Posted on 03/13/2013 6:46:22 AM PDT by xzins
Phelps is the sixth of 13 children of Fred Phelps, the notorious pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.
After Nate left his family in the dead of night, he moved to California and later to Canada. As his family’s notoriety grew, he began telling his story and became a vocal campaigner against religious extremism and child abuse. .
Nate left Westboro in 1976 and says he has carried the emotional scars ever since.
When he was young, Nate, now 53, recalls his mother keeping him and his elder brother Mark away from their father as much as possible.
“He had this old barber’s strap and used it so much that the last six inches were frayed, kind of like a cat-o-nine-tails, and he’d hit you with it and it’d wrap around your hips and rip the skin,” Nate says. “By the time I turned eight I remember he had started using a mattock handle instead. Similar to a pickaxe handle, it was about 4ft long and bigger than a baseball bat.” Nate says his father would fly into rages and beat him and his siblings mercilessly: “Then he’d set the mattock down and hit them with his fist.” Nate recalls one particular occasion when he was bent over a church pew backwards and felt like his back was breaking. When he tried to escape, Fred split his head open.
It’s an incident Mark Phelps, who left two years before Nate, recalls with clarity. “Fred’s always denied it, but there is no question,” Mark told me later in a telephone call.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I'm not a psychologist by any means but I beleive this guy's story. It fits with Fred Phelps image of a hateful, vengeful god. A god who cheers the death of Ameerican service people. I'm not denying that God hates sin or that He reserves vengeance unto Himself but I find it very hard to believe that God wants His followers harassing His people while the grieve the death of a son or huisband or father. I have no trouble seeing that it might cheer up a sicko like Fred Phelps though.
Interesting. Glad he escaped the brutal cretin.
From the end of the article we get a good idea of the consequences when religion gets sick:
In the mid-Nineties, when Westboro’s campaign of hate was still in its infancy, Nate was driving home late one night, flicking through the radio stations, when he heard the voice of his father. It was a talk radio programme he listened to regularly. “I assumed it was a pre-recorded session,” Nate says, “so when I got home I called the station to talk to the hosts. But it wasn’t pre-recorded. It was live. The host said, ‘You’re Fred Phelps’s son, you wanna ask him a question?’ The presenter then turned to Fred Phelps and asked him, ‘Do you have a son, Nate?’ ‘Well, I used to,’ he replied.
“At that point I was still clinging to the religious arguments, so I asked him about passages in the Bible that I thought contradicted his behaviour,” Nate says. “How he justified his behaviour based on a particular verse.” But Nate got the wrong verse number, and his father picked him up on it. “I’d never interrupted him before and I told him to answer the question,” Nate says. “He just blew up. You didn’t talk that way to him. He started screaming. And that was it: the only time I’ve talked to my old man since I left.”
Fred Phelps. Democrat. Al Gore fund raiser in 1988.
I forgot - civil rights lawyer - NAACP award winner.
I wouldn't read too much into that. It seems like he was a "civil rights lawyer" back in the 1960s, when being a civil rights lawyer meant something - fighting against Jim Crow laws, etc. He appears to have gone off the deep end only after that. It would be a disservice to civil rights lawyers of that era to associate them with what this a**hole is doing now (or to associate them with what "civil rights lawyers" are doing now, for that matter).
Bleeeech. He’s more despicable then I knew.
Nate Phelps is one screwed up sad individual. His dad is one extreme and he is the athiest opposite extreme it seems. Now a sad divorced athiest. Pray for his soul!
He is an unlikely looking ex-member of one of the most notorious fundamentalist Christian churches in the world: a large, friendly man with a grey goatee and small hoop earring in his left ear, he looks relaxed as he recounts his horrifying story of mental and physical abuse.
Yep. I thought that too. Reminiscent of Frankie Shaeffer Jr. in that regard.
Yep. I thought that too. Reminiscent of Frankie Shaeffer Jr. in that regard.
This nugget is good one to drag out when the race whores don the Cloak of Moral Superiority.
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