to tell the story of a human\u2019s life after their passing, the whole story from the positive to the negative.\u00a0 They don\u2019t hide either side, so that the family can remember the real person, not a hagiography or a condemnation.\u00a0 So that a real human can be remembered, with all the positive and negative lessons that come from their lives accessible.<\/p>\n And in the end that is the point.\u00a0 When Fred Phelps passes from this world, tell his story.\u00a0 Tell the story of a man who hated with all his being and stained a family, a church, and a town with that hate.\u00a0 Protest his funeral if you want to, because while I would never do it myself I can\u2019t deny the appeal of protesting the funeral of a family that fought for the constitutional right to protest at funerals.\u00a0 But also tell the story of a man who spent hundreds of hours fighting hate before his life was overtaken by it, and brought a great deal of good to a number of people.\u00a0 Tell all of the story so that we can learn what the lesson of his life is, and so that someday a person who has done great things and feels the stirrings of hate can learn what that looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To Speak for the Dead, or Warts and All: Fred Phelps, an (at best) mixed legacy, and how we remember ourselves (Note: I do not endorse Fred Phelps or the Westboro Baptist Church, their actions or their views. \u00a0I cannot repeat that enough) Fred Phelps is dying, and the general consensus on the internet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,7],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crazy-people","tag-honor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}