Fred Phelps, the founder and face of the virulently homophobic Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, has died from natural causes, reports CNN.com. According to church spokesman Steven Drain, Phelps, widely regarded as “the most hated man in America,” died of natural causes. He was 84.
Phelps founded Westboro Baptist Church in 1955 and became famous for his unapologetic messages of fire and brimstone. His congregation, small and united mostly by blood or marriage, gained notoriety for their unseemly protests at military funerals and gay-related events. Their two most famous slogans – “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” – came to epitomize the homophobic environment of the Religious Right during the 1990s.
In a statement Thursday, the church chided the “world-wide media” for “gleefully anticipating the death.”
But, despite the fact that Phelps was reviled by the LGBT community and the military, he and his church won an important Supreme Court victory in 2011 when they ruled that he had the right to protest military funerals on free speech grounds.
Reaction to his death came swiftly among the LGBT community. “Fred Phelps will not be missed by the LGBT community, people with HIV/AIDS and the millions of decent people across the world who found what he and his followers do deeply hurtful and offensive,” the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said in a statement.
Fred Phelps was born Nov. 29, 1929 in Meridian, Miss. and planned on pursuing a military career. But a Methodist revival meeting he attended changed the course of his life forever. “I felt the call, as they say, and it was powerful,” Phelps told the Topeka Capital-Journal in 1994.”The God of glory appeared.” Later, Phelps was ordained by a Southern Baptist church in Utah. He bounced around several Christian colleges as his preaching and his theology took a hard right turn. And according to the report on CNN.com, a Time magazine article from 1951 described Phelps as a “craggy-faced engineering student” who harangued fellow students about the dangers of promiscuity and profanity.
Phelps was keenly self-aware of his image. “If I had nobody mad at me,” he told the Wichita Eagle in 2006, “what right would I have to claim that I was preaching the Gospel?”
Shirley Phelps-Roper, Phelps’ daughter, said Westboro will not hold a funeral. “We do not worship the dead,” Phelps-Roper told CNN.
