REV. FRED PHELPS gives good curse. Famous for his anti-gay picketing of funerals and other sensational venues, he admits that his vibrant colored signs with provocative epithets (notably “God Hates Fags”) are intended to “get inside people’s heads.” In October, he will receive what he most seeks—national publicity—during an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is critical, and so is an understanding of this man, however tempting it is to dismiss him as a self-parody of bigoted ignorance.
“My very first exposure to Phelps was trying to get family and friends into church, through a barrage of the Phelps’ pickets and angry shouting on the church steps,” says Phil Griffin, a director for the Topeka AIDS Project. It was in the early 1990’s, before drugs had made HIV manageable, that Phelps would show up at funerals for deceased gay men carrying signs that gleefully predicted the man’s eternal damnation. It was only when Phelps began to picket the funerals of dead soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that 47 states passed funeral picket laws.
“It was hard enough in those days, dealing with the pain and separation, we were losing so many creative people,” Griffin says. “Then to be faced with the Phelps’ harassment, there was no opportunity for healing. We would sit in the service so angry, distracted from our mourning.”
Al Snyder agrees: “It’s not about free speech, this is about harassment.” Snyder is the father of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, and a jury awarded him $10.9 million in 2006, in part for the intentional infliction of emotional distress caused by Phelps. The Phelps family targeted and protested Matthew’s funeral in Westminster, Maryland. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s decision on free speech grounds.
When the U.S. Supreme Court hears Snyder v. Phelps in October, they will consider when speech by private citizens, as distinct from public figures, crosses the line from being protected by the First Amendment to infringing on a person’s reputation and privacy. Phelps maintains that his signs and taunts are protected by the First Amendment both as protected speech and as religious practice. Topeka attorney and long-time Phelps adversary Jerry Palmer disagrees: “You shouldn’t let one narcissistic and abusive person torment the community under the rubric of the First Amendment. He can be isolated.”
Several briefs to the Supreme Court have pointed out that Rev. Phelps and his family are the only people in U.S. legal history ever to picket funerals, a sacred rite in every faith tradition. While the Court will determine the legal issues in this case, Americans will define our national character by considering Fred Phelps, the man behind the signs.
Nate Phelps offers a unique lens with which to understand his father. Out of thirteen Phelps children, Nate is one of four who left the isolated Westboro Baptist Church compound. At least four grandchildren have left so far. Nate speaks openly of the physical, psychological, and emotional abuse endured while growing up under his father’s “system.”
“Things would escalate, the old man would talk faster, he’d have certain mannerisms and you knew he was going into a full boil,” Nate says, noting his father’s violence was unpredictable but erupted several times in an average week. “A rage enveloped him, face bright red with little white spittle at the side of his mouth and he’d lift me up by the arms and bring his right knee into my stomach, again, and again, and again.” Anyone who has seen Phelps on YouTube has no problem imagining this picture. “Then there were times when he’d be very specific, approaching real slow just looking for the right place to hit, very deliberate,” Nate recalls. “He’d be swinging the mattock [ax handle]going faster and faster, becoming more indiscriminate about where it landed, and my mom would scream, ‘You’re going to kill him!’”
Research done by Jonathan Bell for The Topeka Capital-Journal (available on-line as the unpublished manuscript, “Addicted to Hate”) establishes through numerous sources that injuries sustained by the Phelps children “went far beyond the bounds of a ‘strict upbringing’ … and would be seen as torture and abuse in any era, at any age, in any culture.” Nate worries about the younger Phelps generation today. “My brothers John and Fred, Jr., and sister Shirley admit publicly to following in my father’s footsteps with respect to corporal punishment. Some people say, ‘So what?’ But add in the dimension of growing up with my father. It is frightening to me that my siblings know what we went through even though they deny it publicly.”
Tracing Fred Phelps’ history to his birthplace in Meridian, Mississippi, Bell quotes a high school classmate saying that in Phelps’ boxing days, “He’d always leave marks on the boys.” Bell details Phelps’ religious experience at a revival while still a teen, after which he turned down a prestigious appointment to West Point and began preaching. From that point on, Phelps “was getting involved in the idea that only he was saved, going into heresy.”
Phelps’ physical power and his belief that he alone was anointed by God took root early in his life, over the objections of his own father, with whom Fred Phelps cut off ties while still a young man. After eighteen months at Bob Jones University, Phelps attended Prairie Bible Institute for two semesters. The head of the school observed, according to Bell’s research, that Phelps may be “clinically disturbed.” He graduated from John Muir College, where Time wrote about his sidewalk crusade against sex on campus, in 1951.
Sean Summers, Snyder’s attorney, sees Fred Phelps’ abusive nature today in his targeting of vulnerable, mourning families. Summers explains that the facts are simple in Snyder v. Phelps. Phelps “started sending out fliers about Matthew Snyder and his family prior to the funeral, they showed up and protested the funeral, and then they posted an ‘Epic’ online after the funeral, all of which targeted the Snyder family in a continuum of harassment.”
The fliers Phelps sent to media and law enforcement prior to the funeral had a picture of Matthew Snyder above a military coffin, reading “Burial of an Ass,” and went on to announce a protest at “St. John’s Catholic Dog Kennel.” That flier resulted in an outpouring of media attention, undesired by the Snyders, and extraordinary planning by local law enforcement. To ensure the peace of 1,500 mourners and the Phelps protesters, a SWAT team, eight sheriffs, state police, county police, fire engines, ambulances, and a Winnebago Command Center were deployed. At the time, Maryland had no restrictions on funeral protests, and the Phelpses were positioned near the church’s main vehicular entrance. The Snyder family had to be re-routed to a service entrance.
