Granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church Founder Poses for NOH8 Gay Rights Campaign
Libby Phelps-Alvare, the granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church Founder Fred Phelps, posed for the NOH8 gay rights campaign, further showing her disagreement with the controversial group that she left in 2009.
"The message is simple: No hate. We want people to be happy, healthy and hopeful," she wrote along with a picture with her husband, Logan, their newborn son, Paxton, and members of Equality House on her Facebook page.
The NOH8 Campaign seeks to "promote marriage, gender and human equality through education, advocacy, social media, and visual protest," the campaign's website says. It's a "photographic silent protest created by celebrity photographer Adam Bouska and partner Jeff Parshley" in response to the passage of California's Proposition 8, which amended the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
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Phelps-Alvare quit the group that is known for picketing funerals and the slogan "God Hates Fags" in 2009, and swung to the other side, offering support to the Planting Peace group, which purchased a house near the WBC compound in Topeka, Kansas, and painted it in rainbow colors.
"The whole family talks about homosexuality, every single day. And it's always about how homosexuals are dooming the world," Phelps Alvare wrote in an article for The New York Post in 2013. "They talk about fornication and divorce, remarriage and adultery, but the main thing is the homosexual lifestyle. It wasn't a personal hatred toward anybody. We were taught that we were doing a loving thing."
Her grandfather, 84-year-old Phelps died on March 19, about a year after he was thrown out of the group.
About a week before the founder's death, his son, Nathan Phelps, wrote on his Facebook page: "I've learned that my father, Fred Phelps Sr., pastor of the 'God Hates Fags' Westboro Baptist Church, was ex-communicated from the 'church' back in August of 2013. He is now on the edge of death … I'm not sure how I feel about this. Terribly ironic that his devotion to his God ends this way. Destroyed by the monster he made."
Nathan broke away from the religious group years ago.
Former WBC member Lauren Drain, who wrote a book about her time in the group after being excommunicated, had urged compassion for Phelps.
"I hope and pray that change can and will be the result of so many years of heartache and confusion. I pray that pastor Phelps has a change of heart even if it is his last days. I pray that the remaining family members see what generations of judgment and banishment can do," she wrote on her Facebook page at the time.
The ex-member prayed that the many families and people affected by the WBC "will not have vengeance in their heart, but rather pity. As a nurse I can say that every man and woman deserves the right to make peace with themselves, their family and their God on their death bed. I wish for peace," she added. "I wish for change. I wish for families to be reunited in love."
Phelps started the WBC in 1955.
