A couple days ago, we heard news that Fred Phelps (of Westboro Baptist Church fame) was on his deathbed. As expected, it didn’t take long before he passed, and now comes news that he died at the age of 84 last night. And honestly, my response has been “meh”. Just meh. Because if you’re going to spend your entire life teaching people that love is wrong, using your family as an echo-chamber for your bigotry, and you die alone, banished by the family you taught to hate and exiled by the world at large … Well, you deserve pity. I’m not sad or angry or happy that he’s gone. I pity him. Because he wasted his life, and deep down he probably spent his last few days with the weight of his legacy crushing him, knowing he deserved it. I literally can’t imagine a worse way to die. So I won’t link to any of the news about him, and instead I’ll pull up this quote from Reddit user paperarmory …
I am from Topeka. He and his crew stood across the street of my best friend’s funeral back in 2000 and yelled profanities at us. My friend and I had been buds since we were in kindergarten, and he’d died in a car crash our senior year of high school. I was at a loss – we were going to go to college together and everything. It’s today that I realized I don’t give a shit about Phelps. I have forgiven him. But I am in tears in real life today because I still miss my friend. I think that’s what we should remember today. Everyone who was lost. Everyone who has suffered. We should not celebrate the death of this man. We should celebrate the lives of our loved ones.