DW_a_mom wrote:
Although ... watching those clips, that group of people did not "feel" nice to me. You can feel the judgment, the arrogance, the assumption. None of those are "nice" qualities.
I'm relying on what Louis Theroux himself said about the family.
Louis Theroux being interviewed wrote:
They don't separate their children from the real world either, do they?
They go to school; you can have normal conversations with these people. They're intelligent, high achieving, have good jobs, and they're kind, for the most part, when they're not on pickets. They're easy to communicate with and deal with too. It's just this one area - their pickets. They will even - so I'm given to understand and I have no reason to doubt it - work alongside gay people very happily in the work place. If a gay person goes along to talk to them outside the church or if a gay person even turned up to the church to attend a service, they wouldn't humiliate them or be rude to them; they'd shake their hand and welcome them in.
...
They're relatively "normal" apart from this obsession with the pickets?
Louis: Yes. In some ways they're a model family. All these things that you associate with the breakdown of families, like the dad's gone to the pub all the time or they just watch TV and the parents don't talk to the kids, well you can't put that on this family. They spend all their recreational time together and they all look out for each other. They don't really have friends outside the church because all their best friends are in the church. It's important to recognise the good qualities of the family as it helps explain why so many of them have stayed in it and embraced the hateful stuff.
...
Do you think you've come to an answer?
I think that the pastor is not a very nice person. I think he's an angry person who's twisted the Bible and picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger, and he's instilled that in his children and they've passed it on to their children. Although the second and third generation are by and large quite nice people from what I saw, they still live under the influence of their Gramps.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6507971.stm
It should be notted that while the second or third generation Phelps families might be quite "normal" (as Theroux states), Fred Phelps beat his children, exploited them by making them run all across the state selling candy, beat his wife, and abused amphetamines in the late 1960s.