Vote in Topeka Today Hangs on Gay Rights and a Vitriolic Local Protester

ruggerson

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Mon Feb-28-05 10:57 PM
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Vote in Topeka Today Hangs on Gay Rights and a Vitriolic Local Protester

Who just happens to be Fred Phelps daughter. If Kansans elect this piece of filth, we should never let them forget it. Ever.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/national/01topeka.html

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By JODI WILGOREN

Published: March 1, 2005

OPEKA, Kan., Feb. 24 - Jael Phelps, 20, a nursing student, stood outside the City Council chamber here on a recent night holding a sign with a photograph of the councilwoman whom she hopes to unseat, Tiffany Muller, placed on a dog's body.

"Mutt Muller," read the caption, an allusion to her family's view of homosexuals.

Ms. Muller is the first openly gay officeholder in Kansas, Miss Phelps, a granddaughter of the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., possibly the nation's most vitriolic protester against gays.

Their battle to represent a working-class slice of northwestern Topeka will almost certainly turn not on typical concerns like sidewalks and snowplows, but on heated questions of civil rights and free speech.

Voters will choose among them and two lesser-known candidates for the seat on the ballot on Tuesday and decide whether to repeal an ordinance that prohibits the city from discriminating against gays in hiring. Ms. Muller sponsored the ordinance shortly after she was appointed to the Council in the fall.

Miss Phelps's family led the petition drive to overturn it.

The twin contests have transformed the often ignored primary into an impassioned struggle. Residents worry that the voting results could brand Topeka as a haven for homophobia or for homosexuality, with many residents unsure which would be worse.

"It's made us do a little soul searching about who we are as Topekans," Deputy Mayor Clark R. Duffy said.

The referendum, which would ban the Council from passing any ordinances specifically protecting gays for 10 years, would be the only one of its type in the nation, after Cincinnati voters in November repealed a similar measure that they passed in 1993.

The battle has become as much as anything a debate over Mr. Phelps, whose incessant daily pickets and hate-filled faxes have plagued Topeka for 14 years, yet whose opposition to the antidiscrimination ordinance is shared by many residents of this church-laden, Republican-leaning city of 125,000.

The Phelpses' tactics have turned some evangelical ministers and conservative businessmen into unlikely crusaders for gay rights, backing measures like the antidiscrimination ordinance. And with an amendment to the State Constitution to ban same-sex marriage on the ballot in April, many other religious and civic leaders are trying mightily to stop the Phelpses from hijacking what they see as a signature issue.

As Ms. Muller and Miss Phelps go door to door in the district, talk about taxes and employment gives way to questions about sex and the Bible. Miss Phelps has been yelled off lawns when residents learned her surname, which appears on campaign fliers in the finest print, and voters have told Ms. Muller's supporters that she would not win their votes if she ran against a pack of snakes.

"If I lose the primary, it'll be because I'm gay," said Ms. Muller, 26, who moved here six years ago and was the lead lobbyist against the same-sex marriage ban in the Legislature. "There are people who are voting for me just because of my stance on gay rights, and there are people who are voting for me just because I got the Phelpses all riled up."

Miss Phelps promoted herself on a radio show last week as the candidate with the appropriate "moral compass," not "a recent transplant who came to Topeka to make a living pushing the gay agenda."

"The main reason why I got into the race," she said as she strolled the streets in search of support, "is so the people of District 9 would know who the incumbent is. We have someone whose goal in life is to make it so the governmental stamp of approval is put on sin, and an abomination at that."

The contest has symbolic significance because of Mr. Phelps's reputation. He picketed the funerals of Matthew Shepard, the gay man who was beaten and left to die in 1998 in Wyoming; Mister Rogers; Sonny Bono; and Al Gore's father. And the dispute here is being repeated across the country.

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