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Making Sense of 'God Hates Fags' and 'Thank God for 9/11': A ThematicAnalysis of Milbloggers' Responses to Reverend Fred Phelps and theWestboro Baptist ChurchDaniel C. Brouwer; Aaron Hess

To cite this Article Brouwer, Daniel C. and Hess, Aaron(2007) 'Making Sense of 'God Hates Fags' and 'Thank God for 9/11':A Thematic Analysis of Milbloggers' Responses to Reverend Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church', WesternJournal of Communication, 71: 1, 69 — 90To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10570310701215388URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570310701215388

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Making Sense of ‘God Hates Fags’ and‘Thank God for 9=11’: A ThematicAnalysis of Milbloggers’ Responsesto Reverend Fred Phelps and theWestboro Baptist ChurchDaniel C. Brouwer & Aaron Hess

Since June 2005, the Reverend Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC)

have conducted protests at funerals of U.S. military personnel killed in the War on

Terror. Investigating a webring of military blogs, we conduct an analysis of vernacular

responses to the WBC’s protests. Articulation theory informs our analysis as we charac-

terize the ideological work performed in vernacular responses to the protests. Bloggers’

responses demonstrate that the WBC exposes ideological tensions involving freedom

of speech and religious expression, enactments of citizenship, injustice in the justice

system, and disciplined military bodies out of control.

Keywords: Articulation; Blogs; Fred Phelps; Freedom of Speech; Milblogs; Military;

Nation; Religion; Sexuality; Vernacular

As the death toll of U.S. troops deployed in the Bush Administration’s War on Terror

continues to grow, more and more families and communities confront the painful

and arduous task of ritualizing the deaths of loved ones. For some of these families

Daniel C. Brouwer is an Associate Professor and Aaron Hess is a doctoral student in the Hugh Downs School of

Human Communication at Arizona State University. Portions of this manuscript were presented by the first

author at the public sphere theory preconference at the November 2005 annual meeting of the National Com-

munication Association and at research colloquia at the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin,

and the University of Michigan in October 2006. The authors would like to thank graduate students and faculty

at those colloquia, Robert Asen, Cheree Carlson, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous and insightful

commentary on an earlier version of this essay. Correspondence to: Daniel C. Brouwer, Associate Professor,

Arizona State University, P.O. Box 871205, Tempe, AZ 85287-1205, USA. Tel.: 480.965.5976; Fax:

480.965.4291; E-mail: [email protected]

Western Journal of Communication

Vol. 71, No. 1, January 2007, pp. 69–90

ISSN 1057-0314 (print)/ISSN 1745-1027 (online) # 2007 Western States Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/10570310701215388

Downloaded By: [University of Nevada Reno] At: 20:38 4 January 2010

and communities, this task has been complicated by the highly visible and anta-

gonistic presence of the Reverend Fred Phelps and other members of the Westboro

Baptist Church (WBC). Famous for protests at the funerals of queer people and

people who have died from AIDS-related causes, the WBC has recently gained atten-

tion for protesting at the funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq. Beginning in

June 2005 at military funerals in Massachusetts, Idaho, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and

elsewhere across the United States, the families and communities of Army Staff Ser-

geant Christopher Piper, National Guard Corporal Carrie French, National Guard

Medic Tricia Jameson, Marine Lance Corporal John Mattek, Jr., and others have

endured the WBC’s vexing theodicy that links national security to heterosexuality.

None of the deceased soldiers are known to identify as queer. Yet through the utter-

ance and display of slogans that proclaim ‘‘God Hates Fags,’’ ‘‘USA ¼ Fag Nation,’’

‘‘Thank God for 9=11,’’ and more, the Phelps protesters argue that the nation’s

deceased military personnel serve as stunning, corporeal evidence that God is punish-

ing this nation for its tolerance of homosexuality and other vices. This articulation is

not novel,1 but its expression at the funerals of U.S. military personnel is contro-

versial and intriguing. Months before state and federal legislatures began proposing

and passing legislation restricting protest activities at military and civilian funerals

in direct response to WBC protests, current and former members of the military,

families and friends of the deceased, and other parties interested in the U.S. military

responded to the protests with a mixture of astonishment, skepticism, and anger.

Analysis of these responses has much to tell us about the constitution of nation,

nationality, citizenship, religion, and sexuality in these post-9=11 times.

We began with a simple question: how do people in the U.S. military and suppor-

ters of the military make sense of the WBC’s presence at military funerals? To answer

this question, we conducted an analysis of vernacular responses to Phelps’ military

funeral protests. By ‘‘vernacular,’’ we mean discourse that is non-institutional, infor-

mal, quotidian, or mundane but still constitutive of public opinion (Hauser, 1999,

p. 11).2 For sources of vernacular discourse, we explored fifty weblogs. More specifi-

cally, we explored milblogs, blogs that host discussions on war and military issues and

are maintained by active-duty, inactive-duty, or veteran members of the military,

their spouses or family members, or supportive civilians.3 In our view, milblogs pro-

vided access to communities of invested commentators who were likely to be familiar

with the Phelps protests and whose vernacular commentary evidenced individual and

collective efforts to shape political horizons and political communities (p. 92).4

Articulation theory informs our analysis. Following and extending the work of

leading theorists of articulation such as Stuart Hall (1980) and Ernesto Laclau and

Chantal Mouffe (1985), contemporary scholars conceive of articulation as ‘‘both a

way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to

cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not

become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects’’ (Grossberg,

1996, pp. 141–142). That is, articulation theory motivates scholars to examine,

amidst conditions of social complexity, how ideologies and ideological elements

are invoked, mobilized, combined, altered, rejected, or ignored. Key outcomes of

70 D. C. Brouwer and A. Hess


such analyses include specification of ‘‘the role of discourse in the constitution of the

social world’’ (DeLuca, 1999, p. 335); exploration of the connections between

elements within ideologies, between ideologies and social forces, and among different

social groups in a social movement (Makus, 1990, pp. 503–507); and explanation of

how seemingly contradictory and often oppositional forces coalesce to construct

relations of dominance or opposition.

More specifically, we employ the concepts of thematization, combination, and

antagonism to account for the ideological work that is performed in vernacular

responses to the Phelps funeral protests. We follow Angus (1992) in his call for analy-

ses informed by articulation theory to account for both ‘‘the thematization of ele-

ments from the undifferentiated background of interconnected presuppositions

and the combination of these distinct elements’’ (p. 541). Additionally, we attend

to key antagonisms. Defining antagonism within the conceptual constellation of

articulation theory, DeLuca (1999) notes ‘‘an antagonism occurs at the point of

the relation of the discourse to the surrounding life world and shows the impossi-

bility of the discourse constituting a permanently closed or sutured totality’’ (p. 336).

Refracted through the lens of articulation theory, then, our simple research ques-

tion about milbloggers’ sense-making sharpens into the following questions: What

ideological themes and linkages set in motion by Phelps and the WBC do milbloggers

accept, and which do they reject? What ideological work do milbloggers perform in

their disarticulations and rearticulations of Phelps’ themes and linkages? What key

antagonisms emerge in milbloggers’ discourse, and how and to what extent do they

foreclose ideological totalities?

