No punches being pulled here folks.
Phelps, the founder of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church, died in Kansas on Wednesday night and without wanting to speak ill of the dead, his passing wasn’t exactly cause for an outbreak of mourning worldwide.
The Westboro Baptist Church has collected quite the amount of enemies over the years for their offensive picket signs, anti-gay sentiments and attacks on pretty much any group in society you can think of, including our good selves in Ireland, or the “knuckle dragging potato eating perverts” as they preferred to call us.
As their figurehead and as a man who courted notoriety like it was going out of fashion, Phelps was a figure of vilification worldwide and Time Magazine didn’t beat around the bush in an obituary to the 84-year old on their website.
Leading with the headline ‘Good Riddance, Fred Phelps’ and the sub-heading “He was the kind of person no one wanted to be around,” David Von Drehle wrote: “Fred Phelps, a colossal jerk, died Thursday in Topeka, Kansas, at 84, after a long life in which even his few admirable achievements (a series of civil rights cases that he filed as an attorney) stemmed from a deeply disagreeable personality (he loved to pick fights with his neighbours).
“He was the kind of person no one wanted to be around: a lawyer disbarred by his colleagues, a preacher disowned by every denomination he ever espoused, a father rejected by his children—even, in the end, the children who emulate his worst characteristics.”
You can read the obituary in full here but, needless to say, Von Drehle didn’t stop there, referring to Phelps as “an unpleasant and despicable man” and calling the Church itself “a brutal but highly effective tool for compelling the attention of the world’s media”.
Even Phelps’ own son Nathan, who left the Westboro Baptist Church 37 years ago, struggled to say anything nice about his late father yesterday, writing on Facebook: “I’m not sure how I feel about this. Terribly ironic that his devotion to his god ends this way. Destroyed by the monster he made.
“I feel sad for all the hurt he’s caused so many. I feel sad for those who will lose the grandfather and father they loved. And I’m bitterly angry that my family is blocking the family members who left from seeing him, and saying their good-byes.”
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