Heritage founder Edwin Feulner’s death reminds us, every time hell mourns, a devil gets their horns

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown less sympathetic when someone whose entire life’s work was about hurting others dies. Once, I tried to find some redeeming quality, some lesson in grace. But the older I get, and the more I see the long shadows cast by bigots long after they’ve left this Earth, I feel no need to pretend or have pity.

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In fact, I feel down right giddy, because the God I believe in, one who is compassionate and kind and inclusive, is not putting a welcome mat for these people outside of Heaven.

When Rush Limbaugh died, I didn’t mourn. When Pat Robertson passed on, I didn’t feel loss. When Anita Bryant finally stopped singing her syrupy sermons of hate, I offered no tributes. Instead, I wrote reminders about the ways in which these people were doing not God’s work but the devil’s work while they lived and breathed fire.

These were loathsome people who poisoned the well of a just society. They weren’t merely misguided; they were cruel, calculated, and proud of it.

And now Edwin Feulner has joined them. Hip, hip hooray! I’m sure the fires of hell were burning extra bright this week. And no, I feel no remorse in saying that because he felt no remorse for all the cruelty he preached.

Feulner, who died this week at 83, was a founder of the Heritage Foundation, an organization that doesn’t just promote conservative ideals, it manufactures cruelty with pseudo-academic polish.

Under his leadership, Heritage wasn’t just a think tank. It was a hate cauldron, quietly engineering a generations-long war against LGBTQ+ people, women, immigrants, and anyone who didn’t fit into the narrow, whitewashed version of America that Feulner called “civilized.” Come to think of it, when I’m about to type his name, I keep wanting to write “Fuhrer.”

The organization he birthed not only spawned evil — it spawned the sibling of evil that is the destructive Project 2025. This sweeping blueprint currently being implemented by the Trump administration, is the culmination of Feulner’s legacy, a dystopian manifesto dressed up as governance.

Read it (I did with a bucket next to my chair) and you’ll see the nightmare he’s left us: LGBTQ+ people erased from federal protections, diversity initiatives dismantled, trans health care criminalized, our very existence defined as a “threat” to national stability.

The giant boulder of hate Feulner threw into the lake of American society is still rippling. It echoes in school libraries where queer books are banned, in hospitals where trans kids are turned away, in courtrooms where rights once won are now under siege again.

His fingerprints are all over the far-right judges sitting on the Supreme Court, justices who are gutting civil liberties at a record pace. Letting Trump do whatever he wants to ruin the Constitution, the lives of immigrants, and the federal government. And it will take decades to undo the destruction he set in motion.

But what gnaws at me isn’t just the damage. It’s the deeper questions, What makes someone like Edwin Feulner hate so much? And,what did I, as a gay man, ever do to him that makes him hate us so much?

What drives a man to spend his life constructing barriers of oppression? What kind of soul wakes up every morning determined to make life harder for those already struggling to survive in a world stacked against them? Why would someone devote their smarts, their resources, and their connections to building a machine designed to suffocate the freedoms of others?

I’ve thought about this for days now, and the answer I keep returning to is this, and that is Feulner didn’t hate by accident. He hated with intention. He built an institution that dehumanized us by design. And throughout his life, as the suffering he helped create piled higher, young queer people taking their own lives, families torn apart, rights revoked, justice denied, he never showed an ounce of remorse.

In fact, he boasted about all he had done.

There was no apology. No moment of reckoning. No public reconsideration of the pain his policies caused. When someone is convicted of maiming or killing another person, a judge will sometimes temper sentencing if the convicted shows genuine remorse. But Feulner? He never sought forgiveness. He saw his destruction as victory.

He was proud of the terror he instigated.

And if God is the final judge, as Feulner presumably thought, then I can only imagine the sentencing. The God Feulner professed to believe in would weep for the LGBTQ+ youth who felt unworthy because of his ideology. That God would rage at the injustices baked into every Heritage plan and pronouncement.

That God wouldn’t be impressed by think tanks or policy memos or Ph.D.s in persecution. That God would judge him not by what he built, but by what he destroyed. At least that’s the way the God I worship would believe.

When we talk about legacy, Edwin Feulner did not leave a legacy of “ideas.” He left behind an institution known for oppression, exclusion and silence. And while his obituary may speak of his influence and his service to conservative causes, those of us who bore the brunt of his actions know the truth. His was a legacy of harm.

I don’t write these words lightly. But I write them honestly. Feulner is dead. And every time hell mourns, a devil gets their horns.

Death most certainly does not redeem the irredeemable. Feulner’s death doesn’t close a chapter. It reminds us how long this story is, and how long it took him to write what, in the end, amounts to a horror story.

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