Nate Phelps gets why some people rejoiced at the death of his father.

“I understand where they’re coming from,” Phelps, 55, said in a telephone interview from Calgary.

“I’m deeply sorry for the hurt they’ve suffered.”

He’s the son of Fred Phelps, longtime leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, who was universally condemned for his virulent message of hatred against gays. Fred Phelps died shortly after midnight on Thursday .

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Nate Phelps fled his father’s church — and the U.S. — for Alberta when he was just 18. He said he can understand why Patty Sourivong, a mother in Iowa, told the Des Moines Register newspaper on Thursday that she’s glad his father has died.

“Am I happy that he’s gone?” she asked an Iowa reporter. “Yeah, I’m happy that he’s gone. It’s cruel to say that, but what he did was cruel.”

Nate Phelps said he can’t blame her at all for feeling this way.

His father picketed the 2006 funeral of her son, Kampha Sourivong, after he was killed in combat in Iraq.

Fred Phelps preached that American soldiers were killed because God was punishing the country for its support of gay rights.

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Sourivong had to sneak in the back door of her son’s funeral at City High School in Iowa City to avoid Fred Phelps and a group of like-minded protesters, holding up signs declaring “God Hates Fags” and "God welcomes the deaths of American soldiers."

Some Tweeters joked that it was appropriate his father died on the first day of spring and on International Happiness Day.

Nate Phelps said he knows there are plenty of others who share those sentiments, and while he sympathizes, he wishes they could move past hatred and focus on something or someone to love.

There’s nothing stronger, he said, than to respond to hatred with love.

“Ultimately, we’re better when people respond with love, but I’m not going to judge them.”

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Nate Phelps said he finds himself totally in agreement with a position put out by Star Trek actor George Takei on Twitter immediately after his father’s death.

“I take no solace or joy in this man’s passing,” Takei wrote. “We will not dance upon his grave, nor stand vigil at his funeral holding ‘God Hates Freds’ signs, tempting as it may be.”

“He was a tormented soul, who tormented so many,” Takei wrote. “Hate never wins out in the end. It instead goes always to its lonely, dusty end.”

Nate Phelps said that loneliness was the thing his father seemed to fear most.

Perhaps that started when his father was just 5 and his mother died.

Certainly it got worse last August, when he was kicked out of the splinter church he founded for reasons that have not been publicly explained.



“He had a terrible time with the idea of abandonment,” Nate Phelps said. “He died alone.”

Nate Phelps is an atheist who speaks out often on LGBT issues. He doesn’t believe there will be any great divine judgment for his father.

“The only thing we have is here, and now he’s gone.”

He originally didn’t plan to go to his father’s funeral. Then he heard from other family members that there might not be a funeral to go to anyway.

At some point, there will probably be some sort of memorial, he said.

While he was estranged from his father, Nate Phelps said he still feels a strong sense of loss and sadness.