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A fter gay student Matthew Shepard was beaten to death in October 1998, a tall man in a white cowboy hat descended up on the Wyoming funeral waving fluorescent signs of Shepard's face amid blood-red flames and chanting the mantra "Matt is in hell."

Few Christians would advocate the virulent phrases—such as "God hates fags"—that pour from Fred Phelps, the infamous antihomosexual protester and pastor. But the rest of the country often confuses Phelps's Day-Glo signs, lifted high by a man wearing a giant name tag that reads "Pastor, Westboro Baptist Church," with mainstream Christian thought and politics.

Phelps's high-profile publicity stunts act as fodder for homosexual-rights activists to portray Christians as dangerous, crazy, hateful, and irrelevant. Every news clip of Phelps helps to blur the line between disagreeing with a nonbiblical agenda and advocating a fiery intolerance for people Jesus died to save. "Leaders like [Phelps] pose a twofold danger to the church," says Daniel Angus, a representative for the media-monitoring group Faith in Touch. "They supply the Left with an arsenal of detestable religious examples to discredit credible people of faith, and they present a false gospel that plays upon legalistic Christians' fears of moral compromise."

DISCREDITING THE CHURCH: Phelps's outrageous antics have attracted broad media attention, casting him in the undeserved role of spokesperson for conservative Christian viewpoints. His angry sound bites make him an easy antagonist for reporters searching for a "balanced" story.

In March, some journalists eagerly showcased Phelps picketing outside the Chicago church of Gregory Dell, the United Methodist minister who was found guilty of violating church law for conducting a "holy union" ceremony for a homosexual couple (CT, April 26, 1999, p. 16).

Karen-Louise Boothe, president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, says that although she believes Phelps is "mentally unstable," coverage of his Dell protest was justified because Phelps is an outward symbol of unspoken attitudes inside the church.

"Reverend Phelps wants gays and lesbians to die and go to hell. Institutionalized homophobia just wants gays and lesbians to disappear," says Boothe.

And yet other reporters later acknowledged that Phelps's views were extremist. "Fred Phelps was really a sideshow," said Chicago Tribune religion writer Steve Kloehn at a Chicago-area conference in April on media coverage of the Dell trial, sponsored by the Garrett-Medill Center for Religion and the News Media. Still, in November the Chicago Tribune ran a 900-word Phelps story with a four-inch photo of him waving a sign emblazoned with the word sin (Kloehn did not write the story).

Steven Williams, prosecuting counsel for the United Methodist Church, was concerned the media would misread Phelps's extreme position as representative of his own more traditional evangelical views. "I thought: Now everybody's going to think I'm coming from the same crazy perspective!" Williams said in a panel discussion at the conference.

JUST CALL IT HATE: "Gay-rights organizations have not hidden their agenda for years," says Focus on the Family's John Paulk. "You can go to Web sites and pull up their point-by-point strategy. The way the debate is being framed now is that anything you say that doesn't accept and support homosexuality is labeled as hate speech."

For instance, Elizabeth Birch, director of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual-rights organization, says that endorsing reparative therapy for homosexuals and telling people they have a choice about their sexual orientation is "hateful."

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October 25 1999, Vol. 43, No. 12