Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps has died
By Josh Haggis
Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, has died.
His son Timothy Phelps told several local news outlets that his father passed away late Wednesday night (March 19), from health problems related to his age.
A spokesperson for the church revealed last Sunday (March 16) that Phelps, 84, was being cared for in a hospice facility in his hometown of Topeka, Kansas.
Westboro Baptist Church is famous for its ‘God Hates Fags’ tagline, and regularly pickets funerals of people that it believes support the rights of the LGBT community. Its followers believe that homosexuality is the root of all evil in the world, and claim that the deaths in tragic events such as 9/11 are down to the progression of the gay rights movement.
Phelps once said of the USA: “This evil nation has smeared fag faeces blended with fag semen and dyke faeces on the Bible.”
In 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled that the church’s right to picket funerals was protected under the First Amendment.
The following year, a petition signed by over half a million people made its way to the White House, demanding that the government crack down on the church’s activities, in response to reports that they were intending to picket the funerals of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting victims.
Phelps, a disbarred lawyer, headed the Westboro Baptist church from its first service in 1955 until he was “ex-communicated” last August (2013), when one of his sons, Nathan Phelps, revealed that he was “on the edge of death”. He is survived by his wife, Margie, and five children.