The Rev. Fred Phelps, the virulently antigay preacher who drew wide, scornful attention for staging demonstrations at military funerals as a way to proclaim his belief that God is punishing America for its tolerance of homosexuality, died here late Wednesday. He was 84.
The Westboro Baptist Church confirmed the death, declaring on one of its websites, “Fred W. Phelps Sr. has gone the way of all flesh.” The church did not give a cause of death, but Mr. Phelps had been living under hospice care.
Mr. Phelps, who founded and led Westboro, a small nondenominational church in Topeka, was a much-loathed figure at the fringe of the American religious scene, denounced across the theological and political spectrum for his beliefs, his language and his tactics.
His congregation, which claims to have staged tens of thousands of demonstrations, is made up almost entirely of his family members, many of whom lived together in a small Topeka compound, although in recent years some of his children and grandchildren had broken with the group.
A disbarred civil rights lawyer who had once been honored by the N.A.A.C.P. and who ran for office repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, as a Democrat, Mr. Phelps seemed to accept the criticism if not relish it.
He believed that the United States was beyond saving, and he devoted his life to traveling with a small band of protesters to highlight what he saw as America’s sinfulness and damnation. His church’s website maintains a running tally of “people whom God has cast into hell since you loaded this page.”
He was highly litigious and employed crude language to call attention to his cause. (The slogan “God Hates Fags” appeared on the church’s picket signs and remains in its web address.) He sued President Ronald Reagan for establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican; denounced the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who called Mr. Phelps a “first-class nut,” and picketed the funerals of Al Gore’s father and Bill Clinton’s mother.
Mr. Phelps began protesting the funerals of people with AIDS in 1991, and in 1998 attracted global attention and condemnation when he picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay 21-year-old Wyoming college student whose brutal beating death led to a national debate over hate crimes.
In 2006, Mr. Phelps explained his thinking by describing his analysis of the terrorist attacks of 2001.
“We told you, right after it happened five years ago,” he said, “that the deadly events of 9/11 were direct outpourings of divine retribution, the immediate visitation of God’s wrath and vengeance and punishment for America’s horrendous sodomite sins, that worse and more of it was on the way.” He added: “God is no longer with America, but is now America’s enemy. God himself is now America’s terrorist.”
Mr. Phelps’s tactics prompted a variety of legislative bodies to establish buffer zones to limit the ability of protesters to interfere with mourners at funerals. In 2011, Mr. Phelps won a major legal victory when the Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 1, that his church’s protests were a protected form of speech. The ruling preserved the buffer zones but found that the father of a slain soldier was not entitled to damages for emotional distress caused by the protest.
“This is somebody who was addicted to rage and anger,” K. Ryan Jones, a filmmaker who made a documentary about Mr. Phelps, said in an interview. “Early on in his legal career he would manifest that rage against the people he was prosecuting, or some would say persecuting, and then when he was disbarred that rage transitioned into the ministry.”
Fred Waldron Phelps was born on Nov. 13, 1929, in Meridian, Miss. He said that he had been admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point but that after high school he had what his official biography called “a profound religious experience” and decided instead to pursue a Christian higher education, first at Bob Jones College in Tennessee and then, when the institution moved, at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. He did not graduate.
He devoted himself to evangelism, and in 1951, when he was just 21, he was profiled in Time magazine because his denunciations of “promiscuous petting” and “teachers’ filthy jokes in classrooms” on a California college campus had brought him into conflict with the administration.
He married Margie Marie Simms in 1952, and in 1954 the couple moved to Topeka. They had 13 children, 54 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, according to the church’s website. Mr. Phelps established Westboro Baptist in 1955.
He earned a law degree in 1964 from Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, but his legal career was troubled from the start. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which describes Westboro Baptist as “arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America,” Mr. Phelps struggled to find people to attest to his good character when he wanted to join the bar, was temporarily suspended for professional misconduct, and was even sued for failing to pay for candy his children sold door to door.
He succeeded in winning settlements in discrimination cases he filed as a civil rights lawyer.
Read his full obituary at The New York Times.