We argue the following: while the themes of sexuality and religion shape the ways

in which blog commentators make sense of the WBC, bloggers emphasize the theme

of nation, particularly the subtheme of freedom of speech, as the crucial site of Phelps’

assault. Further, despite Phelps’ legacy as an antigay crusader and despite some blog-

gers’ thematization of homosexuality, bloggers overwhelmingly foreground Phelps as

an antiwar or antimilitary provocateur; doing so warrants underinterrogation of the

role of sexualities in the constitution of the military, citizenship, and the nation (see

Berlant & Freeman, 1997; Berlant & Warner, 1998; Bloodsworth-Lugo & Lugo-Lugo,

2005) and thwarts possibilities of queer=military identifications or coalitions against

Phelps. More generally, scholars and citizens alike err significantly in dismissing the

WBC as ‘‘evangelical camp’’ or the ‘‘Phelps Family Freak Show,’’ for the WBC suc-

cessfully exposes key ideological tensions in contemporary U.S. politics.5 Expressed as

antagonisms, these tensions involve freedom of speech and freedom of religious

expression, enactments of citizenship, injustice in the justice system, and disciplined

military bodies out of control.

We focus on three prominent themes of sexuality, religion, and nation. In its pro-

test signs and slogans, the WBC emphasizes these themes, thus establishing a frame-

work of controversy. We begin our discussion of each theme with a brief summary of

the ideological terrain of each theme and the linkages that WBC protesters mobilize.6

We follow each summary with an account and critique of milbloggers’ vernacular

responses. Notably, in our discussions of sexuality and nation, we address a wide

Western Journal of Communication 71


range of subthemes. Commentary on these subthemes is sometimes contradictory or

fragmented, and among all three themes there are, to be sure, points of overlap.

Sexuality

When ‘‘God Hates Fags’’ and ‘‘Fags Doom Nations,’’ and when the United States suf-

fers from its status as a ‘‘Fag Nation’’ (according to Phelps’ protest slogans), sexuality

leers extravagantly as an ideological theme. More specifically, Phelps explicitly thema-

tizes the disorder of homosexuality and its potential threat to God and country. In

Phelps’ logic, ‘‘fag’’ and ‘‘faggot’’ refer not only to same-sex practices and identities

that proliferate within national borders but also to liberal and decadent policies that

compromise the nation. Indeed, Phelps’ shift from protesting funerals of queers and

people with AIDS to protesting funerals of military personnel represents a shift—an

expansion—of the meaning of fag and faggot from behavior and identity to policy.

Emblematic of the dual meaning of fag is a series of Phelps’ protest signs that portray

two male stick figures engaged in anal intercourse. Each of the four main branches of

the military has its name appended to the same image. Literally, the image and text

suggest the practice of anal intercourse between men in the armed services; more

figuratively and more importantly, the image and text depict feminized and thus

enfeebled armed services that place the nation at risk.7

Bloggers in the milblog webring address the theme of sexuality and Phelps’

articulation of homosexuality’s heretical national insecurity through strategic

silences and amplifications. We examine these silences and amplifications at three

levels: the sexuality of dead soldiers; sexuality as a component of the ‘‘Don’t Ask,

Don’t Tell . . .’’ policy; and homosexuality and gay rights generally. Among blog part-

icipants, there is moderate awareness of Fred Phelps’ history as an antigay advocate

and protester at the funerals of deceased queer people and people with AIDS. Some

bloggers provide links to news stories about his antigay protests or to Phelps’ notori-

ous website, godhatesfags.com. In a few cases, posters offer first-person accounts of

having witnessed an antigay Phelps protest. Bloggers do not readily draw upon this

familiarity, however, to make sense of Phelps’ vexing presence at military funerals.

Indeed, despite bloggers’ awareness of Phelps’ history as an antigay advocate and

despite Phelps’ deployment of ‘‘God Hates Fags’’ and similar slogans at military fun-

erals, the linkage between dead soldier and fag—the implication that Phelps posits a

queer sexual identity upon the dead soldiers he protests—simply does not stick. That

is, overwhelmingly blog posters do not perceive the presence of antigay protesters at the

funeral of a dead soldier as queering the soldier in any serious way. Shbinga (The

Stupid Shall Be Punished) expresses one of the few considerations of the linkage when,

writing about National Guard Corporal Carrie French, he or she remarks in an aside ‘‘if

she was gay as phelps & co seemed to believe.’’8 Other instances in which Corporal

French’s husband appears in a parenthetical reference and Army Staff Sergeant

Christopher Piper is described as ‘‘not gay’’ (brgonzo, Blackfive) indicate recuperation

of a slandered, queered sexual identity for the deceased soldiers, but overall we discern

feeble defense of the soldiers’ heterosexuality and little mobilization of heterosexual



signifiers to protect them from the charge. Instead, as we demonstrate later, bloggers

frame Phelps more vigorously as an antiwar protester than as an antigay protester.

Further, there is little explicit treatment of controversy about lesbians and gays in

the military. This quietude is surprising, for the presence of notorious antigay pro-

testers at military funerals promises an articulation between homosexuality and the

military that is clearly materialized in the ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell . . .’’ policy. The

quietude is surprising also because Phelps explicitly connects the presence of gays

in the military with national (in)security. Thus, what would seem to be under duress

in these military funeral protests would be, at least, the policy that allows lesbians and

gays to serve in the military (albeit by hiding their sexual identities). Instead, The

Timekeeper’s claim that ‘‘Phelps has just destroyed any support he might have had

in the armed forces’’ (Horologium) by protesting military funerals and not just

the funerals of queers and people with AIDS represents one of the few explicit com-

ments about the ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell . . .’’ policy. Expressed in The Timekeeper’s

claim is an assumption that milbloggers might share Phelps’ antigay opinions and

Phelps’ opposition to homosexuals in the military but that Phelps has alienated

potential allies by targeting military funerals.

Several bloggers extend the discussion beyond the immediate offense of protests at

military funerals and the specific ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell . . .’’ policy. They do so by

addressing secular and sectarian histories of homosexuality and the general state of

gay and military politics. Notably, several condemn what they characterize as thou-

sands of years of Christian gay-bashing and work to recognize histories of structured,

official homophobia. For example, Boonton (The Evangelical Outpost) locates the

roots of conservatives’ current obsession with gay marriage within a longer history

of homophobia, while Larry Lord (The Evangelical Outpost) characterizes homopho-

bia as akin to racism. Elsewhere, Willysnout (The Mudville Gazette) suggests that

Phelps’ slogans and logics are but extreme iterations of more mainstream Christian

beliefs: ‘‘He’s extreme, but he simply vocalizes what millions of . . . Christians really

think.’’ In our view, Willysnout argues convincingly that it is a mistake to dismiss

Phelps as ‘‘evangelical camp’’ or the ‘‘Phelps Family Freak Show.’’ While we do

not purport to know what millions of Christians really think, we know that promi-

nent versions of Christianity have condemned and continue to condemn homosexu-

ality and to correlate homosexuality with social and political decay (see, e.g., Boswell,

1980; Rogers, 2006).9 In short, Willysnout argues that Phelps’ articulation—refracted

and distorted as it is through an extreme style—resonates within a mainstream,

mundane ideology.

Many more commentators fail to address or express indifference toward the

broader topics of homosexuality and gay rights, while some express moderate, con-

servative, or fundamentalist positions. Qualified indifference to homosexuality, as in

Beth’s (She Who Will Be Obeyed!) claim not to ‘‘care what people do behind closed

doors, as long as no one is hurt,’’ functions to privatize homosexuality and to conceal

the very public mediations of all types of sexuality (Berlant & Warner, 1998). In con-

trast to qualified indifference, during a heated exchange on The Mudville Gazette,

Rich Casebolt tells his interlocutor, Willysnout, ‘‘compared to respecting you,



respecting those who adopt a lifestyle I consider wrong is easy.’’ In doing so, Casebolt

performs a condemnation of homosexuality in the weak guise of a compliment.

