Fred Phelps, the pastor who led a small Kansas church's vitriolic "God Hates Fags" anti-gay campaign across the United States, has died, the church said on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
"God Hates Fags" was the overriding slogan for Phelps and his followers, as well as the name of their primary website, according to the AP. They carried that message to protests, brandishing signs declaring "Thank God For AIDS," "America Is Doomed," "Thank God For Dead Soldiers" and "God Blew Up The Troops".
Phelps, whose Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, won a 2011 freedom-of-speech U.S. Supreme Court decision related to their anti-gay picketing, died on Wednesday in a Kansas hospice at the age of 84, the AP reported.
"People die - that is the way of all flesh," a blog post on the church's website said, according to the AP. Phelps founded the church in the 1950s. In his later years, Phelps, known as "Gramps" to his family, turned over much of the church's day-to-day operations to his offspring.
In March, his son Nathan, who ran away from home as soon as he turned 18 and later became a gay rights advocate, said in a Facebook posting he had learned Phelps was near death in a hospice and that he had been excommunicated in 2013, the AP reported.
Phelps' church was widely denounced as a hate group and was not part of any mainstream Baptist organization, according to the AP. Its membership has been estimated at about 100, many of whom were related to Phelps.
By Phelps' reasoning, cancer, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, school shootings and the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other tragedies involving Americans, were God's retribution for a lax attitude toward what he called "the modern militant homosexual movement," the AP reported.
Phelps' rhetoric was hotter than fire and brimstone, according to the AP. He called President George W. Bush a "Bible pervert," Barack Obama a "bloody beast" and conservative TV commentator Bill O'Reilly a "demon-possessed messenger of Satan".
Phelps's church gained notoriety in 1998 by picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was beaten outside a bar in Wyoming and left to die, the AP reported. His story was turned into a movie and play.
