In this case, I’m not sure liberal bias is really at work. I think the Associated Press is being lazy and stupid as much as anything else. But in its report on the Supreme Court decision that upheld the right of the so-called Westboro Baptist Church to be the biggest jerks on the planet, the AP really outdid itself by so casually referring these douchebags as a “fundamentalist church”:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a grieving father’s pain over mocking protests at his Marine son’s funeral must yield to First Amendment protections for free speech. All but one justice sided with a fundamentalist church that has stirred outrage with raucous demonstrations contending God is punishing the military for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.

I realize much of the legacy media thinks “fundamentalist” is merely a euphemism for extremism among people who mention God. To them, if you’re mean, judgmental and prone to making people angry, you’re a fundamentalist.

In the real Christian world, a fundamentalist is simply someone who accepts the straightforward Gospel without a lot of add-ons. We embrace the fundamentals. Man sinned against God. But instead of rejecting man, God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that all who call on his name will be saved. Men killed the Son, but he rose again and ascended to Heaven, and then God sent his Spirit to dwell in the hearts of all who believe.

Got that? You’ve got the fundamentals. Satisfied with that? You can be a fundamentalist.

Somewhere in my Bible, I missed the part where it said that God “hates fags,” since it says nothing of the sort. God detests all kinds of sin, but he doesn’t hate anyone, and in fact has gone to great lengths to give us a way to be purified from our sin because he wants so badly for us not to perish.

That’s the focus of a fundamentalist.

Fred Phelps and his crew are not fundamentalists. They’re just jerks. And the AP wouldn’t have had to look very hard to find information setting the Westboro bunch apart from actual fundamentalist churches. One of its fellow travelers, National Public Radio, did so very nicely. NPR reports that, far from being any kind of noteworthy “church,” Westboro is little more than a cabal of 100 or so of Phelps’s relatives, who travel around the country making asses of themselves for public consumption.

Their fixation with homosexuality is particularly bizarre, as is their continued insistence on tying it to military funerals. The so-called logic, I guess, is that since the United States tolerates homosexuality, and the military protects the United States, that makes soldiers little more than highway rest stop attendants, or gay bar security guards.

Don’t ask me to get inside such warped minds. There are lots of sins that degrade the spiritual health of the nation. Why Phelps and his sycophants focus on this particular one would probably tell us more about them than it does about our nation.

But can we at least dispense with the notion that they are a “fundamentalist church”? Because it’s hard to think of anyone who has less regard for the fundamentals of the Bible.

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