Fred Phelps: A hater’s legacy

“What shall we say now that the monster has died?” asked Leonard Pitts Jr. in The Miami Herald. Fred Phelps, the 84-year-old founder of the virulently homophobic Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, went to his Maker last week, triggering a wave of gloating reactions. As he lay on his deathbed, one woman created a “Fred Phelps Death Watch” page on Facebook. Another expressed hope via Twitter that “his final hours were filled with immense physical pain and horrifying hallucinations.” You can hardly blame people for their bitterness: Armed with signs reading “God hates fags,” Phelps and his followers picketed the funerals of thousands of gay people and American soldiers, and claimed that even Sandy Hook victims had been killed by God as punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuality. Yet as utterly loathsome as Phelps was, we’d all be “diminished” if we succumbed to hatred and celebrated his death.

Believe it or not, said Emily Timbol in HuffingtonPost.com, “I’m grateful for Fred Phelps.” He was the best friend the gay-rights movement ever had. Unlike other evangelical Christians, Phelps didn’t pretend, behind a saccharine smile, to hate the sin and love the sinner; he was utterly honest about his disgust and loathing for gays. Almost single-handedly, “he made the word ‘fag’ something that only hateful people, not ‘Christians,’ used to describe gay people.” Phelps made mainstream homophobes squirm, said Alyssa Rosenberg in WashingtonPost.com. His hellfire-and-brimstone rhetoric made opposition to gay rights look unhinged. As homophobia’s clownish embodiment, Phelps demonstrated that anti-gay sentiments are “acts of unkindness” that hurt fellow citizens and degrade the nation as a whole.

Phelps was no Christian, said Wesley Pruden in WashingtonTimes.com. He was a “mean and vulgar troublemaker” unaffiliated with other Baptist churches. With his absurd rhetoric, he “smeared the name of the church” and undermined those who believe in the religious institution of marriage: “the union of one man and one woman.” In the end, Phelps achieved “the opposite of what he set out to do,” said Alexandra Petri in -WashingtonPost.com. As an old man, he witnessed “the end of don’t ask, don’t tell” and the spread of marriage equality to 17 states. His hatred got a lot of publicity, but “love was bigger.”

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