Finally and starkly, a self-identified soldier (Chris, The Stupid Shall be Punished)

exemplifies a fundamentalist position by announcing ‘‘I don’t support homo-

sexuality . . . . I believe in God.’’

When bloggers imagine Phelps and kin primarily as antigay protesters, they

endorse forms of counterprotest that thematize sexuality. Responding to a report that

members of the Boston Police Department’s bagpipe band played over the protesters’

chants, Seawitch (Blackfive) proclaims, ‘‘It was a great thing that the police did to

drown out their message of hate, stupidity, and homophobia.’’ This response exem-

plifies the frame of Phelps as antigay and decries his homophobia. More playfully,

two bloggers, keen to rumors of the Phelps family’s fire-spark litigiousness, caution

against potentially actionable counterprotest signs announcing ‘‘Phelps is Gay’’ and

wonder if the interrogatory form of ‘‘Is Phelps Gay?’’ would be less actionable

(Blackfive). While an amusing exchange on the theme of sexuality, these remarks

present a complicated deployment of sexuality. If Phelps is meant to be humiliated

by an accusation of homosexuality, then homosexuality is reified as shameful.

Similar mobilizations of homosexuality and homo-semiotics as counterprotest

tactics add further ideological complications. In a brief exchange in The Mudville

Gazette, Graumagus suggests ‘‘wearing leatherboy gear, complete with assless chaps,

and the sides and back of the truck should read ‘Bruce’s Gerbil Farm’’’; in response,

Bloodspite ostensibly endorses such homo-semiotics but warns Graumagus that he

will have to ‘‘find some other sucker’’ to wear the chaps. The strange persistence

of the rectum-traversing gerbil, the characterization of chaps as outrageous and solely

the province of gay men rather than part of anyone’s earnest and legitimate sexual

expression, and the reluctance to code oneself in homo-semiotics even temporarily

all mobilize aberrant homosexuality as a mode of critique against Phelps. The con-

trast between endorsing homo-semiotics as a mode of counterprotest and applauding

police officers’ fight against homophobia underscores an important point: Seawitch’s

remark notwithstanding, blog participants rarely describe or imagine Phelps’ coun-

terprotesters as engaging in antihomophobia activism. This is so because blog posters

overwhelmingly frame the WBC as antiwar protesters rather than antigay protesters.

(We address this linkage below in the Nation section.)

Religion

Through codes of religious authority, including scriptural references and common

symbols of Christianity, Phelps claims the weight of God. On their protest signs

and in their protest slogans, his church and his movement frequently employ the

‘‘Thank God for . . .’’ motto, usually inserting the latest national tragedy, whether it

be the death of Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist, Hurricane Katrina, or the impro-

vised explosive devices (IEDs) that kill soldiers overseas. Phelps simultaneously

defends and attacks through the use of Christianity. As a shield, religion and its con-

stitutionally protected expression defend Phelps and his right of protest. Frequently,



he has reverted to his religious rights and freedom of speech as a defense in court. As

a weapon, Christianity warrants Phelps’ vexing presence at a sacred location that is

particularly meaningful to military-aligned audiences. Phelps’ articulations of religi-

on inspire a riotous variety of responses about the values and meanings of Christian-

ity, complicating any sort of ideological closure advocated in the name of

Christianity. Milbloggers struggle to create a category or space in which to place

the Phelps clan and their actions. Four major subthemes are evident: Phelps is a

mainstream Christian who uses an extreme style; Phelps is a certain type of extremist

Christian; Phelps is a not a real Christian; Phelps is a scam artist who exploits

Christianity. Having addressed the first subtheme in the previous section, we address

the latter three here.

One vernacular response to Phelps is to link him to other types of Christian

extremism or to fundamentalist Islam as an explanation of his actions, thus exiling

him to the outskirts of the Christian domain. Simply put, Phelps is one more brand

of absurd or dangerous fanaticism. Bloggers note the similarity between Phelps’

behavior and other ‘‘extremist Christians’’ such as Falwell and Robertson (Citizen

Grim, Dr. Phat Tony’s). One blogger remarks that the premise for Phelps’ argument,

a theodicy linking homosexuality to national insecurity, iterates other well-known

fundamentalist preaching: Phelps’ message ‘‘is basically what Pat Robertson of the

700 club and Falwell said as well. (Later retracted). Dobson of Focus on the Family

has also said similar things in the past, that God had removed his hand of protection

from America because of its wickedness and allowed terrorists to strike on our

shores’’ (Patrick, Blackfive). These linkages construe the Phelps family’s actions as

products of both extreme fundamentalism and the timid tolerance of other believers

who disagree with his position.

A different sense-making response involves bloggers’ exiling Phelps beyond the

Pale of Christianity. This disarticulation of Phelps from the Christian religion oper-

ates as an emetic on behalf of the religion that is poisoned by his presence at military

funerals. Many of the milbloggers identify themselves as Christians and warn that

Phelps taints the perception of the religion. As AFSister remarks, Phelps ‘‘does not

know the same God I do, does not represent the church I love’’ (Ma Deuce Gunner).

Bloggers’ reclamation of Christianity is also enacted through reference to Biblical pas-

sages (Former MP, Blackfive) or personal relationships with Christ (devildog6771,

Blackfive). By self-identifying as Christians, especially through quoted Biblical pas-

sages, bloggers demonstrate their authentic status as proof of their claims in contrast

to Phelps’ inauthenticity. In sum, this disarticulation of Phelps from Christianity

recuperates the faith.

The final articulation of Phelps’ actions constructs a significantly different frame-

work for sense-making and exposes the focus on Phelps’ Christianity as inconsequen-

tial and errant. Commonly, bloggers charge the WBC with exploiting Christianity

and the legal system for their money-making scam. (This view is supported by a

Department of Defense directive that we discuss later.) This articulation changes

the frame of the protest from an earnest, substantive stance to a purely legal and

financial endeavor. As one blogger puts it, ‘‘I have no authority other than my



opinion to say so, but let me be clear that I do not count him and his so-called

(cough, tax dodge, cough) ‘church’ inside the communion of Christianity’’ (Donald

Sensing, One Hand Clapping). The use of descriptors such as ‘‘family project’’

(Donald Sensing, One Hand Clapping), ‘‘twisted and brilliant’’ scam (LarryK, Blackf-

ive), and ‘‘moonbats who claim to be religious’’ (chembrad, Blackfive) replace labels

such as church, pastor, or religious faith. For some bloggers, then, the scam frame-

work absolves one from the task of understanding the contradiction of a stridently

hate-filled Christian.

Those who focus on the scam subtheme warn each other of the consequences of

physical contact with the Phelps clan. In an exchange on the Blackfive blog, LarryK

describes the WBC’s actions as ‘‘using tax laws (a nonprofit church) and the court

culture to get rich.’’ In response, Robert Modean describes the lawsuits following

his assault on one of the Phelps clan: ‘‘I also became more familiar with the Phelps

family than I ever wanted to be as I was sued by them three times over the next two

years.’’ Consequently, some bloggers assert that the proper response to Phelps is a

legal rather than a religious one. In discussion of an appropriate legal response, Hope

argues that the tax system could be used against Phelps: ‘‘Let the IRS deal with Fred

Phelps and his group and then Fred Phelps will not have the time or the funds to

protest funeral’s [sic].’’

