Members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church are threatening to picket the funeral of Tim McLean, the young man decapitated on a Greyhound bus last week.Controversial? There is little dispute in this country that this is the sorriest excuse for a family to pollute a civilized nation since the Sawney Bean clan. (The Beans, 16th century Scottish bandits and cannibals, were eventually surrounded in their cave hide-out and killed by a posse).
The Kansas-based church - a small fundamentalist sect led by Fred Phelps - is reviled in the United States for protesting the funerals of hundreds of soldiers killed in the Iraq war. The sect gained notoriety in the 1990s by picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man beaten to death in Wyoming.
Actually they were widely reviled well before the Iraq war started. At one point, in 2000 iirc, they actually went to Iraq to take part in one of Saddam's orchestrated anti-American protests.
Seven members of the church originally planned to picket theatre performances in Toronto and Red Deer, Alta., later this week. They recently added Mr. McLean's Manitoba funeral to their itinerary and plan to stand outside the service with signs reading "God hates you," "the wrath of God is revealed," and "God hates Canada." God is sending a message through Tim McLean's murder that He and the commandments must be obeyed, Ms. Phelps-Roper said.
Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn are brought before a "Human rights commission" star chamber for "hate speech" and these Phelps devils are allowed to run around loose? WTF is going on in Canada?
"The reason we're going is it's dot-connecting time," Ms. Phelps-Roper said on Tuesday. "The Lord is coming, America is doomed, the wrath of God abides upon the children of disobedience. His wrath appears in the form of these God smacks that are going on all around us. They're only going to get worse, and they're only going to come faster."
Despite its threats, the group does not always show up at their publicized events. They also claim they will target two Alberta performances of The Laramie Project, a play about Matthew Shepard, and a Toronto play about the Westboro group titled The Pastor Phelps Project: a fundamentalist cabaret on opening night.
Phelps-Roper, like 4 or 5 of the 12 other Phelps children, is a lawyer. She practices in the family law firm, but some of her sibs are employed by the Kansas Department of Corrections
The Westboro Baptist Church is a tiny organization with only Mr. Phelps, his children, their spouses and perhaps one other family as members, according to Mark Potok, director of the intelligence project of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala. "This is just about as despicable a bunch of people as you can find," he said. "They have picketed the funerals of little girls killed in bus crashes, of boy scouts killed in a tornado. These people actually celebrated the attacks of 9/11, saying this was God punishing America for its 'fag-enabling ways.' ... It's interesting because Fred Phelps has managed to unite everyone in this country from the far-right to the far-left. He is despised by one and all."
Something caused a fire at their compound the other night. Arson or wrath of God? Your call.
Mr. Phelps himself is not expected to be among the group headed to Canada, Ms. Phelps-Roper said.