As a general rule, we don't believe that deaths should be celebrated. But it’s perhaps no surprise that the news of the death of Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church – also known as the ‘God Hates Fags’ group – has been treated as a victory by some.
In 1991, the church, which had been up and running in Topeka, Kansas since 1931, started picketing areas where gay men would meet for anonymous sex. It then began picketing anything and everything: gay pride marches, football games, pop concerts (Lady Gaga’s in particular), funerals of people who died after suffering from AIDS, the funeral of Matthew Shephard, a 21-year-old gay man who was savagely beaten to death for being gay… You get the picture. The sad truth is that the list is depressingly long.
Why do they picket these events? Well, Phelps and his followers claim that everything – literally, everything – bad in the world is down to Americans’ tolerance of homosexuality. ‘Thank God for dead soldiers’ and ‘Thank God for 9/11’ read posters that church members hold up at funerals to make this point.
If that wasn’t charming enough, Phelps also took a pop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, saying the victims ‘righteous cause….has been drowned in sodomite semen’
On the plus side, despite hating everyone who practices any other religion, denouncing them as ‘fag-enablers’, at least they’re not racist. Their FAQ page reads, ‘We don't believe in physical violence of any kind and the Scripture doesn't support racism. The only true Nazis in this world are fags.’
Cool.
Phelps became a household name here in the UK after Louis Theroux interviewed the family in a documentary called The Most Hated Family In America. In the show, he discovered that the church was in a state of crisis because dozens of members, mostly from Phelps’s own family, had left in protest at his actions.
Starting off as a civil rights lawyer, Phelps did much to overturn the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation in the southern states of America (see, really not racist!). However, by 1997, he was disbarred from practicing law after he called a witness a ‘slut’ during a cross-examination. He was later accused of physical abuse by two of his sons – allegations which never reached court.
Families attempted to sue the church for inflicting pain on them while grieving by picketing at funerals. However, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2011 said that the Westboro Baptist Church could not be sued because their right to a free speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Despite Phelps’s death, the Westboro Baptist Church still exists. And we doubt they’ll be picketing his funeral…
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Pictures: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.