Through their rearticulation of Phelps as a scam artist, these bloggers deflect atten-

tion away from the degradation of their religion while simultaneously revealing and

amplifying Phelps’ true motive of greed. In blogs that rearticulated Phelps-as-scam,

we found that, in all cases except one, the claim did not veer the conversation into

investigating the nature of the scam. Instead, bloggers would frequently return to dis-

cuss the religious or national implications of the protest. We derive two possible

explanations as to why this rearticulation did not stick. First, the extravagant offense

of WBC protests simply overwhelms the scam argument. In other words, even if it is

a scam, the offense is too great to dismiss. Second, the nature of the medium itself

may also redirect conversation away from a continuous discussion. The structure

of blogs invites responses to either the thread of comments or the original post. As

a result, scholars cannot assume that bloggers practice direct and sequential engage-

ment with each other.10

Nation

To members of the WBC, the United States is a nation in distress, provocatively

signified by their upside-down display of the nation’s flag on their website,

godhatesamerica.com, and at their military funeral protests. Each new tragedy that

befalls the nation functions as evidence of God’s wrath for the nation’s license.

Concurrently, the United States’ indefinite participation in the global War on

Terror guarantees massive investments of money, troops, and casualties in the near

future. Domestically, intelligence agencies and legislators struggle to secure the

nation through clandestine surveillance and proposals to scrutinize and differently

regulate flows of people across the nation’s borders. In response to Phelps and



amidst the broader context of a nation in distress, bloggers thematize three promi-

nent aspects of nation: political affiliation, the roles of soldiers and the military,

and freedom of speech.

Political Affiliation

Concurrent with bloggers’ efforts to make sense of Phelps as a religious figure are

their efforts to make sense of his political affiliation. By political affiliation, we simply

mean political principles, political philosophy, and political party. At their protests,

Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church do not explicate affiliation with a specific

political party, nor do we see such explication in news stories about the protesters

between June and September 2005. This leaves the work of discerning party,

principle, and philosophy affiliations to bloggers.

To a lay observer, it might seem obvious and inevitable that Phelps is a right-wing

Republican Christian fundamentalist. His history of protesting against (and at the

funerals of) queer people and people with AIDS and his repeated linkages between

God’s wrath and various natural or political disasters such as 9=11 and Hurricane

Katrina fit squarely within a common narrative about fundamentalist, activist Chris-

tianity in the United States. Several bloggers express this presumption about Phelps

and the Westboro Baptist Church. However, other bloggers mobilize divergent pre-

sumptions and various forms of evidence to link Phelps tightly with the Democratic

Party and Democratic Party principles. This linkage is not as difficult to make as one

might think. In part, the linkage is presumptive and rests on an underinterrogated

presumption that Phelps is antiwar. Who in the world would possibly choose to pro-

test at funerals of U.S. military personnel killed in the war? Radical antiwar activists,

who are much more likely to be Democrats (or worse—Leftists, communists, anar-

chists) than Republicans. Once antiwar activist becomes the primary lens through

which to view Phelps, he becomes yet another antiwar Democrat. Indeed, bloggers

sometimes link Phelps to Michael Moore (who produced Fahrenheit 9=11), Demo-

cratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (who likened terrorist suspect interrogation tactics

at Guant�aanamo to Nazi interrogation tactics), avowed liberal Dan Rather (who

crafted a 60 Minutes story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service that used

fraudulent documents), or Democratic Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor Catherine

Baker Knoll (who attended a military funeral and expressed her opposition to the war

in Iraq to the deceased’s family members).11

In addition to this presumption, however, blog posters offer forms of evidence of

Phelps’ Democratic affiliation that are part of the public record. A few blog posters

(e.g., Chris, The Stupid Shall be Punished) who have surfed godhatesfags.com or its

companion site godhatesamerica.com report that Phelps has written letters of support

to both Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, the former for his aggressive opposition to

homosexuality and the latter for his tolerance for the preaching of Christianity in

Iraq. WBC members even traveled to Iraq where they protested the U.S. military

presence and the moral depravity of the U.S. more generally. Given the United States’



long-standing isolation of Cuba and vilification of Castro and its aggressive toppling

and prosecution of Saddam Hussein, Phelps’ expressions of admiration for both lea-

ders represent a level of treasonous U.S.-hatred that, in the view of some, only a rad-

ical Leftist could muster. More indicting is the fact that in 1990, 1994, and 1998,

Phelps entered the Democratic primary race for the office of governor of the state

of Kansas. Several bloggers note this fact, and a few of them send readers to the Wiki-

pedia entry for Phelps for impartial verification of Phelps’ affiliation with the Demo-

cratic Party (see ‘‘Fred Phelps,’’ 2006).

To some bloggers, the evidentiary keystone, however, seems to be Phelps’ lengthy

relationship with Albert and Tipper Gore and, more specifically, photographs of Fred

Phelps and Al Gore in physical and, by implication, ideological proximity. The

photographs appear in the blogs The Mudville Gazette and USS Neverdock; in other

blogs like Blackfive and She Who Will Be Obeyed!, readers are directed to the photo-

graphs. The composition of the photos clearly codes an overt, public relationship

rather than a clandestine relationship captured by a hidden camera. By showing

Phelps’ incontrovertible, affable, intimate proximity to Democratic Party leaders,

the photographs secure Phelps’ linkage to the Democratic Party.

In the face of several acknowledgements that Phelps and key Democrats have dis-

avowed each other (e.g., Greyhawk, The Mudville Gazette; Observer, The Mudville

Gazette), a preponderance of commentary about Phelps’ political affiliation insists

upon his linkages to the Democrats and their imagined militant antiwar position.

This insistence gives rise to a puzzling contradiction, for Fred Phelps and WBC do

not express opposition to the war per se in any way. To clarify, they do not express

opposition to the war, only support for the death of U.S. soldiers as Godly signifiers

of the nation’s sins. Because they are not antiwar in this specific sense, it seems errant

to insist upon Phelps’ position as a radical Democrat=antiwar position. In our view,

this contradiction offers an especially clear example of competing articulations and

the ideological work that they perform. Some bloggers ignore Phelps’ insistence on

homosexuality as a theme and replace it with political affiliation in order to drama-

tize Phelps’ assault on the integrity of the military.

The Role of the Military and Soldiers

Phelps’ theodicy dictates that the nation is being righteously punished via the death

of soldiers overseas; God is angry for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality and

uses improvised explosive devices (IED) to discipline the nation’s behavior. The site

of the military funeral is, therefore, ideal for the staging of his argument due to the

symbolic presence of the dead soldier, the likely presence of living soldiers, and the

synecdochic function of soldiers as exemplary national personae. The dead soldier

operates as a symbolic loss of the nation. The loss requires the act of mourning where

the funeral becomes a sacred place, a place where protest becomes unthinkable. In

describing the scene of the funeral, bloggers use language that highlights the sacred-

ness of the ritual and its national symbolic power. The funeral becomes a ‘‘vigil’’

(Bubblehead, The Stupid Shall be Punished) or a ‘‘memorial that honored the fallen’’



(binkyboy, The Stupid Shall be Punished), populated by a ‘‘grieving family’’

(Candace, Blackfive). The soldier him- or herself is constructed as an extension of

the military, which carries the symbolic power of the nation. Skippy-san (The Stupid

Shall be Punished) remarks, speaking of Carrie French, ‘‘As an American Soldier she

deserves the honor and thanks of a grateful nation.’’ Through characterizations like

these, WBC protests become symbolic attacks on the United States as a nation, not on

individual soldiers. In proposing counterprotests, many of the bloggers suggest the

use of large American flags as a means of symbolic support of the nation (e.g., Chuck,

Blackfive). These actions indicate that milbloggers recognize the significance of the

site of the protest and its representative power. The unthinkable act of protesting

during a ceremony for the dead becomes even more pronounced at military funerals

where sentiments of nationalistic pride and sacrifice resound.

