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BALTIMORE (AP) - The head of a fundamentalist Kansas church being sued over a funeral protest testified in Baltimore today. Fred Phelps of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church said he didn't consider whether children would see a sign carried by protesters with the words "Semper Fi Fags" and two stick figures that appear to be engaged in a sex act. Phelps says they needed to warn to the country to change its wicked ways. Under cross-examination, Phelps agreed his presence was NOT wanted at the funeral and he could have protested somewhere else. Phelps' group is being sued by Albert Snyder,...

If this is not the place for vanity posts I apologize, but it's quite breaking news either. I heard at my church today that the Westboro Baptist Church will be protesting outside of a Roman Catholic and an Episcopal church next Saturday and a memorial to fallen firefighters and another RC church on Sunday. These aren't to protest funerals, rather to protest against...well...I don't know. Apparently God hates homosexuals, soldiers, firefighters, Catholics, and Episcopalians, though I'm not sure in what order. We've been told that there will be police present and that the best thing to do would be to...

Westboro Baptist Church (WBC Chronicles - Since 1955) 3701 SW 12" Street Topeka, Ks. 66604 785-273-0325 Religious Opinion and Bible Commentary on Current Events Tuesday, November 21,2006 NEWS RELEASE (Supplemental info: background, photos, audio sermons & hymns, and video footage - available free at: wwn.podhatesamerica.com, hatemongers.com, and www.thesiensofthetimes.net) WBC to picket the funerals of school children killed in Huntsville, Alabama, when their school bus from Lee High School plunged 30 feet off a highway overpass - in religious protest and warning: ccGod is not mocked!" Gal. 6:7. God Hates Fags! & Fag-Enablers! Ergo, God hates Alabama and America because they...

Men and women of the Patriot Guard Riders have one main mission: Show respect for soldiers killed in war and shield the mourning families and friends from protesters. Protests and military funerals President Bush signed a law on Memorial Day banning protests within 300 feet of national cemeteries. Last month, he said it "ensures that families of fallen service members will not have to endure protests during military funerals." Florida law also states that anyone who willfully interrupts or disturbs a military funeral honors detail commits a first-degree misdemeanor. On Saturday, the men and women of this national motorcyclists organization...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A Kansas church group that protests at military funerals nationwide filed suit in federal court, saying a Missouri law banning such picketing infringes on religious freedom and free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on behalf of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, which has outraged mourning communities by picketing service members' funerals with signs condemning homosexuality. The church and the Rev. Fred Phelps say God is allowing troops, coal miners and others to be killed because the United States tolerates gay men and...

created: 3/8/2006 8:26:18 AM updated: 3/8/2006 8:29:11 AM SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) -- A Missouri State University professor says a new state law that limits protests at funerals is so broad that it should be overturned. MSU journalism professor Andrew Cline says a Kansas church's picketing at funerals for U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq makes him "nauseous." But Cline said Missouri's new law is so vague that it invites a legal challenge. The picketing has spawned legislation in Missouri and several other states to limit funeral protests. Last week, Governor Blunt signed into law a bill to ban the demonstrations....

Fred Phelps calls himself a Christian minister, but his actions resemble a self-styled hatemonger with no room in his heart for the love of God or the forgiveness taught in Christ’s Gospel. Phelps has been a preacher (defrocked), a lawyer (disbarred) and a Democrat politician (never elected). Now, at age 76, his “church” is a congregation consisting of his 13 children and 50 grandchildren in a tiny compound in Topeka, Kansas. He is also the epitome of everything the elitist secular left would love to believe about every Christian conservative in America. Phelps first foisted his annoying presence onto the...

States move to bar protests at soldiers’ funerals Fundamentalists’ picketing may provoke clash of privacy, free speech rights The Associated Press Updated: 8:48 p.m. ET Feb. 6, 2006 COLUMBUS, Ohio - States are rushing to limit when and where people may protest at funerals — all because of a small fundamentalist Kansas church whose members picket soldiers’ burials, arguing that Americans are dying for a country that harbors homosexuals. During the 1990s, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., went around picketing the funerals of AIDS victims with protest signs that read, “God Hates Fags.” But politicians began paying more...

In a phone interview today, Shirley Phelps-Roper informed this reporter that a group of approximately 15 people will be coming to Buckhannon to picket at the memorial service on Sunday, January 15. They will be picketing between 1:15 to 2 p.m.Their website will soon be updated to reflect this, according to Phelps-Roper. The group will also be sending notices to law enforcement agencies to announce their plans, she added. Note: This article was written late last night after receiving a tip about this release. An editorial decision was made to put it in the paper to alert the area to...

Inside Grace Lutheran Church last Wednesday family and friends of fallen Ripon soldier Sergeant Andrew Wallace grieved. Outside, others stood with signs with messages including 'America is doomed,' 'God hates you,' 'Your pastor is a whore' and 'Thank God for dead soldiers.' The protesters were part of the anti-gay organization, the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), which believes God is punishing America for supporting homosexuality. "It was hard to take in," says junior Liz Molitor, who witnessed the protest. "I had heard about the group before, but I never imagined it all to be this graphic." The graphicness of the display...

