Fred Phelps | |
|---|---|
 Fred Waldron Phelps | |
| Born | November 13, 1929 Meridian, Mississippi, US |
| Died | March 19, 2014 Topeka, Kansas, US |
| Alma mater | John Muir College, 1951, Associate's degree Washburn University, 1964, Law degree |
| Home Base | Topeka, KS |
| Groupaffiliations | American Guard |
| Formergroupaffiliations | Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Outlaw Hammerskins (OHS), Vinlander Social Club (VSC) |
| Published By | OPP HQ |
| Published On | 13 March 2004 |
Now THIS is a piece of shit! Phelps is quite possibly the nastiest anti-gay character going today (Chuck Spingola is trying, but he's not even close). He is best-known for his local and national picketing which he misnames his "street ministry". Particularly he will picket the funeral of a prominent persons, such as President Clinton's mother. Many people acquainted with Phelps mistakenly believe he pickets only the funerals of homosexuals and/or AIDS victims. Not true. He pickets anyone, anywhere whose funeral is likely to draw media attention and/or large crowds.
Crowds and publicity are the two magnets that attract this scumbag. He also cranks out from 3-10 obscene, slanderous fliers each week and faxes them to media, businesses and government agencies throughout the city whether they want them or not. He mislabels this endeavor "his fax ministry". ANYONE who disagrees with him or challenges him regardless of sexual preference is a "fag", "bull dyke", "whore" and/or "bastard" on billboard-sized signs painted with bright neon letters and all referenced by Biblical chapters and verses. In 1995, there were objections to an advertisement for a gay and lesbian youth hotline and support group in a Tecumseh, KS high school newspaper, for allegedly advertising illegal activities and for allegedly not reflecting the school's abstinence-based curriculum. After the school board claimed it violated the state's law against sodomy, the ad was removed, although no other school in the state removed the ad.
Phelps jumped into the fray by creating an ad that directly mocked and countered the ad. His ad warned teenagers against the support group as "a...homosexual propaganda mill and recruiting depot to a lifestyle that is criminal...and...sinful" He allegedly threatened to sue any school that refused to ran the ad and most did.
Phelps is an embittered 65 year old former lawyer and convicted criminal who was disbarred several years ago in both state and federal courts because he lied to and about judges, cheated his clients, abused every facet of the legal profession and its powers in and out of court and otherwise behaved boorishly in and out of court.
His "church" consists entirely of family members who live in close proximity to the church and to one another. A 12-foot high privacy fence surrounds their compound, and "church" membership is of course closed to the general public. Phelps or the designated adult child collect the paychecks of his adult children and sons and daughters in law, removes their "tithes" and allocates the remainder of their money as he sees fit. Four of his 13 children have left him and say he beat them and his wife unmercifully for many years, forced them as children to sell candy door to door to support him while he attended law school, and cheated the IRS out of thousands of dollars for years.
Three other "church" members have also been convicted of crimes and Fred and his 300 lb. lawyer son, Jonathan, went on trial some time ago on still more criminal charges. All of his children still attached to him, most of them lawyers, are angry, grossly obese, obsessive-compulsive freaks who misuse their law degrees to bully and intimidate the local populace into tolerating their illegal conduct. They file dozens of frivolous lawsuits against public officials and private citizens every year clogging and have kept state and federal courts clogged up with these lawsuits for the last three years. (This is just a continuation of one of the patterns of conduct that got Phelps disbarred and 3 of his lawyer children severely disciplined in the late 1980's.)
He's lost just about every one of them and will soon be ordered to pay the state hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees (odds are he'll declare bankruptcy). The kids also frequently chase people in their cars leaning out of their car windows, gesturing with their middle fingers, yelling obscenities and writing obscenities on notebook paper and holding it against car windows.
There is NOTHING they won't do to further their goals: vandalism, covert surveillance, harassing phone calls, anonymous threats, etc. and they indeed have intimidated many in Topeka. They have bought off a few politicians who were able to keep them from being arrested for three years until the scheme was investigated by the sheriff and exposed. The chief of police resigned in disgrace because he's ordered Topeka police not to arrest the Phelpses even if they observed illegal conduct. Most of the time, the police wouldn't even take complaints of Phelps illegal conduct from citizens. But that's changed.