The bloggers’ construction of WBC protests as attacks on the merits of the United

States and the war itself allows for a connection to other types of protest. As suggested

above, this articulation identifies the Phelps clan as part of other fringe, anti-

American groups. In a striking display of photographic images, one blogger, Marc

at the USS Neverdock, supplies bloggers with images of Phelps protests and juxta-

poses the WBC to other types of protests: ‘‘Everyday, military members who support

our troops that are in harms [sic] way, or who are involved in the war on terror and

suppoting [sic] America, go to work at the Pentagon. And everyday they are met with

protesters who try and undermine their morale’’ (Marc, USS Neverdock). The sec-

ondary pictures shift from Phelps to other types of protest against the nation. In these

photographs, protesters carry signs stating, ‘‘We support our troops when they shoot

their officers,’’ ‘‘The USA and peace are a fundamental contradiction,’’ and ‘‘No war

for oil.’’ The placement of Phelps adjacent to images of other antiwar protest visually

insists that all protest against war is tantamount to the absurdity of the Phelps per-

formance. Other bloggers verbally construct similar juxtapositions, such as compar-

isons to ‘‘EarthFirsters; the whole general patheticpatchoullipunk brigades’’ (Jim,

Blackfive). After articulating Phelps to the category of Leftist domestic protesters,

these bloggers extend the linkage to al Qaeda, saying that Phelps and other protest

groups support ‘‘terrorists and . . . [call] . . . for the overthrow of the government’’

(Marc, USS Neverdock). Linking the WBC to far-Left positions or a terrorist organi-

zation warrants the several calls to prosecute the group under treason laws.

Freedom of Speech

Many commentators portrayed freedom of speech as a key element of U.S. national

values even as they grappled to make sense of its obligations and limitations. Notably,

a recurring visual advertisement for the Milblogs webring partners imagery of the U.S.

flag and a soldier in uniform with the maxim, ‘‘Free speech from those who make it

possible.’’ In this vein, some bloggers who identify as members of the military

announce the protection of freedom of speech as one of the two primary functions

of the U.S. military or the primary reason why they joined the military. A majority

of bloggers endorse a position of support for free but appropriate speech. These



proprieties take the modalities of timing, place, and content—as in not now, not

here, and not these words and images. (In this way, bloggers’ claims anticipate by

several months the flood of state and federal legislation restricting the WBC’s and

others’ actions at military and civilian funerals.) Additionally, bloggers devote exten-

sive energy to consideration of how to properly respond to Phelps—that is, how to

enact their own rights of free speech in response to Phelps’ abhorrent speech. In the

pages that follow, we chart how the endorsement of free but appropriate speech

emerges and how bloggers defend various responses to Phelps, including violence.

We argue that two antagonisms, both showing ‘‘the impossibility of . . . discourse

constituting a permanently closed or sutured totality’’ (DeLuca, 1999, p. 336), emerge

in bloggers’ discussion of freedom of speech—free speech is not free, and the justice

system does not always produce justice.

Like Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink, and others before him,

Phelps has wrongly politicized funerals in the view of many bloggers. Echo-9-er pro-

claims, ‘‘It’s one thing to protest the war . . . . BUT, it is wrong to disrupt the funeral

service for a Hero that allows the freedom of these people to protest’’ (Blackfive). A

different blogger, berkley, recommends that if Phelps and his crew have a problem

with the Administration’s war policy, they should ‘‘go protest in Washington DC

and leave our troops out of it’’ (The Stupid Shall be Punished). Because they wrongly

politicize funerals and degrade multiple constituencies, Phelps’ protests are ‘‘indig-

nities that should never be allowed’’ (Blackfive, Blackfive). What to do, then, in a

nation that extols freedom of speech but finds those who are imagined or self-identify

as primary defenders of this right degraded by Phelps’ specific enactments of free

speech? This conundrum gives rise to a key antagonism that bloggers address—free

speech is not free. The most stunning expression of this antagonism comes from Bub-

blehead in the blog, The Stupid Shall be Punished. Observing that during a protest in

Caldwell, ID, the local police created a barrier between Phelps protesters and counter-

protesters, Bubblehead ponders: ‘‘I got to thinking about what kind of country allows

people like this to flaunt their unpopular opinions while being protected by the

police’’ (The Stupid Shall be Punished). To which one might dumbfoundedly reply:

the United States? Incredulity aside, however, one discerns in Bubblehead’s ponder-

ing an interrogation of the limits of free speech in the nation.

Free speech is not free for two primary reasons, according to bloggers: first, mili-

tary personnel exert extraordinary effort to secure the privilege; second, some enact-

ments violate the spirit of free speech and disrespect those who secure the privilege.

Military Wife imagines Colonel Carrie French, at whose funeral Phelps appeared,

‘‘out there fighting for your right to have freedom of speech’’ (Military Wife). The

Mad Pigeon observes, ‘‘I joined the military for two primary reasons: to defend free-

dom of speech, and defend freedom of religion’’ (Diary of a Mad Pigeon), while

rebootinit proclaims of the military, ‘‘We are the ones that give . . . you the ability

to speak’’ (The Stupid Shall be Punished). Having insisted upon the linkage between

freedom of speech and military purpose, bloggers describe Phelps’ protests at military

funerals as especially odious breaches of the spirit of free speech. Bloggers extol the

sanctity of funeral rituals and the sanctity of the deceased’s memory and family and



overwhelmingly deride Phelps’ violation of these as indecorous enactments of free-

dom of speech. In fact, to several bloggers enacting one’s freedom of speech to

degrade the U.S. military (represented synecdochically by the dead soldier) represents

an intolerable irony, for the dead soldier is imagined as having put her or his life at

risk to protect the right of free speech.

Phelps’ indecorous speech catalyzes vigorous consideration of appropriate

responses. Bloggers acknowledge three significant constraints on the exercise of their

own free speech—concern about granting Phelps legitimate status as a speaking sub-

ject through directly engaging him, respect for the family’s wishes, and a Department

of Defense directive (Force Protection Advisory Message 05-180) not to engage

Phelps. The latter two constraints are especially notable. On several blogs there is dis-

cussion of an ‘‘official navy memo’’ that endorses the scam framework and directs

soldiers to exhibit self-restraint if they witness a WBC protest. The memo indicates

that the Westboro Baptist Church group will not initiate physical contact but will

‘‘employ passive-aggressive techniques intended to provoke a hostile response or

offensive reaction from others’’ (Blackfive). Department of Defense personnel are

directed to avoid the Phelps clan: ‘‘Do not personally engage protesters in any

way; verbally or physically’’ (Blackfive). Additionally, families like the family of

Colonel Carrie French expressed their opposition to organized counterprotest, a

point made by Bubblehead (The Stupid Shall be Punished) and recognized by other

bloggers. Nevertheless, cognizant of the deceased’s family’s wishes and=or disregard-

ing the DOD directive, many bloggers craft a wide range of responses to Phelps.

