The Toronto Star is reporting that Fred Phelps, the founder of the “church” everyone loves to hate, is on his deathbed.  Phelps, who began the infamous Westboro Baptist Church in 1955, is reportedly living in a care facility in Shawnee County, Kansas, and is experiencing some major health problems from which he is not expected to recover.

For those living in a cave for the last 10 years or so, Fred Phelps is known as the head of the group of violently hateful protestors that show up at events all over the country to hold up signs saying things like “God hates fags.”  They received the most notoriety, however, for picketing soldier funerals, yelling things like “Thank God for IEDs,” and even “Your soldier is burning in Hell” at the families.  His church members, almost all of them members of his extended family, would use the American flag as a doormat while they protested, and screamed insults and epithets at anyone curious enough or angry enough to attempt conversation.

Love them or hate them (and quite frankly, to know them is to nearly hate them), Fred Phelps and his tribe of freaks tested our belief in the First Amendment.  Do we truly believe it?  Or do we have lines in the sand that deep down, we think should be enforced?  Where is the space between indecency and freedom?  Is there one?  The belief that any of us are free to speak our opinion anywhere seemed absolute, until we had to see their group standing outside the funeral of an American Marine, airman, sailor or soldier.  Suddenly the desire—no, the need—to make them just shut up meant that we were willing to set aside the freedoms that we claimed to believe in.  We wanted the families not to have to suffer those hateful fools.  We wanted to demand that those troll-faced jackasses standing on our flag show some respect.  We wanted to force them to respect what they disrespected.  We had the best of intentions…and we were wrong.

We were wrong, not because the things Fred Phelps stands for are anything resembling humane, but because the liberty to speak cannot be treated as a privilege to be granted to one group and taken from another—even if that group’s only real purpose is to dishonor all that we hold sacred.  It is because we hold liberty sacred that we allow them to speak.  The second we decide we much silence even such cretins as this, we have become what we fight against.  We become despots ourselves.

As someone who despises every last thing that Phelps and his tribe stand for,  I admit that I feel some satisfaction that veterans, Gold Star families, and other people worthy of respect will no longer have to deal with this particular piece of trash.  I find no real joy in the news of his impending death, however; he will answer to God the same way we all do.