The Lady Gaga parody dance in part 2...the incredibly broken Asian dude who wants to join their church...wow...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byDXu3aMAc0

also I love the people who try and talk any sense into them and wind up walking away utterly frustrated.

Also, the guy who was a documentary film maker but then became indoctrinated. This entire thing is amazing.

Do fundamentalist Christians feel embarrassed by this shit at all or do they simply just tell themselves that they have nothing to do with it?

Great question. There are several flavors of delusional fundy response to Phelps:

"Our gay hate isn't as bad because we have more decorum about it." Exemplified by some old dude who drove by to take a verbal jab at Shirley in the first documentary, "I don't agree with the lifestyle, but..." just to get promptly shouted down as a fag-enabler by Shirley. I bet that must have really got his goat to be called pro-gay. These are the people that are truly bothered on some level. They hide behind "love the sinner, hate the sin," but the Phelps skip that step and go straight to "hate the sinner," which does tend to make them a bit uncomfortable.

Then there is disavowal. Fun fact: Grandpa Phelps has run for public office several times, as a Democrat! So there's a small subset of fundies and right-wingers that are fond of calling WBC a liberal hate group. In a similar way, when the whole soldier funeral thing started getting big press, Fox News was fond of calling them "anti-war protesters" because that was a fashionable bogeyman at the time.

The usual cop-out goes something like this: "They're not really Christians" or "They're bad Christians".

Yay for doublethink.

I love how he dives right in this time with no pretense of objectivity.

In the previous show he was still doing his "befuddled naive reporter" routine, although Steve's crap did get him to break character and come back with a sarcastic comment at least once. This time he's right out of the gate with things like "whose brainwave was it that Obama was the antichrist?".

On the other hand this one is somewhat more depressing, especially when you see that even some of the younger kids are aware of how messed up it all is and are terrified by that realization.

Take heart, the Supreme Court case in question still allows for communities to set limits on where and how protesters can protest. And the Phelps family always follows community rules to the letter. In the case of the protest in question, the Phelpses were restricted to a place where they could neither be seen nor heard by mourners, so this was a matter of the family knowing the Phelps tribe was out there but not actually encountering them.

Yeah, you show that group of lunatics the immorality of their ways by calling for the assassination of a public official.

(Because you don't think the First Amendment should apply to mean people.)

Documentary is fantastic, as almost all of Theroux's stuff is.

First Amendment is primarily between you and the government. Between citizens with competing interests, other factors come into play.

If the Supreme Court had ruled that mourners have no protections at all against protesters, that would be one thing. But that's not what the Supreme Court said, only that there shouldn't be any rule stating that nobody may protest, period. Communities may set standards that afford mourners a dignified ceremony, and I'm okay with that.