According to Phelps, his homebase of Topeka, Kansas is "the most evil spot on the face of the earth, where Satan's seat is - whose zipcodes bear the Mark of the Beast; where bloody, state-sponsored religious persecution on a scale not seen since the days of the Spanish Inquisition rages against humble Baptist preachers - whose monicker (nickname) is The Golden City as in ancient Babylon, city of whores and harlots and whose mascot, The Ichabod, means "the glory of God has departed." A few months ago he tried to get a new pickup truck that has two large plywood rear panels that read "Dole heart (for loves) Fags" off the tax rolls claiming that the truck is used solely and exclusively for religious purposes. The state Board of Tax Appeals denied his request and Phelps is suing.
Again, people acquainted Phelps believe he only pickets homosexuals and businesses owned by homosexuals. Wrong. 99% of his local picketing is against heterosexuals who've opposed his neo-nazi, gestapo style. He pickets the local daily newspaper, government and law enforcement buildings, courthouses, the Jehovah's Witnesses Convention, Boy Scout meetings, day care centers, pediatricians' offices, traveling entertainment, theater and concert productions (he even picketed 'Frosty the Snowman' and the 'Ice Capades'), high schools, school board meetings, cultural exhibits, other lawyers' offices, restaurants - the list is nearly endless. Fred could really care less about homosexuals - they're simply a vehicle for him to abuse and harass people of all sexual orientations.
Phelps has a national radio show on a shortwave station owned and operated by Jeff Baker, a radical Florida anti-abortionist and militia leader. Phelps makes many anti-Semitic statements on his show (something new since he took up with Baker), rails against abortion, and in general spouts the Christian Identity line. He requires all the women in his "church" to wear their hair past their considerable waists in "subjection" to him.
Phelps is also a close friend of Greg Dixon, pastor of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple which actually is no longer a church the IRS having taken away their church status. Phelps often refers to Dixon in his faxes and radio show, and last October during the nationwide Christian Identity gatherings, Phelps addressed Dixon's assemly in Indianapolis. Dixon is the founder of the American Coalition of Unregistered Churches, a front group for tax protestors/Posse Comitatus.
Phelps is nose-deep in the Posse Comitatus himself. Four of his close associates, whom he occasionally lists on the 'church' roster when advantageous in his lawsuits, are self-confessed members of the Posse, various local militias, and the Freemen. One of the Freemen arrested in Montana, Jon Barry Nelson, is/was a member of our local Freemen group that included several WBC members.
He has another interesting connection too. Phelps served as an then-Senator Al Gore delegate when he ran for president on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988. Gore, who was quoted by the Nashville Tennessean in 1984 saying homosexuality is not "an acceptable alternative that society should affirm" and said in his 1984 U.S. Senate race that he would not accept money from gay rights organizations and that he opposed a "gay bill of rights," also invited the Phelps' to the Clinton-Gore inaugurations of January 1993 and January 1997. Remember this the next time the "lesser of two evils" crowd starts with their routines again to try and stifle third-party voting.
Phelps claims that he is fighting a battle on First Amendment grounds of freedom of speech and religion. He uses the homosexual theme merely as a diversionary vehicle to draw our attention away from what he's really up to which is the fulfillment of the Christian Identity agenda. For three years, he's picketed mainline church services and funerals and unfortunately has succeeded through violence and intimidation in driving away good people from these churches. He has a distinctly political rather than a religious message. He is a political action committee, not a church! He attempts to influence every political issue in this community, covertly gives money under the table to unethical politicians and carries political messages disguised in and wrapped in pseudo-Biblical terminology.
Most notably, his crew was seen in Wyoming, picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old man murdered because he was gay. All of this garbage from someone who as a lawyer once fought for civil rights!
Phelps has used his consitiutional rights to bully his way into advocate violating the constitutional rights of others, and folks from the top down in his home town of Topeka, Kansas are getting very tired of him.
"Topeka is now identified with Fred Phelps," Mayor Joan Wagnon said in an interview with the Intelligence Report, the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "If someone could figure out how to get him off the streets, they could be elected mayor for life."