I mentioned the whole Fred Phelps thing on a forum where I post and I received this interesting response from a person who lives in Topeka, which is either the hometown for the church or really near it.

The woman who posted is from a fairly conservative church and even they got picketed once according to her.

You guys, in all honesty it is best to just ignore Fred Phelps and his gang as they can't be reasoned with. They will stand there and argue until they are blue in the face, they are so brainwashed. We use to live in Topeka, Ks. and you learn pretty quickly to either ignore them or act civil with them...one time they tried to pickett our church because a college associated with our denomination was supposedly too liberal and supported Gays ... some of our deacons went outside and invited them to come in and join our church service and it was so funny they immediately left ... anger doesn't get anywhere, but kindness burns them.

What really burns them is to ignore them though, they do all this for public attention and if you don't give them any public acknowledgement they will feel slighted

They have to go other places now, because they don't get the rise in Topeka like they use to be able to...the more places ignore them, the sooner they will start to fade into the woodwork of the local looney bin.

Since you are often limited in conducting true experiments with a control and a variable when using humans as test subjects, I've decided to use The SIMS as a model.

Subject A will be the Amin and Lydia Christian family that is currently working on having one child which they will be responsible for rearing through childhood up to college. They will have one and only one child.

Subject B will be a not yet known family that will adopt as many children as they can until they reach the status of elder. As soon as a baby becomes a toddler they will adopt a new baby and so on.

It should provide some grounds for observations on small family versus large family rearing as well as several future blog posts, I hope.