I think they’re liberal plants/agent provocateurs.
The sheeple will judge real Christians by what these frauds do....and that’s the plan.
Nonsense. Read up on the history of Phelps and his Church. He's a sadistic wife-beater and child-beater and started using his warped religious crap to justify that decades before anyone outside of his series of small-town residences had ever heard of him.
Also, he was admitted to West Point in 1946, but couldn't attend until the following year because he was only 16. Instead, he attended a local community college for a year, during which he had some sort of "religious experience", and lost interest in attending West Point. Instead, he enrolled at Bob Jones College (now University). He was already displaying extreme hostile and violent tendencies during a mission trip the summer before he entered Bob Jones (apparently affiliated with Bob Jones, as it was just him and two other Bob Jones students, sent to Utah to try to convert Mormons).
There's zero evidence that this criminally insane man has ever been even loosely associated with any "liberal" group or people. Posing for a picture with an unwitting Al Gore was just an attempt to look as if he had connections beyond his crazy little family "church".
Fred Phelps Expose:
http://www.blank.org/addict/orig.addict.html
(looonnnnnggggg, but well worth the read)