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The Kansas correctional system's ten overcrowded facilities house 9,175 prisoners. The state's prisons currently release about 5,800 inmates annually, including parolees and persons who have simply been discharged.

"That release figure is misleading," cautions Margie Phelps, Kansas DOC's Director of Reentry Planning, "because it reflects the multiple releases of some who have been through multiple incarcerations."

Efficiently cooperative when reached by phone at her worksite, the 50-year-old Topeka attorney has a clear command of facts pertaining to Kansas prisons and the risk-reduction protocols she oversees. Her summer 2005 citation as the Kansas Correctional Association's "Employee of the Quarter" credits her with "almost single-handedly" establishing the state's offender release program.

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helps has been praised by DOC officials, who note that her extramural pursuits on behalf of her father's church seem not to affect her job performance. Considering that her personal calendar has for years been choked with activist commitments-- talk-show appearances, propaganda distribution, letter-writing, travel to remote parts of the US to picket funerals and other events-- her ability to plan her time is impressive. No member of her fecund clan promotes its patriarch's core message, "God hates fags," more ardently than Margie, Rev. Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr.'s second daughter and most passionate disciple.

Prison Legal News, a Seattle-based publication monitoring US prisons, notes that a number of Phelps family members occupy key positions in the Kansas Department of Corrections. Margie's eldest brother, Fred Phelps, Jr., 53, once a parole officer, is a Kansas DOC attorney. Her youngest brother, Timothy, 43, is a spokesman for the Shawnee County Department of Corrections. Timothy's wife Lee Ann and sister Elizabeth, 44, both attorneys, have been employed by the Shawnee County Sheriff's Department. The youngest Phelps sibling, Abigail, 38, works for the Kansas Juvenile Justice Authority.

All belong to Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), whose Phelps-led congregation regards gay sex as the unpardonable sin. In their view, the United States-- "a nation of fags and fag enablers"-- has courted the wrath of God by allowing homosexuality to spread and thrive. The Phelpses condemn all anti-discrimination statutes pertaining to sexual orientation, and urge the repudiation of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 US Supreme Court decision gutting sodomy laws. Not merely insisting that homosexual activity be criminalized, they advocate executing anyone caught having intimate relations with a person of the same sex.

"All nations must immediately pass and enforce laws that make sodomy a capital crime," reads a typical mass-faxed WBC flyer. In the 1980s, Fred Phelps, Sr. was a frequent talk-show guest of Colorado reactionary Pete W. Peters, author of Death Penalty for Homosexuals is Prescribed in the Bible. Recordings of anti-gay colloquies between Peters and Phelps remain available through the Christian Identity leader's mail-order ministry, despite a rift caused by Peters's dim view of Baptists.

The Westboro Baptist Church has no connection to mainstream congregations, however. Most Baptists, including those who oppose gay rights, give the Phelps cult a wide berth. WBC's blood-and-thunder theology, which Phelps identifies as Primitive Baptist, is a Phelps-invented cocktail of steroidal Calvinism. Its vision is close to that of reactionary, racist Christian Identity sects. It goals are synchronous with those of Christian Reconstructionism, a hard-right fundamentalist movement whose adherents' mission is to "take dominion" of the United States and restore Old Testament law.

Born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1929, Fred W. Phelps became an ordained Baptist preacher at 17. As a young man, he was a dedicated amateur boxer who never dated girls. He attended paleofundamentalist Bob Jones University for three semesters, later moving on to John Muir College in Pasadena, California. In the early '50s, he earned fame as a fledgling street missionary whose theme was lust. Following his marriage in 1952, he kept his wife pregnant for most of the next 16 years. He founded Westboro Baptist Church in 1955.

The Phelps family enclave now covers a block along 12th Street near downtown Topeka. The church or "meeting hall" is actually in the basement of Fred Sr.'s home. Family members live in adjacent houses. A large, inverted American flag flies over the security-fenced compound on a fifty-foot pole. At the center of the property, an Olympic-sized swimming pool doubles as a baptismal font. The WBC congregation numbers somewhere between 100 and 200; most members belong to the extended Phelps clan.

The group's regimen of anti-gay picketing evolved from 1991 demonstrations protesting the existence of a cruising area inside Topeka's Gage Park. While continuing to picket a variety of targets in hope of turning the human rights clock back to the days of public stonings, the Phelpses have embraced post-Biblical media. The increasingly sophisticated constellation of websites launched by Phelps grandson Benjamin encompasses Godhates-fags.com, Godhatesamerica.com, Priests-rapeboys.com, and the forthcoming Smellthebrimstone.com.

An interest in reconciling present-day legal systems with the Book of Leviticus helped spur Phelps, now 77, to pursue a legal career himself, then put 11 of his 13 children through law school. (It also stoked political ambitions whose failure has enhanced the family's self-assessment as the persecuted Chosen.) Surprisingly, most of the Phelps family attorneys, including Fred père, obtained their law degrees at Topeka's Washburn University, a secular institution originally known as Lincoln College, a school that admitted black and female students as early as the 1860s.

As an attorney, Phelps was a harassment-lawsuit specialist with more than four hundred lawsuits to his credit. His official biography says he "retired from practicing law in 1987." In fact, the state of Kansas disbarred him for misconduct in 1979. In the aftermath of complaints issued in 1985 against Phelps and five of his lawyerly offspring, Phelps, Sr. ceased practicing law in federal court as well. Another upshot of disciplinary hearings held in 1987 was suspension of Margie Phelps's legal license for a year.

Of the nine Phelps offspring who remain loyal to their father, at least four, including Margie, are affiliated with Phelps-Chartered, the family law firm. Described at the Phelps-Chartered website as "a sole practitioner who serves as co-counsel with [Phelps-Chartered] on select cases," Margie specializes in "employment and constitutional law, appellate practice, and medical malpractice."

