04/05/2010
Nate Phelps, the estranged son of fag-hating soldier-hating, America-hating Westboro Baptist Church pastor Fred Phelps, spoke out against him in an interview that aired last night on Vision TV in Canada: "In his first in-depth television interview, he tells journalist Peter W. Klein about a childhood dominated by a fear of going to hell, and says the Westboro Baptist Church shares some of the same traits as a cult. Phelps says his father regularly beat his mother and 11 siblings, used racial epithets and blamed the world’s problems on homosexuality ...
http://www.towleroad.com/2010/04/natephelps.html... In October of 2008 a young man named Trevor Melanson climbed into my cab in Cranbrook, British Columbia. As I drove him to the airport he talked about his activities as a journalism student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Suddenly he was explaining to me about a program on the BBC about a small, radical church in Topeka, Kansas. The look of stunned confusion on his face, when I told him that was my family, will stay with me for a long time. That chance meeting turned into an award winning article on the UBC newspaper website called “Running From Hell”. That article can now be found at:
http://thetyee.ca/Life/2009/10/07/PreacherPhelps/ ... We opened this site in June of 2009 and in early December hit the milestone of 10,000 unique visitors ...
http://natephelps.com/Phelps' son speaks out
Topeka Capital-Journal ...
Jul 23, 2006 by Ric Anderson
... Nate Phelps, the estranged son of Fred Phelps, said the church's protests at the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq had driven him to speak out about his father's actions. Nate Phelps said he left home for good in 1980 after a terror-filled childhood in which Fred Phelps beat him and his siblings during outbursts of violence. "When I watch what he's doing now, I see shadows and visions of who he was when we were growing up," he said. "When we were kids, he could vent his rage and anger on us. Now, I'm seeing the same kind of vicious rhetoric and cruelty, it's just that he can't beat these people up." Now living in Canada, Nate Phelps said he hadn't spoken to his father or any of his brothers and sisters who remain loyal to Fred Phelps for about 15 years. His last contact with his father came in the early 1990s, he said, when the two were pitted against each other on a radio talk show and ended up shouting at each other for about 60 seconds before the host cut them off. Around that time, Nate Phelps said, he spoke with several reporters about his father, the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church. He also was working with an author who was writing a book about Fred Phelps and the church, he said, but Nate Phelps eventually withdrew from the book project, and the media requests died down ...
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4179/is_20060723/ai_n16666550/