The Westboro Baptist Church, founded in Topeka, Kansas, is notorious for its picketing of military funerals and for its vehement anti-gay ideology. The church planned to picket the funerals of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings. Most recently, the church planned to protest Lorde’s concert in Kansas.
Phelps was being cared for in a Shawnee County facility, said Steve Drain, a Westboro Baptist Church spokesman.
There is currently no information on what he died from; on Sunday he was said to be suffering from “unspecified health problems.”
There have been numerous attempts to officially label the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group, such as this White House petition from December 2012, which garnered over 300,000 signatures.
