March 18, 1929 - Fred Phelps
The date provided does not match the Wikipedia source, which gives his birth as November 13, 1929 — worth noting before publication. Phelps built the Westboro Baptist Church into a vehicle for sustained public protest, deploying his congregation — drawn almost entirely from his own family — at funerals, political events, and cultural gatherings across decades. His campaigns generated enough legal conflict to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, and both federal and state governments passed legislation specifically aimed at limiting his activities, with limited success. His earlier career as a civil rights attorney makes the arc of his life particularly difficult to render in simple terms.
From Wikipedia
Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. (November 13, 1929 – March 19, 2014) was an American minister and disbarred lawyer who served as the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, worked as a civil rights attorney, and ran for statewide election in Kansas. A divisive and controversial figure, he gained national attention for his homophobic views and protests near the funerals of gay people, AIDS victims, military veterans, and disaster victims whom he believed were killed as a result of God punishing the U.S. for having "bankrupt values" and tolerating homosexuality. Phelps founded the Westboro Baptist Church, a Topeka, Kansas-based independent Primitive Baptist congregation, in 1955. It has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America". Its signature slogan, "God Hates Fags", remains the name of the group's principal website.
In addition to funerals, Phelps and his followers—mostly his own immediate family members—picketed gay pride gatherings, high-profile political events, university commencement ceremonies, live performances of The Laramie Project, and functions sponsored by mainstream Christian groups with which he had no affiliation, arguing it was their sacred duty to warn others of God's anger. He continued doing so in the face of numerous legal challenges—some of which reached the U.S. Supreme Court—and near-universal opposition and contempt from other religious groups and the general public. Laws enacted at both the federal and state levels for the specific purpose of curtailing his disruptive activities were limited in their effectiveness due to the Constitutional protections afforded to Phelps under the First Amendment.
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