Fred Phelps Is Dead. Gay America Lives On.

When I was in college in the
1990s in St. Louis, I remember getting a bunch of bizarre
anti-abortion fliers faxed to our student newspaper office. That
was my introduction to Fred Phelps, his family, and the Westboro
Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas (and also, to a lesser degree, the
frequent experience as a journalist of being sent strange screeds).
If I recall correctly, they were in town picketing something, so it
was part of their effort to scrounge up some press. They were still
crafting their image as far-right extreme religious conservatives,
blaming all of America’s ills on homosexuality and abortion and
other things they defined as non-Christian. I remember seeing Fred
Phelps sometimes showing up on daytime talk shows (anybody remember
Ricki Lake?), but the Westboro Baptist Church was not yet a
household name.

They most certainly are now, and today a family member has
revealed that former patriarch
Fred Phelps died last night at the age of 84. Fred Phelps had
been out of the public eye for some time now, and over the weekend,
a son who had broken away from the family said the man was in bad
physical shape and had been moved into a
care facility. He also, allegedly, had been
excommunicated from the church during a power struggle over
leadership.

I encountered the Phelps family and Westboro Baptist Church
members in person in 1999 as attention on them started ramping up.
I was covering a meeting between a group of gay Christians and
Jerry Falwell’s followers at Liberty University in Virginia. By
agreeing to meet with the gay Christians, Falwell was deemed not
anti-gay enough, so Westboro Baptist (and another extremely
anti-gay church) showed up to picket Falwell. I decided to
acknowledge their appearance in my reporting (for an alt-weekly I
was working at and for a freelance piece for the gay magazine
The Advocate) but I declined actually trying to interview
them. Even back then, their shtick was well-worn, at least to the
audience I was writing for. They had nothing new to say. Other
journalists couldn’t wait to get some crazy, nasty quote for
them.

They had been picketing the funerals of people who had died of
AIDS for years, but after 9/11 they started picketing funerals of
soldiers, blaming their deaths on America’s failure to believe the
same things that the Phelps family believed. Well, now that they
were being bipartisan in their cruelty, the coverage took off. Even
as they started getting more and more attention, and people across
the spectrum started getting repulsed, I found it easier and easier
to tune them out. I always wondered why it was such a struggle for
others. The federal government passed a
law blocking protests near military funerals (and only military
funerals, again showing what people were really upset about). The
church won a Supreme Court verdict in 2011 that they couldn’t be
sued for monetary damages by the family of a slain soldier they
picketed.

Given that Fred Phelps has already apparently been purged
from the church, it’s unlikely that his death will change the
family’s behavior in any recognizable way. On a fundamental level,
Fred Phelps is not really responsible for the family’s fame—we are.
The Westboro Baptist Church is a scab we keep picking at. Americans
have grown more and more accepting of gay people, and the church’s
actions grow more and more desperate to get attention. Yet so many
people find it hard to look away from them. They couldn’t be any
less relevant to the direction the country is moving, and yet they
bother us so much that we pass laws to try to stop their protests,
arrange
elaborate plans to block said protests from public view, and
essentially continue to
perpetuate their fame by continuing to let the church’s actions
draw outraged responses.

Like I said, the death of Fred Phelps probably won’t result in
any changes from the family, but it’s a good excuse for the rest of
us to move on. I’m sure that right now some dreadful editorial
cartoonist is sketching Phelps being met at the pearly gates
by all the soldiers his family picketed. It’s true that the
solution for bad speech is more speech. But the solution to crazy
obsession is not becoming obsessed right back at them. Stop picking
at this scab. The attention the Westboro Baptist Church received
was always much greater than their actual influence or import,
except perhaps as a bad example. They were the Kardashian family of
religious activism.

Read about Fred Phelps’ secret origins as a civil rights
attorney who fought racial discrimination in the 1960s here
and speculate about what the heck happened.