As far as the original post, we shouldn't expect to see them going anywhere any time soon. Apparently he was excommunicated a while ago, and one of his children has been running things for months.
I believe I also heard that there won't be a funeral, so no picketing. Though even if there were a funeral, many people in the LGBT community have expressed that they would have loved to picket his funeral with signs that said, "We forgive you." So it certainly would not have been the mob that many people would have been looking for.
I think we should remember here that while his freedom of speech should have been protected under law, that isn't the same thing as freedom from criticism. His freedom of speech gave him the right to say what he wanted, and mine gave me the right to say that he was wrong and that I thought he should shove it. Freedom of speech is a legal protection from government censorship, not from individuals expressing distaste at what you're saying and asking or demanding that you stop.
People are going to have different feelings about his passing. He caused a lot of people a lot of pain. It is easy for those of us who were not directly affected by him to say that we can and should forgive him. We don't have as much to forgive. But for those who do have a lot to forgive him for, we should give them the space to process in the way they need to. Some will choose to forgive. Some will want to but won't find the strength. Some just have no interest in forgiveness.
But forgiveness is not for the other person. Fred Phelps certainly can't care if he is forgiven, and his family probably doesn't care either. Forgiveness is for the person doing the forgiving. If someone isn't ready to take that step, that's something for them to work out with themselves and their own beliefs, and it doesn't help to have people telling them how they should be feeling or reacting.