Potty-Mouthed Fundamentalists

Perhaps her family's chief rhetorician, Margie also specializes in vitriolic invective. Answering e-mail from visitors to Godhatesamerica.com, she responds even to nonconfrontational queries with insults. ("Slope-browed fool" and "hell-bound freak" are favorites.) Her rants often heat past coherence. "Prepare all your nonsensical reasoning and petitioning and blah, burp, fart, spew-out-leftover-feces, blah, for the Judgmental Day," she advised one gay activist in a November 2005 posting. She typically concludes messages with "Magormissabib" (Hebrew for "terror on all sides") or "See ya soon, fouled-in-feces baboon!"

Among Margie Phelps's abiding interests, excrement ranks high. To set the tone for her letters and postings, the Kansas DOC's Director of Reentry Planning sometimes enlists the salutation "hello feces-eaters." Her occasional allusions to semen-drinking carry less urgency. In January 2007, she wrote, "The perverts who call themselves Americans stumble around liken [sic] drunken retards, pretending it's just fine to exalt a human being to a special status because HE EATS FECES." She has called Casper, Wyoming "the town world-famous for promoting sex with feces." In a 2005 response to someone who suggested that feces-eating may not be universal among gay people, she wrote, "One feces snack by one fag is ONE TOO MANY."

Margie, who remains unmarried, is thoroughly absorbed in her father's cause. She has joined her family in picketing funerals of gay activists, people with AIDS, and bashing victims-- most notoriously Matthew Shepard-- waving signs reading "God Hates Fags," "AIDS Cures Fags," and "Fags Die/God Laughs." The family has picketed the funerals of Bill Clinton's mother and Al Gore's father. "The thing that people miss about us is the compassion that drives us," Margie told the Wichita Eagle in 2005.

Going global, the cult has targeted Canada, Sweden, and Great Britain ("Island of the Sodomite Damned"). Immediately after the London transport bombings on July 7, 2005, WBC mass-faxed a flyer reading, "Thank God for the bombing of London's subway today... wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured. Wish it was many more." Zimbabwe, whose President Robert Mugabe calls gay people "worse than dogs or pigs," may be the only nation on earth to have earned the Phelpses' approval.

In the purity of its fanaticism, the Phelps clan has alienated more corseted right-wing homophobes such as Jerry Falwell, who has called Fred Phelps "a first-class nut." Beginning in 2005, the family shifted the principal focus of its funeral demos to memorial services for soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing up with signs reading "Vet Fag" and "Thank God for IEDs" (improvised explosive devices). Margie Phelps has referred to the US flag as "a filthy fag rag worthy of use in wiping up feces."

Recently the Phelpses expressed disappointment that Cho Seung-hui, the Virginia Tech shooter, failed to kill more people. ("We would have preferred 33,000," said Rev. Fred in a video clip available at Godhates-fags.com.) Their intention to picket funerals of Virginia Tech casualties was stated, then abandoned. In exchange for a promise to set their protest plans aside, radio talk-show host Mike Gallagher gave Margie Phelps and her sister Shirley Phelps-Roper three hours of national air time on April 24.

'Tween Church and State

When a key prison official is also a high-profile member of a religious cult devoted to criminalizing a sexual minority, the resulting situation is morally queasy and constitutionally problematic. But Margie Phelps, a lawyer from a tribe of lawyers, knows where constitution-al boundaries lie. Aware that the Civil Rights Act protects her from losing her job over statements she makes as a private citizen, she knows just where, when, and how to articulate her dreams of Leviticus-friendly criminal codes.

Asked about faith-based components of her reentry-planning agenda, Phelps evades the question. Reminded of the presence of the evangelical Christian Prison Fellowship's InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), a reentry program billed as "Biblically based and Christ-centered," at the Ellsworth, Kansas medium-security prison, she says sharply, "We have nothing whatever to do with those people"-- although, as Director of Reentry Planning, she oversees release programs statewide. The biases of support mechanisms directly crafted by Phelps for paroled and discharged prisoners are elusive.

Kansas DOC deserves at least some credit for maintaining an inmate reentry program; many states lack any meaningful counterpart. But the Kansas correctional system does not exactly glisten with enlightenment, especially with regard to sex crimes. Among the first states to enact a "sex predator" statute, Kansas remains doggedly repressive. From Leroy Hendricks, subjected to probable lifetime civil commitment for fondling two teenaged boys in public (see The Guide, January 1999) to young Matthew Limon, imprisoned for consensual gay sex with another teenager (see The Guide, January 2006), scores of gay men have fallen afoul of Kansas's institutionalized homophobia. Perhaps fortunately, persons civilly committed for sexual offenses fall outside Margie Phelps's jurisdiction. But her programs do serve a range of prisoners, some gay, some incarcerated for sexual crimes.

Decrying fecal fags in her off hours, Margie Phelps joins her family in voicing animosities deeply entrenched in American culture, expressing sentiments many of her DOC colleagues-- and many Americans-- merely think. Some opponents feel that banning the Phelps family's "hate speech" would have a curative effect on homophobia; others disagree.

"Silencing these people won't solve bigotry," says attorney Jeremy Leaming, a spokesman for the Washington, DC-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "Censorship just drives it underground and makes it more dangerous."

Leaming, who is gay, points out, "The state can't discriminate against an employee on religious grounds, no matter how wacko the religion. Margie Phelps has the right to express her personal opinions publicly as long as she's not speaking as Director of Reentry. It must be a hard job keeping her private and professional lives separate. But so far, as infamous as her family is, she seems to be playing by the rules."