How to respond to the death of a monster? Dance? Rejoice? Sing (again) Ding Dong the Witch is Dead?

For Fred Phelps, the founder and patriarch of the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for picketing funerals with banners subtly proclaiming GOD HATES FAGS, it is inevitable that one other idea has already been widely suggested: picket his funeral.

How deliciously ironic, you might think. How apt. How Old Testament. But an eye for an eye doesn’t just make us all blind, it makes us stupid, inhumane, sinking to his subterranean level.

It is also distinctly impractical – the remaining members of the church have previously stated that Westboro does not hold funerals for their own, excommunicated or not. Of course. Funerals give comfort, catharsis, dignity – a holy trinity of human compassion, antithetical to hate-mongers.

No, the most befitting response to Phelps’s death lies in his life. We know about the funeral picketing. It wasn’t only the soldiers he shamed, deeming them puppets of a “fag-enabling” country. It was anyone with even the faintest association with gay people. And with any prominent LGBT people – the Westboro members were attention-seeking trolls long before the internet even existed. Phelps first gained international coverage for his family cult by picketing Matthew Shepard’s funeral.

This was the gay student – 21 years old – tortured, murdered and strung up on a fence in a Wyoming field in 1998. The police officer who found him later said that the only parts of his face not covered in blood were two streaks where tears had washed it away. Yet Phelps held in his right hand a placard reading MATT IN HELL, complete with a photograph of Shepard with a pink triangle on his forehead – the sign used by the Nazis in concentration camps. In his left hand stood a banner: NO SPECIAL LAW FOR FAGS.

Fred Phelps did not recognize hate crimes as anything special because he was a walking hate criminal.

I spoke to Matthew Shepard’s mother Judy on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of her son’s death and brought up the protest.

“Why would people go through their lives doing that?” she asked rhetorically, before offering a possible explanation.

“The depth of his hate speaks volumes. People who express that much hatred are unhappy with their own sexuality.”

I have always thought Fred Phelps was gay. Where else would such an inflamed, all-pervading obsession arise but from continually suppressed homoerotic fantasies? We hate what we can’t have. Freud identifies the defense mechanism “reaction formation” to denote those who so despise a part of their inner world that they outwardly campaign against it. Phelps is its utmost illustration.

Judy Shepard also said that the demonstration played a part in her commitment to championing gay rights. She has dedicated her life since to speaking in schools around America against hate. That is how we can react to the death of Fred Phelps. To use it as fuel. To see him not as a monster, far removed, but as a symptom of an ill against which we must always remain vigilant.

How, then, do we react to his family? In the last few months they have seemingly managed without him, having ostracized him for reasons still not fully explained. Some sources suggest a power struggle at the top of the church. It does not matter. Louis Theroux’s documentary dubbed the Phelpses, with not a small amount of accuracy, the “Most Hated Family in America”.

I wish, however, we could view them differently: as victims. Three years ago I tracked down Nathan Phelps, Fred’s estranged son, who ran away from the church at the strike of midnight on his 18th birthday. He told me about the violence and abuse Fred inflicted.

I would see him beat my brothers and sisters and kick them as they lay on the floor. He would grab me, pull me toward him and then put his knee up so it would go in my stomach. He would do that over and over and over. … Then there was the mattock. It’s a two-headed farming tool, with a hole on one side and an axe head on the other. He used that to beat us. He also had leather boxing gloves with a bar running through. He would put those on to hit me round the face and body. He would strangle me. … As he beat us he would tell us that we were evil and deserved to die.

Nathan said, too, that their mother Margie, on one occasion, was trying to get away from Fred as he was beating her, started to fall down the stairs, reached out and ripped her arm out of its socket. Fred did not let her go to the hospital, Nathan said. Her body never properly healed.

The Phelps family is the freakishly hateful result of domestic abuse. To see them through any other prism is to dispense with our own humanity – however tempting. Theirs is a story far beyond the model of Stockholm syndrome. And so I suggest we stop hating them and fight them with something else, something they might possibly understand: a very Christian forgiveness. With love’s antithesis being indifference, forgiveness – that highest of virtues – is surely the real antidote to hate.

Oscar Wilde, always a jester about the solemnest of subjects, advised, “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” But I do not wish to annoy those who consider annoyance an art form. I wish that they would recover, get well, heal, lay to rest their leader’s twisted paranoia.

My ultimate wish, however, is that there would be, for a few revelatory moments, an afterlife, one in which Fred Phelps sees that there is no god, no hell, no damnation for we abominations, nor for anyone – not even him. And that he would see this void mirroring a life squandered on the pettiest of hates, sees that all along it was he who was the deviant, he who embodied humanity’s sickness. I wish too he would see Judy Shepherd, dignified, carrying on, and all the mothers of all those whose funerals he desecrated, unbowed and empathetic. And, finally, that he could see us, the opponents of hate, the inevitable victors in these bloody culture wars, looking back at him with pity, with forgiveness, with the humanity he never mustered, flags billowing, wedding bands glistening, emboldened, undeterred, marching, laughing, and with the grace forged on the ashes of bigotry, smiling in the face of perversity.