Fred Phelps, Anti-Gay Preacher Who Targeted Military Funerals, Dies at 84

TOPEKA, Kan. — 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 on 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 Baptist, a small, independent 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.

“If I had nobody mad at me,” he told The Wichita Eagle in 2006, “what right would I have to claim that I was preaching the Gospel?”

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.

“The way to prove you love thy neighbor is to warn them they’re committing sin,” he told the central Pennsylvania newspaper The Patriot-News in 2004. “You’re not going to get nowhere with that slop that ‘God loves you,’ ” he added. “That’s a diabolical lie from hell without biblical warrant.”

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’s picketing began in 1991 as an outgrowth of his dissatisfaction with Topeka’s response to his complaint that gay men were using a park near his home for “indecent conduct.” His antigay effort at the park was followed by protests of funerals of people who had died of AIDS, and then multiple local churches that he criticized as tolerant of homosexuality.

In 1998, he explained his view of a wrathful God in an interview with The Houston Chronicle.

“You can’t believe the Bible without believing that God hates people,” he said. “It’s pure nonsense to say that God loves the sinner but hates the sin. He hates the sin, and he hates the sinner. He sends them to hell. Do you think he loves the people in hell?”

Later that year, he attracted global attention and condemnation when he picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay Wyoming college student whose beating death led to a national debate over hate crimes.

It was his church’s protests of military funerals, which began in about 2005, that provoked the most widespread anger, prompting legislative bodies to establish buffer zones to limit such protests 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 a 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 devote himself to evangelism. In 1951, when he was just 21, he was profiled in Time magazine after his denunciations of “promiscuous petting” and “teachers’ filthy jokes in classrooms” at John Muir College in Pasadena, Calif., where he was a student, 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 be admitted to 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.

“Most blacks — that’s who they went to,” the Rev. Ben Scott, president of the N.A.A.C.P.’s Topeka branch, said in an interview with CNN in 2010. “I don’t know if he was cheaper or if he had that stick-to-it-ness, but Fred didn’t lose many back then.”

Mr. Phelps was disbarred in Kansas in 1979 for professional misconduct in connection with a lawsuit he brought against a court clerk who he said had failed to have a transcript ready in time. In 1989, after being accused of misconduct by nine federal judges, he agreed to stop practicing law in the federal courts as well.

His focus on protests since 1991 was relentless: His church claimed to hold multiple events a day while issuing news releases using coarse and inflammatory language, some of which celebrated the deaths of American soldiers, saying they were God’s way of punishing America for enabling homosexuality.

This week, an estranged son of Mr. Phelps said his father had been excommunicated from his own church. The church did not respond to that assertion. Answering inquiries about Mr. Phelps’s health, however, the church summed up its message, saying: “God still hates fags, God still hates fag enablers and any nation that embraces that sin as an ‘innocent’ lifestyle can expect to incur the wrath of God. Repent or Perish.”

Westboro Baptist has said that it does not plan to hold a public funeral for Mr. Phelps, and the Kansas Equality Coalition, a gay rights group, has urged people not to celebrate his death. When asked in 2006 how he would feel if his own funeral were protested, Mr. Phelps said: “I’d welcome it. I’d invite them.”