God Hates Cabaret

International News, By Joal, 7th August, 2008

There’s a new cabaret production opening in Toronto, Canada tonight, but the high camp theatrics are likely to begin long before the curtain goes up. It’s the premiere of The Pastor Phelps Project: A Fundamentalist Cabaret, and guess who’ll be picketing outside? You guessed it. The Phelps.

Homophobe pastor and inspiration for the play, Pastor Fred Phelps, has said he and his congregation will be picketing outside the play with their placards, ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘God Hates Canada’.

A self proclaimed ‘primitive Baptist’ preacher, Phelps’ views couldn’t be any more old-school, preaching that America’s failure in the Iraq war and environmental disasters like Hurricane Katrina are due to the ‘moral decline’ of the US. And his biggest problem with his own country? Its acceptance of homosexuals.

“Homosexuals and Jews dominated Nazi Germany… just as they now dominate this doomed USA,” Phelps was quoted in a 1996 press release. It seems Phelps is anti-everything, including the play his hate-mongering has inspired. And publicists for the play and those involved couldn’t be happier.

“They’ve amplified my voice a millionfold,” said 25 year-old writer and director Alistair Newton. “They’re empowering us… giving us publicity we would not otherwise have had.”
Newton wrote a letter to Phelps, inviting the 78-year-old disbarred lawyer to the show:

“Our show is just like you: a shameless spectacle. It’s not just your fundamentalist hate-addiction that fascinates me; there’s something more.

“You’re not the type of conservative who hates fags but hides behind slick rhetoric about the sanctity of marriage and family values. No, you are the real deal: a balls-to-the-wall lunatic; spitting bile with all the conviction and dedication of a man possessed and there’s a part of me that can respect that.

“You are so utterly loathsome, your ideas so mind-bendingly facile and your tactics so crassly ludicrous that you provide the perfect mirror to reflect the awesome stupidity of religious homophobia.”

The Westboro Baptist Church responded to the letter in a press release:

“The Pastor Phelps Project is a tacky bit of filthy sodomite propaganda, with no literary merit and zero redeeming social value, masquerading as legitimate theatre.

“It is of the fags, by the fags, and for the fags – designed only to mock the word of God and the servants of God. “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” Psalms 2:4. God Hates Canada – Land of the Sodomites.”

Let’s hope the show tours.

The Phelps Project is part of the Summer Works festival. You can find out more about the show by clicking here.

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