CARNAL NATION

Having already produced what may be safely considered the year's most sensational and harsh critique of pop diva Lady Gaga by damning her to hell, Fred Phelps and company have decided to expand their cultural analysis to the performing arts and Web 2.0. And, of course, the Jews. Phelps and his crew of kooks have announced that they'll be hitting CarnalNation's very own hometown of San Francisco to protest Fiddler on the Roof, several Jewish community organizations, and Twitter. If we can't admire their theology, ethics, tolerance, or sanity, we can at least give credit to Westboro Baptist for stamina and ambition: on January 28 and 29, the church has scheduled itself to protest at 14 different sites in San Francisco and Palo Alto. (For those of you not in the Bay Area, Palo Alto is about 35 miles south of San Francisco.) Targets for demonstrations include the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Center, Stanford University Hillel, the theatrical productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Rent, and, of course, the offices of Twitter. That's a lot of protesting for one guy and his extended family in two days.

Why, you ask? Well, if you've ever read Phelps's tracts, you know that his reasoning typically makes the text of Dr. Bronner's look well-reasoned and comprehensible. Demonstrating against Fiddler on the Roof makes a weird kind of sense, because not only is it a musical about Jews by a Jewish writer, but the current production stars Harvey Fierstein, who's both Jewish and gay, and not shy about either of them. From the perspective of Fred Phelps, Fiddler is a great big twofer of hate. (Of course, Phelps also considers Jewish and Gay to be redundant; sounding somewhat like a white supremacist schoolgirl texting her friends, Phelps announces on his site that "Jews are Fags Really, 2 True!")

The Twitter protest seems so random that it's just weird, although WBC is no stranger to hateful non sequiturs. You may remember several months ago when the church traveled to Bethesda, Maryland, to protest against Walt Whitman High School because it was named after a "fag poet." But while the Phelps family may not be sponsoring readings of Leaves of Grass or fundraising by putting on productions of Rent in the backyard, but they do plan to be Tweeting.... their protest against Twitter.  Displaying an almost unheard-of sense of humor, the WBC reflects on the irony: "WBC to Picket Twitter, Inc.! Now that should get interesting, WBC member(s) Tweeting as they picket outside Twitter, Inc. Won't a black hole or something open in the space/time vortex?" Unfortunately, their reason for demonstrating comes down to nothing more than "Why not?" as though they just decided they might as well pop by Twitter while they're bashing Jews, gays, and musical theater: "Twitter is a company which lends itself to mass communication. Why in heaven's name would the great publishers at WBC NOT picket this place? They have a duty to God just like every other person to serve God and to use ALL their resources in their service to him. So we come with hearts of love and joy to humbly suggest they GET ON THAT TASK!"

To us, the most offensive thing about the Phelps's planned assault on San Francisco is how CarnalNation has been left out of the whole thing. C'mon, seriously: Twitter is more sinful and depraved than us? It's true that the CarnalNation staff is a little less forthcoming about our address, and that we remain, Cheney-like, in our "undisclosed location" somewhere in San Francisco, but we'd like to at least be acknowledged for all our hard work. Apparently, we're going to have to work harder and turn the perversion up to 11 if we want to share eternity with the likes of Lady Gaga and Harvey Fierstein.