I don’t believe in celebrating someone’s death. However, the death of Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church helps me sleep better at night.
Phelps was the face of evil, picketing the funerals of soldiers and AIDS victims and protesting outside of businesses owned by homosexuals. The man’s evil was spread to his children and most of his grandchildren.
Phelps didn’t believe in unconditional love for his family and he thought that everyone who went against his ideals was doomed to burn in hell. He admitted this on the short-lived “The Jane Whitney Show.” When an audience member asked Phelps what he would do if he found out one of his children was gay, he responded, “If it should happen, I’d say: We’ve loved you since before you were born, but if you’d taken that tag, bye!”
He was also asked if he saw anything wrong with picketing the funeral of an AIDS victim. Phelps responded, “Best time in the world to picket those creatures. That’s when they are paying closer attention to you. Dying time is truth time. They’ve been living lives based on lies; they died deaths based on lies. It’s a cruelty to stand around their dead bodies and preach more lies. That’s the time to preach the truth to them. It’s an honor for them to have us there.”
My response is that his ideas were based on his own interpretation of the Bible. Throughout history, evil people like the Spanish Conquistadors and the Knights Templar justified their actions with their interpretation of the Bible. However, Jesus didn’t use violence in his teachings, and he didn’t use hate speech to recruit his followers; he used love.
Phelps, the conquistadors and the Knights Templar forgot Luke 6:31: “Do unto others as you would have them unto you.”
I’m sure he wouldn’t want people to picket his funeral or the funeral of family members saying “You’re going to burn in hell” or “God hates you,” as Phelps has done at so many other funerals.
No one has the right to judge an entire group of people based on ignorance. Someone else on the show asked if he knew any homosexuals and he responded, “Lots of them. I’ve been subject to personal physical attack by five or 600 of them. The Bible says that they are brute beasts that need to be taken and destroyed.”
So, is it acceptable to create generalizations or label an entire group of people, say hideous things and even promote violence against them because of an idea that could be interpreted in a hundred different ways? I don’t think so.
The ultimate proof of his evil is how he disciplined and preached hate to his entire family. In multiple interviews, his son Nate Phelps has revealed how his father would physically abuse him, his siblings and even his mother. He also talked about how he and his siblings were conditioned at an early age to believe that Phelps was a man of God so that his actions were excusable because they were in the service of God.
During one interview for the website “The Vital Voice,” Nate said of his father, “Sometimes he would be angry about something and who knew what it was. It really wasn’t that important but you would find the kids cowering in one of the back rooms, literally shaking for hours, while he was raging two or three rooms away.”
The fact that anyone followed Phelps and his cult is truly terrifying. It reminds us that psychos who promote and believe in hate walk among us like wolves in sheep fur.
However, we the American people must be able to see through the smoke screen of those who preach intolerance and understand that all these messages are just different types of hate mongering. I can only hope that people of our modern society remember the lessons that Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi taught us: love is the only thing that can defeat hate.
Let’s all sleep tight knowing there’s one less evil man in our world.
