TOPEKA, Kan. — As the United States Supreme Court heard arguments last week over a small church that pickets the funerals of dead soldiers, comparisons quickly emerged to an earlier test of the bounds of the First Amendment: a 1977 decision that American neo-Nazis had a right to march through a Chicago suburb where many Holocaust survivors lived.

But imagine, for a moment, that the group in question did not simply wish to pass through town with their hateful message. Imagine that they moved in, signs, speech and all.

So goes the fate of Topeka, a city where free speech is less an idea than a lived experience.

Fred W. Phelps, whose operation is at the center of the case before the highest court now, arrived here a half-century ago to work as a preacher for a local Baptist church. Now a self-described prophet of God’s wrath, Mr. Phelps has solicited outrage with his venomous protesting at military funerals all over the country — including the burial of a young Marine in Maryland that prompted the case before the Supreme Court — as well as burning the Koran and enlisting his grandchildren to stomp on the American flag.

Mr. Phelps is regarded here as the ultimate example of an irritating local gadfly. But he and his sprawling family, which make up nearly all of Westboro Baptist Church, have been at the heart of decades of local debate about the proper limits of the First Amendment when speech is meant to be as purposefully inflammatory as it is here.