Those who advocate engagement with Phelps recommend dialogue in only one

instance; indeed, this advocate indicates that she sent an email directly to Fred Phelps

to foster such dialogue (Mom, Ma Deuce Gunner). This rarity of calls for dialogue is

hardly surprising given the extraordinarily abrasive characteristics of the WBC’s pro-

tests. More expected are the numerous calls for counterprotest as a means of enacting

free speech. These range from general calls to show up and protest to specific recom-

mendations to, as noted earlier, deploy homo-semiotics against Phelps, to laugh at

the Phelps protests, to wear a clown suit and hoist a sign reading ‘‘God Hates Idiots,’’

to wave the U.S. flag, to hug Phelps and smile at him in Godly forgiveness, to fling

manure on the Phelps protesters, and more.

One especially robust genre of counterprotest is interference or restriction.

Implicitly endorsing mechanical subterfuge, several bloggers recommend preventing

Phelps and crew from reaching the funerals. At the actual sites of the funerals, recom-

mendations include blocking the view between the protesters and those attending the

funeral and speaking or playing music over the sounds of Phelps’ chants.12 Along

these lines, shortly after the military funeral protests began in June 2005, motorcycle

enthusiasts, many of them military veterans, organized into national and local activist

groups. Members of the Patriot Guard Riders, a national organization, travel to

Phelps protest sites (which are posted on godhatesfags.com up to several months in

advance) to ‘‘form a human shield in front of the protesters so that mourners cannot

see them, and when necessary, rev their engines to drown out the shouts of the West-

boro group’’ (Alvarez, 2006, p. A14). In some cases, bloggers like Kitt (The Stupid



Shall be Punished) praise the Patriot Guard Riders or local police and fire depart-

ments for seemingly colluding with counterprotesters to restrict Phelps’ presence,

as in the case of the Boston Police Department bagpipe band’s boisterous bleatings

each time the Phelps protesters attempted to shout their slogans (Blackfive). Such

praise endorses the exercise of free speech to obscure or drown out the free speech

of the Phelps protesters.

Others suggest using the legal system to interfere with Phelps’ protests. As noted

above, in addition to checking the Westboro Baptist Church’s 501(c)3 status and

generally suing the church, bloggers wonder if existing privacy laws, RICO laws, or

even treason laws could be used to prosecute or forestall Phelps’ appearances at mili-

tary funerals. Indeed, bloggers express pleasure in the possibility of using the system

that seems to protect the Phelps protesters against them. That is, exasperated by laws

that protect Phelps’ free speech and by the expense of taxpayer money that funds

police and fire officer protection for Phelps, some seek to find a legal roadblock that

the savvy hate-mongers might have missed.

In the view of some bloggers, however, the viability of the legal system to enable

interference with Phelps is suspect because, in their view, the justice system does not

always produce justice. Because the justice system cannot always deliver justice, some

bloggers express fantasies of extra-legal justice. Expressions of imagined violence, even

murder, committed against Phelps are frequent and varied. Amusingly and rather

benignly, Mad Mikey (Horologium) recommends that someone ‘‘administer an

Atomic Wedgie’’ to Phelps, but most recommendations of this type involve fisticuffs,

iron pipes and baseball bats, loaded guns, backwoods thugs, temporarily errant cars

aimed at curbside protesters, and other methods of damaging physical assault. Com-

mon to many of these recommendations are confessions of a lack of control in the

real or (primarily) imagined presence of the protest: in this vein, Mad Mikey

(Horologium) continues, ‘‘I honestly do not think I’d have been able to contain

myself had I been there.’’ In imagined responses that feature out-of-control counter-

protesters, Mad Mikey and other bloggers who are current or former members of the

military compromise the figure of the disciplined soldier, a soldier disciplined gener-

ally by the rigors of military training but more specifically by the DOD advisory

message calling for nonengagement with the Phelps protesters. Overwhelmingly, this

rupture is warranted by the love of country.

Vernacular expressions of extralegal, vigilante retribution against Phelps occasion-

ally draw from troubling themes of U.S. nationality and mobilize frightening linkages

of elements. A selection of four posts illustrates our concern. CadetCady wonders

‘‘where are the Boondock Saints when you need ‘em’’ (AisforArmy), referencing a

cult status 1999 film in which twin brothers fight organized crime in Boston through

violent, extralegal means. Meanwhile, Cyc6300 eliminates the intermediaries by

threatening to fly to the site of a Phelps protest and ‘‘drag all them mother fuckers

behind my truck’’ (AisforArmy). Those mindful of recent, horrific acts of vigilantism

will readily recall the abominable dragging of African American James Byrd behind

the truck of violent racists in Jasper, TX, in 1998. Texas, in fact, figures as a salient

site in a brief exchange between MajorDad1984 and Mike Openshaw. Imagining



himself assaulting Phelps and being arrested for it, MajorDad1984 reasons, ‘‘I’d wind

up spending a night in jail for assault, but on the up side, I’d be standing in front of a

Texan [judge]. I’d be willing to take my chances in that courtroom’’ (Blackfive).

Openshaw rejoins: ‘‘here in Texas, the jury might get up and beat the stuffings out

of the plaintiff’’ (Blackfive). The linkage between vigilantism (e.g., dragging offenders

behind a truck), a state in the southern United States, and a complicit justice system

conjures a regional legacy of Deep South lynchings and murders of civil rights acti-

vists that were un- or underprosecuted (and many of which remain so) because of the

complicity of racist judges and jury members occupying the justice system. That jus-

tice is a porous, wounded discourse in the United States has long been noted. In a

civil rights context, Martin Luther King, Jr., famously defended his violation of civil

laws by subordinating them to a higher law—the law of God—in order to forward

justice on earth (King, 1963). In their version, supporters of imagined vigilante jus-

tice committed against Phelps and the WBC subordinate civil laws to the higher law

of unyielding defense of nation. The ideological work of such imaginings is to strive

to suture that which has been ruptured by the WBC protests.

Conclusions

While we find the WBC’s protest tactics captivating, we have been more captivated by

the ways in which members and supporters of the military make sense of the WBC’s

presence at military funerals. Vernacular discourse about Phelps proliferates on mil-

blogs and offers a complex and diverse array of linkages, articulations, and disarticu-

lations on the themes of sexuality, religion, and nation. Through the lens of

articulation theory and in milbloggers’ commentary about Phelps, ‘‘one sees continu-

ing struggles across a terrain, portions of which are captured by changing alliances,

hooking and unhooking particular elements. There’s a lot of middle ground; and cru-

cial political and cultural positions are not firmly anchored on one side or the other

but are contested and up for grabs’’ (Clifford, 2001, p. 477). Following Slack (2006),

who advocates ‘‘thinking with articulation,’’ we have interrogated the power of ideo-

logical themes, the ideological work that various articulations and rearticulations per-

form, and the realities that particular linkages attempt to constitute. Notably, much

of the milblog discourse that we examined engaged in the task of repairing dominant

ideologies of sexuality, religion, and nation that WBC protests unsettle. Yet attempts

to define appropriate free speech, for example, exposed freedom and justice as unfin-

ished and fragmented discourses. Further, attempts to anchor discussion about

Phelps through revelation of his scam failed to settle the controversy about what

Phelps means. We take leave of our analysis by offering extended remarks on our

two organizing concepts of vernacular and articulation.