Following the funeral, Phelps posted the aforementioned “Epic” on his website detailing the protest and specifically targeting the Snyder family again. It’s no longer on-line, but it was entered as evidence at trial. It reads in part: “Albert and Julie [Snyder] … taught Matthew to divorce, to commit adultery. They taught him how to support the largest pedophile machine in the history of the entire world, the Roman Catholic monstrosity. They also, in supporting satanic Catholicism, taught Matthew to be an idolater.” This is vintage Phelps, unhinged, incoherent ranting mixed with scripture, typed in crazy fonts, accompanied by smiling pictures of the Phelpses outside Matthew’s funeral.
The Fourth Circuit reversed the lower court, in part, writing that Phelps’ words were so outrageous that “No rational person would believe them.” With that the appellate court set a new standard such that a statement about another person could not be libelous if it was truly without credibility. Snyder’s attorney Summers argues that the ongoing and personal nature of the Phelps’ statements on the Snyder family are not related to public policy or speech protected by the First Amendment. “They’re just out there harassing grieving families. Regardless of your political beliefs, there is nothing political in the Epic, it was just an attack on an individual.”
BEYOND the physical and emotional abuse of his children and tormenting victims of his protests, Phelps is known for using the law to intimidate individuals. Topeka attorney Palmer maintains: “The demonic part of Fred is he is smart and has manipulated the law. He didn’t start picketing until he was disbarred in 1989. Before that he took his anger out on society by suing people for tens of millions of dollars.”
Phelps Chartered is, in essence, the law firm of Westboro Baptist Church, handling the lawsuits that their protests invite along with minor cases for sundry clients. The firm has a history of looking for opportunities to sue people for large sums and then settling for a fraction of the demand, still a lucrative proposition. Six of his children are lawyers who work full-time for the Kansas Department of Corrections. There was a time when Phelps Chartered promoted a practice in civil rights. Lawyers in Topeka give Phelps credit for representing black clients in the 1960’s and 70’s when minorities often found it difficult to get proper counsel. Using his credentials as a Baptist preacher, Phelps solicited referrals from African-American ministers. He had a hand in re-opening Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, though the ACLU quickly took that case over from him. He was once recognized by the Wichita naacp.
Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray has watched Phelps closely over the years and has a different take on Phelps’ civil rights practice. He applauds Phelps for any good he did but points out that this “doesn’t make him a civil rights activist, more of a civil rights opportunist. There is a huge difference between taking cases and believing in the core values of the clients you represent.” Irigonegaray represented a client sued by Phelps for allegedly firing an employee because she was black. “But when I showed the complaining witness a copy of her own deposition, as filed by Mr. Phelps, she denied ever telling Phelps that it was due to racism. She wanted help seeking unemployment. Phelps fraudulently developed a discrimination case in hopes of settling and collecting fees.”
In Addicted to Hate, Bell quotes Topeka attorney Phil Hartley as saying that Phelps “used the legal system to coerce settlements and abuse other people.” Nate Phelps knows the truth about his father’s perspective on civil rights, recalling a law office bustling with activity, more than a dozen family members working together. “When there were black clients in the office we figured out ways to include the phrase ‘DN’ in a sentence right in front of them,” Nate said. “It stood for ‘Dumb N——r’. That was the culture. As far as my father was concerned blacks were a lesser race.”
Fred Phelps even filed a suit attempting to declare three of his children “minorities” because of his “civil rights work” after they failed their first attempt at admission to law school. Phelps then filed a reverse discrimination suit, arguing that the law school rejected qualified whites in order to admit less qualified blacks.
It’s news to no one that social issues like the rights of racial and sexual minorities tend to surface in extreme ways in Kansas. The state’s entire history is written by progressives descended from abolitionists, wrestling with conservative descendants of pro-slave forces who fought over the state’s admission to the Union. Fred Phelps joins other fringe political figures from the latter faction. More Carry Nation than John Brown, Phelps’ antics are reminiscent of the prohibitionist zealot who was reduced, later in life, to hawking miniature axes commemorating her earlier crusades to smash up taverns.
The fact that Phelps is being tried for protesting at a memorial service, not for Matthew Shepard or Randy Shilts but for a U.S. soldier who died in battle, speaks volumes about American values. “As long as it was people on the margins, the mainstream didn’t have any interest in Phelps,” remarked Rev. Ty Sweeting of Topeka’s Metropolitan Community Church. Al Snyder agrees: “It’s a terrible thing that Phelps didn’t get this attention when it was a gay person’s funeral, but I’m thankful for the love and support from the gay community. I firmly believe you are who God made you.”
Nate Phelps, whose journey through eighteen years of his father’s fire-and-brimstone preaching made him an atheist, says of his family, “I think their message is evil, and what they do is evil. But in my own journey I’ve had to ask, ‘Where does evil come from?’ It’s part of being human; it’s in all of us. So the question then is, ‘How does it reveal itself?’” In Nate’s healing process, he ultimately found himself asking, “How much of this is really all about Fred Phelps and how little of it is about the contents of that Book.”
In the end, Fred Phelps’ efforts to change attitudes in Topeka and around the country may well have backfired. According to Rev. Tobias Schlingensiepen, pastor of Topeka’s First Congregational Church, Phelps has softened many hearts. “By being the stereotype of the homophobic individual, Phelps helps those of us in pursuit of equality. He’s demonstrated to many conservatives what the consequences of those views are, that they end up being just like Fred.” Which is something that most Kansans would prefer to avoid. Perhaps a man like Fred Phelps could be called a “necessary evil,” a proposition I put to Rev. Ty Sweeting of Topeka’s MCC, who replied: “I wouldn’t characterize Fred Phelps as a necessary evil, just evil. But scripture tells us all things work together for good to those who love God and are called for God’s purpose. God uses Phelps to further the cause of justice and liberation.”
