A Letter from Fred Phelps

Hello all!

So I know I haven’t been the most popular figure in the media, and I’d like to apologize for that. One of the many features of Hell is they cure psychopathy, as the condition tends to take the edge off watching all of my loved ones repeatedly tortured and killed in front of me while my eyelids are held open with fishhooks. Just for the record, I’d like to say there are indeed a number of homosexuals here (in fact, they figure pretty prominently in my life now, but I won’t bore you with the details), but not, as I asserted when I was alive, all of them. So I was wrong there.

But I’m dead now, and I’m told this will be my last missive to the mortal plane. How do you guys feel about that? I mean, I know a lot of you wanted to kill me or show me up by pointing out the flaws and hypocrisies in my arguments (which, let’s be honest, I would have ignored. I mean, I had to ignore them to get as far as I did, right?), but you don’t have to think those un-Christian thoughts anymore, because I went out old, alone, and crazy. I suspect many of you are ambivalent about your feelings, because you don’t want to be like me and actually be happy about a fellow human tottering off the mortal coil, but you have to admit—heck, even I have to admit that the world will probably be a little bit better without a person whose entire life was dedicated to celebrating the death of innocent people to promote hatred of other, totally unrelated people. Come on, even the Klan is relieved, and I can see why, at least when I’m not distracted by the spiders eating my brain from the inside out.

So now that my caricature of religious intolerance is out of the picture, you can all go back to trying to ignore the endemic homophobia that treats gays with gentle condescension, outright denial of their existence (in retrospect, I should have gone this route), or violence, beheadings, yadda, yadda, but that last stuff just happens in countries like Somethingstan, Russia, Mississippi, etc. Nothing you really have to hear about on major news outlets for more than a couple of days at a time.

So relax! America is finally a post-Phelps society. Add a personality here, drop one there, and it really doesn’t look so bad, does it? Should be interesting times now that all the quieter hate groups don’t have to keep their distance from my absurdly blunt rhetoric. Do you think dropping my name will become one of those signs that a debate has descended into nonsense? Like how mentioning Hitler in an argument means you’ve lost? That would kind of a cool immortality. Definitely cooler than the one I’m looking at (see what I did there?).

Anyway, I’m headed back down to the lake of fire ants (turns out there was a mistranslation), but at least it’s not pound-me-the-ass lake of fire ants. That’s only on Sundays.

He doesn't know he has cancer yet.