Fred Phelps is gone. Here’s hoping his hateful rhetoric follows him to the grave.

The truth is, Fred Phelps made a lot of us feel pretty great about ourselves. No, not the families of AIDS patients, gay men, American soldiers and celebrities whose funerals he relentlessly picketed along with members of his Westboro Baptist Church. As Phelps told journalist Donna Minkowitz, harassing bereaved families was his specialty. “I love to use words that send them off the edge emotionally,” he told her.

Phelps’ early victims included not just AIDS advocates like Nicholas Rango (1993) and Randy Shilts (1994) and gay men of modest fame like composer Kevin Oldham (1993), but also anonymous individuals like Kenneth Scott, a Topeka graduate student who died in 1992. Scott’s sister Sue Mee told Minkowitz, “When Kenny died, they came to the funeral with a sign that said ‘Fags=Death’ with a big smiley face.” Years later, Scott’s family would still receive phone calls asking, “Is this the house where fags live?”

Later, Phelps broadened his ghoulish trolling to include the funerals of U.S. soliders, whom he reckoned God had killed as punishment for America’s immorality. Those families, too, suffered real harm. I think the Supreme Court reached the right decision in Snyder v. Phelps, the 2011 case that concluded the First Amendment protected even hateful public protesters. But it is impossible to read the testimony of Albert Snyder, the father of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, whose funeral Phelps and family bombarded with signs that read “God hates you,” “Fag Troops” and “Thank God for dead soldiers,” and not be utterly devastated. “I want so badly to remember all the good stuff and so far, I remember the good stuff, but it always turns into the bad,” Snyder recounted to the court.

Phelps was not just some Jerry Springer – ized cartoon. He was a real menace. But for the rest of us, he was a useful bigot. The left sometimes deployed Phelps as a facile synecdoche for the perils of religious extremism, even though his church was largely composed of his immediate family and isolated from conservative movements.

For the right, he was the ideal foil. As People for the American Way fellow Peter Montgomery put it, “Phelps allowed other anti-gay leaders to posture that he was the face of hatred. But the substance of the message to gays is similar: Repent or be damned. It’s just that Phelps framed it as ‘God hates fags,’ while people like Bryan Fischer [of the American Family Association] say God loves them and wants them to abandon their demonic lifestyles.”

For the media, Phelps was irresistible bait. And on the occasion of his death, we should ask why that was. What distinguishes him from any other raving street-corner prophet is the simple-mindedness of his message. And to discuss Phelps as if he were a morally vexing and profound evil is to dignify him with a complexity he lacked. His hatred was banal.

In the end, he was only sound and fury. On his own merits, he accomplished nothing. He was a nobody.

RICHARD KIM Is executive editor of TheNation.com