I seem to recall hearing that there was some sort of legal or liability issue that made it impossible to follow through with the offer.
Probably some legal risk involved. But that would always have been true.
Why bother: they’d be converted to the other side’s flavor of hate-mongering faster than Tom Tuttle from Tacoma
They are a very small group that consists almost exclusively of Fred Phelp’s children and grandchildren, plus a few spouses, plus a couple of other people. Fred Phelps was literally the patriarch of the church. There isn’t any other support of the church. In fact they switched from picketing gay funerals to picketing military funerals to make sure that the church/family has no friendly outside contact.
If you just hate gays there are plenty of right-wing christians who will agree with you. Hate gays and soldiers, and you’re down to single digits. And that was the point of the picketing, to keep the grandchildren isolated so they couldn’t make friends with other people and leave the family. To leave the family you have to give up every friendly human contact you’ve ever known, since everyone hates them. That’s extremely scary and very difficult logistically even if you want to leave.
Fred Phelps was motivated by simple sadism, he enjoyed inflicting suffering on people. If his children and grandchildren could leave the family, he wouldn’t have any victims, he’d just be a hateful old man sitting alone in a nursing home screaming at the attendants. The media campaigns and protests and crazy trolling weren’t aimed at the rest of the world, they were aimed at the members of the chuch/family, to keep them in line and isolated.
One problem was you can’t actually get commercial flights into the country right now.
I’ve watched the WBC for over twenty years, stood cheek by jowl with them during counter protests. And what Lemur866 says is on the spot.
Let me give you one story, told to me by my father. The church he attended, one fine Sunday morning, was being picketed by the WBC. There is a short breezeway that faces out onto the sidewalk where the picketing was going on. Another member, inside, was an elementary school teacher, and one of the little Phelps kids was a student of hers. He saw his teacher inside and gave a big wave to her, and she waved back. Poor kid got yanked away by a female relative in the picket line, and although the woman’s words couldn’t be heard, the teacher assumed he was being given a dressing down. My dad saw this himself, and said it looked like the little boy wanted to cry. Poor kid.
Poor kid, but not surprising.
Not to mention that they were and are cowards. I started riding with the Patriot Guard about 10 years ago. The main rule about dealing with the WBC was Do Not Engage the Crazy and never NEVER touch them. Be human shields to block them from view, sing to drown them out and if needed start the bikes with the pipes pointed in their direction. Sometimes there would be a few of them setting up at a funeral…they would always leave posthaste when they heard the bikes.
I’m seeing the future, something about them being captured, and a video and gasp another headless baptists…
Fred made his money as a personal injury lawyer. Oddly enough, I understand at one time he was a pretty respectable civil rights attorney. Anyway, in his next career, he’d walk up to your door, knock, introduce himself, and explain that he just tripped on your sidewalk and injured his knee and was going to sue you for $50,000 or so. But, if you wanted to settle out of court for $5,000, well, just write him a check and he’d drop it. Eventually, the local judges got wise to him and dismissed every case he brought to court.
His daughter is also an attorney. Lately, their MO is to say or do anything they can to provoke someone to assault them. And they’re really good at that. You’ll notice that in all their “protests” there are some of their people holding video cameras. That’s to collect evidence to use in court.
This book by his daughter is pretty amazing: Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church: Drain, Lauren, Pulitzer, Lisa: 9781455512423: Amazon.com: Books
Is your church gay? 
Are the nutters involved in various intramural local religious battles?
Nope, I’m Episcopalian. The WBC is an equal opportunity hater, denomination doesn’t matter. The key with the WBC church picketings is that the church must be on a street that, for Sunday mornings, has plenty of traffic. My church is one of several others in a cluster about eight blocks long. First, they would hit the Catholics at 9:30 AM, then come to our place between 10:00 and 10:30, then down two blocks to the LC-MS Lutherans at 11:00. Depending on how many people they had they could split up and hit another Catholic church two blocks off of our street at 10:30, and the ELCA Lutheran just a few block further at 11:00.
They very rarely have picketed the one synagogue in town because it’s not on a high profile street. But the first church they regularly picketed was the other Episcopal church in town, and it is in a high profile intersection. Although that’s not why they did it then, in the early 90’s. I was part of a group of people that organized a rally at a local park. We called it “Sunday in the Park Without Fred” We sent out invitations to every church in town, only three showed, and that church, St. David’s, not only had members show up, but they wore their congregations softball team shirts, so they were identifiable. It was the next Sunday that the WBC showed up at St. David’s and started a campaign against them. Until the church got an injunction the WBC would be on the sidewalk of their property, yelling the vilest of epithets against those entering the building. For so called church people they had real potty mouths.
One Sunday, on the feast of Pentecost, about the third or second most important Sunday of the Christian calendar, I was helping out by doing counter picketing. This was before the injunction, so the WBC intermingled amongst the rest of us. Now, a number of people going in were wearing red clothing, shirts, blouses, and so on, as it’s the color of fire(for the tongues of flame representing the Holy Spirit) I heard one Phelps son-in-law yell at a little old lady with a cane.
He said: ( spoilered for content)
You’r wearing that red skirt to hide the blood pouring out of your rectum, aren’t you?
Later on, during picketing, I was proud to see the diocesan Bishop(he’s now retired) come and help in the counterpicketing. He wasn’t an ivory tower kind of guy
Named Hills, you say?
Yes, it is illegal to give people first class ticket for which nobody has paid.