SMYRNA, Tenn. (AP) - Members of a church say God is punishing American soldiers for defending a country that harbors gays, and they brought their anti-gay message to the funerals Saturday of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq. The church members were met with scorn from local residents. They chased the church members cars' down a highway, waving flags and screaming "God bless America." "My husband is over there, so I'm here to show my support," 41-year-old Connie Ditmore said as she waved and American flag and as tears came to her eyes. "To do this at a funeral is...

Free Republic Exclusive Fred Phelps, leader of the "God-hates-faXs" movement, is planning on crashing the funeral of one of our War Dead on July 4th. Why? To spread his message of anti-homosexual SPAM in the most inappropriate way imaginable. There's a time and a place for everything. He's a publicity whore, as far as I'm concerned. Here are snips from an earlier FR Report: "A SF SGT E-5, James Stewart, will be buried in St. Petersburg, Florida on July 4, 2005. It's wholly appropriate that he be buried on our nation's birthday, because Sergeant Stewart gave his life for our...

Marblehead police are readying for a possible hate group protest that threatens to mar the privacy and solemnity of a local man's military funeral. A radical Midwestern group has announced its intention to rally at the Marblehead funeral of U.S. Army Special Forces Staff Sgt. Christopher N. Piper, who died June 15 at Brooke Army Medical Center of wounds suffered in action in Afghanistan on June 3. The Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, proclaiming "thank God for IEDs" or roadside bombs, claims the attacks on September 11 and American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are God's vengeance on a nation that...

A Green Beret killed in Afghanistan will be laid to rest in his native Marblehead today as police brace for the anticipated arrival of a Kansas hate group. ``We're in Massachusetts now and we will be in Marblehead,'' said Margie Phelps of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church. The WBC has blamed the 9/11 attacks and deaths of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan on America's tolerance of homosexuals. The group, which recently demonstrated outside local Catholic churches and public schools it deemed tolerant of homosexuality, has threatened to show up at services today for Army Staff Sgt. Christopher Piper, who...

This just in: Millions of moderate Republicans and gay-terrified evangelical Christians and intellectually numbed conservative parents who thought they were doing some sort of good by blindly voting for Dubya and hence protecting their wee ones from swarthy Islamic evildoers who want to steal their kids' Kraft Lunchables and nuke Disneyland, all should be emerging from a deep fog of savage denial any minute now. Wake, they will, to the increasingly obvious fact that their beloved smirkin' president, the one who seemed to care about them so deeply just a couple weeks ago and who reached out to them and...

So here we are, staring down a rather historic moment amidst the sputtering ideological orgy that is the American experiment and if you're paying any sort of attention at all you're doubtlessly drunk on election hype and saturated with Bush/Kerry platitudes and you wish a white-hot death upon every screeching TV pundit who is right now analyzing yet another insidious national poll that seems to reveal everything and nothing at the exact same time. And Bush is out there right this very second stumping and sweating and blinking fast and defending his useless hideous little war and hurling snide little...

Secret societies? UFOs? The truth about what *really* happened on 9/11? The media cowers I get this a lot: Hey Mark, you're a rather weird, unconventional columnist, why don't you quit toeing the typical blasé journalism line and renounce the corporate-controlled news feeds and standard pop-culture drivel and instead write about the real truths, the real and sinister power structures at work in America and the world? Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones, and therefore suckle at the same tit of nefarious primeval Illuminati power and draw...

You know it's true. You know if, say, San Francisco had just been blasted by not two, not three, but fully four lethal trailer-park-eating earthquakes, why, the Right-wing Bible set would be yelping with barely disguised joy. Of course they would. They'd be jumping up and down and saying I told you so and pointing to Volume 18 of "Left Behind" and claiming that this was, of course, God's wrath upon the sinners and the gays and the heathens and sodomites and the tofu eaters and the Toyota Priuses and the yoga studios and the anal sex and the incense...

Aww, screw it. I mean, really. You just gotta love this thing. You just gotta love the fact that some semitruck company somewhere called International Truck and Engine Corp. is now coming out with what they claim is the world's largest production pickup, called the CXT, all 9 feet high and 8 feet wide, a whopping 21 feet long and 14,500 pounds and 18 million excruciating earthly groans of it. And in most states that don't give a crap for their roads or the environment or any human life that might be existing in the various passenger cars surrounding it,...

I have a good friend who believes, gloomily, bitterly, resignedly, that not only are we in for four more years of painful and cheerless BushCo-branded tyranny and misprision and aww-shucks dumb-guy shtick, but also that we are actually at the beginning of a long, brutal, fear-based Republican juggernaut that will last a good 16 more years, at least. Because this is how long it will take for the current horrific conservative cycle to play itself out, and this would resemble a more typical and historically proven 20-year pendulum swing, in this case one toward neoconservative right-wing hate and homophobia and...