Fred Phelps, Founder of Anti-Gay Westboro Baptist Church, Has Died

It's nice to speak ill of the dead, but Fred Phelps, the founder of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, in my view deserves the same lack of respect that he heaped on others while living.  I would further add that, if there is indeed a Hell, Phelps is there now and is likely surrounded by many other "godly folk" that made religious based hate and bigotry a large part of their lives (e.g., Jerry Falwell).  If Phelps did anything while living, it was to help reveal the ugly face of fundamentalist Christianity.  KSN.com has news on Phelps' passing.  Here are excerpts:  

TOPEKA, Kansas - The Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., the fiery founder of a small Kansas church who drew international condemnation for outrageous and hate-filled protests that blamed almost everything, including the deaths of AIDS victims and U.S. soldiers, on America’s tolerance for gay people, has died. He was 84.

Daughter Margie Phelps told The Associated Press that Fred Phelps died shortly after midnight Thursday. She didn’t provide the cause of death or the condition that recently put him in hospice care.

Throughout his life, Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, a small congregation made up almost entirely of his extended family, tested the boundaries of free speech, violating accepted societal standards for decency in their unapologetic assault on gays and lesbians. In the process, some believe he even helped the cause of gay rights by serving as such a provocative symbol of intolerance.

Phelps believed any misfortune, most infamously the deaths of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, was God’s punishment for society’s tolerance of homosexuality.  

[S]ome gay rights advocates believe all the attention Phelps generated served to advance their cause.  Sue Hyde, a staff member at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said plenty of churches and ministers preach a message that attacks gay people. But Phelps and his family had “taken this out on the streets,” forcing people to confront their own views and rousing a protective instinct in parents and friends of gays and lesbians.

He reserved special scorn for conservative ministers who preached that homosexuality was a sin but that God nevertheless loved gays and lesbians. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell died in 2007, Westboro members protested at his funeral with the same sorts of signs they held up outside services a decade earlier for Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death in 1998.
“They’re all going to hell,” Phelps said in a 2005 interview of Christians who refuse to condemn gay people as he did.

It wasn’t just the message, but also the mocking tone that many found to be deliberately cruel. Led by Phelps, church members thanked God for roadside explosive devices and prayed for thousands more casualties, calling the deaths of military personnel killed in the Middle East a divine punishment for a nation it believed was doomed by its tolerance for gay people.

“The Westboro Baptist Church is probably the vilest hate group in the United the State of America,” Heidi Beirich, research director for the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Associated Press in July 2011. “No one is spared, and they find people at their worst, most terrible moments of grief, and they throw this hate in their faces. It’s so low.”

Among the many comments to the piece, one I liked suggested that Phelps be cremated and his ashes scattered along major gay pride parade routes. :)