Seeking an apt descriptor for milbloggers’ discourse, we felt it important to mark

this discourse as everyday and noninstitutional. As such, we were drawn to the concept

of vernacular and recognized that two prominent versions of vernacular—Ono and

Sloop’s (1995) and Hauser’s (1999)—were available. Perhaps surprisingly, Hauser’s

conceptualization of vernacular rhetoric shares features with Ono and Sloop’s earlier



conceptualization of vernacular discourse: like vernacular discourse, vernacular rhet-

oric is noninstitutional, nonofficial, local, everyday words and gestures. However,

Hauser’s vernacular, as Cloud (2001) asserts, describes a more diffuse register of com-

municative practices. More than noninstitutional and everyday, Ono and Sloop’s ver-

nacular is constituted by the ‘‘rhetoric of the oppressed’’ (p. 20), counterhegemonic

yet affirmative discourses of the marginalized. Further, Ono and Sloop’s vernacular

is distinguished by its explicit naming of power as an object of inquiry, with analyses

of vernacular discourse striving to ‘‘render power relations among subjects visible’’ (p.

21). Given these differences, we found Hauser’s version to be the most apt descriptor

of milbloggers’ discourse. We are not of the belief or spirit, that is, to argue that mil-

bloggers’ discourses are the discourses of the oppressed or marginalized.13

By examining rhetorical practices of milbloggers in terms of ideological themes

and antagonisms, we have revealed our affiliation with articulation theory to be

focused but modest. To be sure, as Angus (1992) argues, the aspirations and conduct

of articulation theory are more complicated than we have space to elucidate. One

particularly elaborate exercise of articulation theory that merits attention here is

Greene’s (1998) call for a new materialist rhetoric. In that interest, Greene defends

a ‘‘constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity’’ (p. 25), reanimates governing appara-

tuses as objects of inquiry, and argues that a logic of articulation ‘‘opens the possi-

bility of studying how rhetorical practices traverse a number of different structures

for the purpose of making judgments and planning reality’’ (p. 35). To the valuable

work of charting and analyzing how ideological elements come together, this

approach adds the labor of analyzing how ideological elements link to other elements

of a social formation, such as social movements and political institutions.14 Our

analysis of milbloggers’ vernacular rhetoric has gestured toward broader institutional

apparatuses in the form of the ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’ policy, the accusation that the

WBC is involved in a legal scam, and the concern about the viability of the legal sys-

tem. We offer the following directions for future research that would further link mil-

bloggers’ rhetorical practices to the broader ‘‘articulation of the governing apparatus’’

(p. 31): the aforementioned Department of Defense memo as a starting point for

other military institutional responses; presidential (and others’) proclamations about

the connection between gay marriage and the War on Terror (see Bloodsworth-Lugo

& Lugo-Lugo, 2005); statements about the Westboro Baptist Church by other Chris-

tian groups; and the general legacy of vigilante justice in the U.S. with specific con-

sideration of the nationalistic Minutemen organization. In the spirit of building a

more robust account of the material consequences of Phelps and milbloggers’

responses, we discuss the failure to create a queer=military coalition against Phelps

and the flurry of legislative activity to restrict protests at civilian and military funerals.

‘‘God Hates Fags’’

While Phelps insists that God hates fags, few milbloggers endorse this stridently

phrased view. There are exceptions, of course, but in general milblog posts and

discussions about Fred Phelps do not engage in queer bashing. Absent strong



identification with virulent homophobia, other avenues of identification between

supporters of the U.S. military and queer people become possible. Both constituen-

cies have suffered significantly from the infuriating presence of the WBC at the fun-

erals of loved ones and could, one imagines, begin to establish even tentative bonds of

solidarity. Indeed, The Timekeeper (Horologium) muses that ‘‘Phelps (and all of his

worthless followers and scumbag family members) have managed to find a way to

unite both the (mostly liberal) gay community and the (mostly conservative) military

community (along with the entire thinking community).’’ A cartoon circulating in

queer periodicals in June 2006 iterates this possibility for coalition, its narrator point-

ing to a group of familiar looking antigay protesters and musing, ‘‘our celebration of

Gay Pride provides a valuable national service. For one month every year, we lure

these idiots away from military funerals’’ (Berge, 2006). There is precedent for

imagining such a coalition: Phelps’ threat to travel to Finland and burn that nation’s

flag in protest of its un-Godly liberalism led one Helsinki reporter to anticipate a

‘‘rainbow coalition’’ of counterprotesters including war veterans and the local

LGBTQ community (Moore, 2000).

Despite possible avenues of identification, milbloggers express little solidarity with

queers. One exception occurs in Arthur Wildfire’s (Free Republic) inclusion of a link

to the Georgia Log Cabin Republican organization’s website. Via the link, the viewer

finds photographic evidence of Phelps’ historical relationship with Al Gore and the

Democratic Party. However, in our view, the linkage invests the website with an auth-

entic but sharply delimited ethos, thereby enacting a temporary and narrow alliance

with a gay organization. The tenuous and fleeting nature of military=queer solidarity

is dramatized in a news story that reports Phelps protesters ‘‘brought their anti-gay

message to the funerals . . . of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq’’ (Rucker, 2005).

In counterprotest, angered residents of Smyrna, TN, ‘‘chased the church members’

cars down a highway, waving flags and screaming ‘God bless America’’’ (Rucker,

2005). For a certain type of small-town, Southern queer, this scene might represent

eine verkehrte Welt, a topsy-turvy world in which antigay protesters are chased out of

town by flag-waving citizens. But as queers know and the story continues, Phelps was

chased out of town not because of his antigay message but because of his obstensibly

antimilitary (and, by suspect extension, antiwar) message.15

‘‘Thank God for 9/11’’

The specific acts of violence committed on September 11, 2001, constituted a

national crisis but a crisis with international origins and consequences. In profound

ways, 9=11 altered conditions and practices of citizenship in the United States in the

form of increased scrutiny of and restrictions on the flow of people across national

borders, increased border security, increased scrutiny of domestic communications,

calls for reform in immigration policy, and indefinite detentions of U.S. citizens at

Guant�aanamo. Federal officials defend these altered conditions and practices of citi-

zenship in the U.S. through what Agamben (1998, 2005) and Butler (2004) call ‘‘a

state of exception’’ as civil libertarians sound alarms about excessive intrusions.



As noted above, Phelps and the WBC instigate significant consternation

among milbloggers about the conditions and limits of free speech. Of course, such

consternation follows an intensified 5-year period of national debate about free

speech, dissent, citizenship, and national security. Despite President George W.

Bush’s defense of political dissent during a November 2005 economic summit in

Argentina—‘‘We met in a society which allows people to express their different

points of view . . . which is positive. I expect there to be dissent. That’s what freedom

is all about’’ (‘‘President Participates,’’ 2005)—various constituencies in the

U.S. have not always gamely tolerated criticism of post-9=11 U.S. policies. In

the immediate aftermath of 9=11, scholars and activists like Susan Sontag and Arund-

hati Roy who objected to U.S. responses to 9=11 received significant censure as

ingrates, opportunists, or traitors, an outcome that has greeted more recent war dis-

senters like Cindy Sheehan and—understood in a very specific and narrow way—Fred Phelps.16

If expression of dissent against one’s country and one’s leaders counts as one of the

privileges of citizenship, then recent legislation crafted in direct response to Phelps

and the WBC functions to reshape and redefine the limits of citizenship post-

9=11. The WBC’s protests at military funerals began in June 2005; since then, state

and federal legislators have crafted policies to restrict protests at funerals. State bills,

such as ‘‘the Fred Phelps bill’’ proposed and passed in Ohio, restrict both the prox-

imity of protesters to the funeral site and the timing of funeral protests. By mid-April

2006, nine states had approved such laws, and twenty-three states were at various

stages of considering such laws (Alvarez, 2006, p. A14), a number which has since

increased. Meanwhile, during April and May 2006, the two houses of U.S. Congress

acted quickly to craft legislation restricting protests at federal cemeteries. In the

morning of Memorial Day 2006, President George W. Bush signed the federal bill

into law even as Phelps and the WBC spent their Memorial Day protesting outside

of Arlington National Cemetery. Clearly, despite the modest size (typically between

six and twenty people) of the WBC protest contingent, these protests have been

extraordinarily consequential.

