 Last week, it seemed two right-wing radio ratbags, Steve
Price and Neil Mitchell, unexpectedly came to the defence of the humble homo
against the insanity that is the Westboro ‘God Hates Fags’ Baptist Church.
Neither exactly has a proud history championing all things queer, but in their
respective interviews with the church’s spokeswoman, Shirley Phelps-Roper, both
stuck the boot in over her announcement to picket ‘fag-enabler’ (for his role
in Brokeback Mountain) Heath Ledger’s
funeral. Price claimed such people are part of the reason why the membership
numbers for organised religion are down, while Mitchell dismissed Roper and
other church members simply as ‘absolute nutcases’.
The problem, however, is that it appears to have taken the death of a
heterosexual actor to spur these shock-jocks into action against the church and
its funeral-picketing ways. Price in fact went to great lengths during both his
interview and online editorial to stress that Ledger was only ever an actor
playing gay, as though by implication it would only be acceptable for
Westboro to picket actual fags at their funeral, as they did with
Matthew Shepard in 1998 and have done with dozens of other men and women over
the years.
Admittedly, Price managed to claim that ‘even if (Ledger) was a raving gay (!),
this church and its timing is completely out of touch’, which is probably the
closest to queer tolerance we can ever hope to expect from a shock-jock. But
one wonders why it’s taken the untimely death of a beloved, heterosexual local
son to get the shock-jocks onto their soapbox about this church and anti-queer
‘Christian’ extremism generally. Would they have done so if it had been, say,
Sir Ian McKellen who had recently passed and whose funeral Westboro had announced
they planned to picket? And why is it so important to both these men to stress
that Ledger was only ever an actor playing a gay role? Surely the issue at hand
is the offensive tactics of a bunch of religious whack-jobs, regardless of
whether they're combating ‘fags’ or ‘fag-enablers’, who in their dark minds are
equal sinners anyway?
Will Price and Mitchell now get George Pell or Peter Jensen onto their shows,
and suggest to them that it is possibly their attitudes and actions that lay
the ground for the Phelps-Ropers types to germinate – that she is merely an
extreme, but logical, extension of the sort of anti-queer propaganda espoused
by comparatively ‘moderate’ figures?
If it takes the death of Heath Ledger to bring awareness and condemnation of Westboro
by shock-jocks, and consequently their thousands of listeners, then there is a
positive to his tragic death. It just says a lot about the mainstream media
that this is the case – not much of it good.
Sam Butler: http://queerpenguin.blogspot.com
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