Fred Phelps is dead, but Kansas lawmakers are making his bigoted dreams come true | Opinion

Remember Fred Phelps? Today, in Kansas, we are all Fred Phelps, courtesy of the Kansas Legislature.

I thought about old Fred while watching lawmakers over the last two days overriding vetoes of various mean-spirited bills that are designed to make life more difficult for the few among us who don’t conform to popularly accepted gender norms.

Phelps’ catchphrase was “God Hates Fags” and he and his merry band of homophobes drew national attention for Kansas. He was the self-styled “reverend” of the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church, who, along with a “congregation” made up of mostly his family members, spent his life crusading against the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender human beings.

They criss-crossed the country, noisily protesting at the funerals for victims of AIDS and anti-gay hate crimes; and soldiers killed in Iraq, who, in the warped logic of Phelps World, were damned to eternal hellfire by defending an America that was not as flagrantly anti-LGBT as it could be.

Phelps died in 2014 and most of the obituaries recounted his 2003 protest in Pittsburgh over the funeral of Fred Rogers, the mild-mannered host of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” who tried to teach generations of children to be nice to each other. “Mr. Rogers gave aid and comfort to homosexuals,” Phelps famously told Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman. “He was a wuss and he was an enabler of wusses.”

Back home in Kansas, Phelps was almost universally reviled and denounced by Republicans and Democrats alike. He ran for governor and Senate in the 1990s.

I got here just in time for his last run, the 1998 gubernatorial election. The Democratic Party wasted one of its best candidates, then-House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer of Wichita, in an unwinnable race against the moderate and immensely popular incumbent Bill Graves — mostly to ensure that Phelps would lose the primary and not lead the party’s ticket into disaster in the general election.

But I have long suspected that for many Kansans, the main objection to Phelps was not his beliefs, but his tactics. He said what a lot of people think, but he said it in a way that was giving bigotry a bad name.

That was reinforced in 2005 when more than two-thirds of our legislators and 70% of voters approved an amendment to ban same-sex marriage. It’s unenforceable now, due to a Supreme Court decision and the federal Respect for Marriage Act. But it’s still in our state Constitution. Look it up — Article 15, Section 16.

What Phelps never understood was that if you want to deprive citizens of their rights, you have to do it slowly and methodically. You start with small things and build up until the people you hate are making camouflage nets behind razor wire somewhere in western Kansas.

Phelps’ problem was he skipped to the end of the book.

The political tactic of walling off a small and unpopular minority and then scapegoating them for society’s ills isn’t exactly new.

My Uncle Bud, who was a bit older than my dad, fought a war in Europe against people who did that. My father entered the service two years later, in time to help the survivors try to rebuild a more tolerant and civilized society.

A good starting point for separating LGBT Kansans from their rights would be a law stating that schoolchildren on overnight trips have to be separated by their biological birth sex. Who could argue with that? It’s a law looking for a problem.

Or pass a law saying that transgender athletes have to compete as the sex they were born with. There aren’t very many of them and it’s just sports, right?

Then take a bill to allow seriously injured people who are arrested go the hospital before getting booked into jail, and quietly slip in a provision that all jail inmates have to be segregated by their birth sex, despite the obvious potential that raises for jailhouse harassment, assault and rape.

Pass a law banning transgender people from using the bathroom where they can be safer, and force them to use the one where they’ll most likely sooner or later get beaten to a pulp by someone who objects to the way they are. Call it a “Women’s Bill of Rights.”

All those ideas passed the Kansas Legislature in this year of grace and were vetoed by Gov. Laura Kelly. All have been enacted into law with a two-thirds majority overriding Kelly’s veto.

Wherever Fred Phelps landed in the afterlife, he’s pointing at us, laughing, and saying “I told you so.”

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m sorry Phelps is no longer with us. He was a living example of the kind of people that we should never let ourselves become.