Amidst this flurry of legislative activity, state and federal legislators have resembled

milbloggers in their emphasis on the theme of nation, but legislators have gone

further than milbloggers by almost completely eradicating the theme of (homo)sexu-

ality in their deliberations. Indeed, even as antigay images and slogans appear along-

side images and slogans about religion and nation at WBC protests, legislators’

justifications of protest restrictions enact a disjuncture between sexuality and public

policy. In a rare exception, before a unanimous 133–0 vote in the Minnesota House

of Representatives to restrict funeral protests, openly lesbian Representative Karen

Clark ‘‘won assurance from . . . [the bill’s sponsor] that he intended the bill’s refer-

ence to families to include gay partners’’ (Sweeney, 2006). This exception notwith-

standing, legislators’ actions and milbloggers’ commentary remind us of queers’

tenuous relationships to nation and nationality (Berlant & Freeman, 1997) and sus-

tain, like recent opposition to same-sex marriage (Bloodsworth-Lugo & Lugo-Lugo,

2005), the redistricting of queers from the realm of post-9=11 citizen.



Notes

[1] Phelps’ claim has a precursor in Reverend Jerry Falwell’s notorious revelation on September

13, 2001, that God had opened up the nation to devastation because of the unholy workings

of, among other constituencies, ‘‘the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and

the gays and the lesbians’’ (Harris, 2001).

[2] Recognizing the availability of both Ono and Sloop’s (1995) and Hauser’s (1999) concep-

tualizations of vernacular, we chose Hauser’s vernacular as the most apt conceptualization

for our study. We address this choice in the conclusion of this essay.

[3] We began our data collection with a general search of ‘‘milblogs’’ on the Google search

engine. We arrived at a website organized as a webring consisting of approximately 350

milblogs. We then searched each of these milblogs for the term ‘‘Phelps.’’ This search

method produced about fifty milblogs that offered sustained commentary about Phelps.

Our study focuses on the first 4 months (June-September 2005) of milbloggers’ commen-

tary about Phelps’ protests. Notably, the dates of our data retrieval occur before over 30

states and the federal government proposed and=or passed legislation restricting protest

activities at civilian and military funerals. As a result, our data set excludes milbloggers’

commentary on the virtues or vices of such legislation. We address this legislation in the

concluding section of our essay.

[4] Notably, a study of milbloggers’ responses to Westboro Baptist Church protests at military

funerals is a study of vernacular responses to vernacular discourse. That is, WBC’s protests,

like milbloggers’ responses to them, are aptly described as vernacular. Although Fred

Phelps’ status as a reverend of a Baptist church suggests an official status generative of

official discourse, the Westboro Baptist Church is an independent organization not

affiliated with or officially recognized by national Baptist associations or organizations.

That the national keepers of the Baptist denomination’s faith have not granted Phelps rep-

resentative status and that he remains distant from policy-making institutions in general

locate his activities within the realm of everyday give-and-take.

[5] These descriptions derive from, respectively, a colleague at the November 2005

National Communication Association convention and Robert Modean in the blog,

Blackfive.

[6] Throughout, we vary our descriptors of the protesters (the WBC, Phelps, and more) to

reduce repetition and aid ease of reading.

[7] See Brouwer (2004) for an analysis of the figuration of the U.S. military as a hetero-

sexual male body at risk of emasculating penetration and compromised efficacy by gay

men.

[8] Throughout the essay, we retain bloggers’ informal or colloquial expressions, marking

errors only in three cases involving one misspelling and two misuses of possessives.

[9] Importantly, historian John Boswell (1980) undermines facile presumptions about Chris-

tianity’s enduring and univocal condemnation of homosexuality. Boswell argues that only

in the latter 12th century can we witness the emergence of powerful and persistent hostility

toward homosexuality being expressed in theological as well as popular and legal docu-

ments. Theologian and historian Jack Rogers (2006) outlines and rebuts the ways in which

the Bible has been used to justify various forms of oppression, including contemporary

opposition to homosexuality. For discussion of the perception that the Bible uniformly

condemns homosexuality, see pp. 69–90.

[10] While development of this argument is crucial for scholarship about the nature of

blogging, it is also beyond the scope of this essay. We approach the blogs as a source

of vernacular commentary, rather than a medium under investigation. For scholarship

that theorizes blogs as a medium and the blogosphere as a social space, see Coleman

(2005); Johnson and Kaye (2004); Kumar, Novak, Raghavan, and Tomkins (2004); and

Rak (2005).



[11] Indeed, in the blog The Mudville Gazette the linkage between Phelps, Moore, and Knoll is

accomplished through the contiguous display of their photographic images and the query:

‘‘What do these three have in common?’’

[12] At funerals of queer people and people with AIDS, activists have famously used large angel

wings to shield mourners from direct view of WBC protesters.

[13] The full contours and implications of the differences between these two versions of ver-

nacular remain to be elucidated. With Cloud (2001, p. 213), we wonder why Hauser did

not place his conceptualization of vernacular voices in conversation with Ono and Sloop’s

earlier vernacular discourse. In contrast to Cloud, however, we find in Hauser a definition

of vernacular that is clear and generative. Given the extent to which rhetorical scholars have

defended and championed the critical project of the study of noninstitutional voices,

Hauser’s vernacular retains a critical edge albeit one that is diffuse and more focused on

the ability of noninstitutional rhetorics to impact public opinion and public spheres than

on the ways in which marginalized populations discursively construct their communities.

We thank one of our reviewers for clarifying the latter point.

[14] Because neither Ono and Sloop’s nor Hauser’s version of vernacular includes institutional

discourse within its definitional parameters, such an approach would require focusing on

more than just vernacular rhetoric as we have.

[15] It is worth noting here that the few gay- or queer-identified contributors to the milblogs

that we studied also do not exert much effort to build coalitions between military suppor-

ters and queers in opposition to Phelps and the WBC. Elsewhere, a cursory glance at

LGBTQ media outlets suggests that while there is vigilant watch over Phelps’ actions, there

is little talk about queer activists joining counterprotesters at military funerals where Phelps

is present.

[16] For arguments about conservative ownership of the discourse of ‘‘freedom’’ and the chal-

lenges of leveling opposition to the U.S. federal government post-9=11, see, respectively,

Lakoff (2006) and ‘‘The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and the Risks of Public

Critique’’ in Butler (2004).

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Blogs Referenced

AisforArmy. http://www.aisforarmy.com/

Blackfive. http://www.blackfive.net

Diary of a Mad Pigeon. http://themadpigeon.blogs.com/

Dr. Phat Tony’s. http://drphattonys.blogspot.com/

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Free Republic. http://www.freerepublic.com/home.htm

Horologium. http://horologium.com

Ma Deuce Gunner. http://madeucegunners.blogspot.com/

Military Wife. http://mymilitaryhusband.blogspot.com/

The Mudville Gazette. http://www.mudvillegazette.com/

One Hand Clapping. http://www.donaldsensing.com/

She Who Will Be Obeyed! http://www.thedonovan.com/beth/

The Stupid Shall be Punished. http://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/

USS Neverdock. http://ussneverdock.blogspot.com/



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