Westboro Baptist Church and their leader, Fred Phelps. Adherents of that old time religion and very definitely not full of Christian charity.

Westboro Baptist has been known for some time for picketing outside the funerals of gays: claiming that America’s acceptance of them was calling down the wrath of the Lord. Now Fred Phelps and his peeps picket the funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming that their deaths, as with the deaths of those in 9/11, is a sign of God’s wrath for, yes, you’ve guessed it, America’s acceptance of homosexuality.

Fred, you seem to have a little bee in your bonnet there about this: not remember the one about he who is without sin being the first to cast a stone? Motes and beams even?

More on Westboro Baptist Church:

For years, the calculatedly offensive Westboro Baptist Church
has horrified humanity by picketing the funerals of dead homosexuals.
(You may remember their breakout performance outside the funeral of
Matthew Shepard, hoisting signs reading “FAG MATT BURNS IN HELL.”)

More recently, WBC has busied itself picketing funerals of U.S.
soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming such casualties as
God’s punishment of the United States’ acceptance of homosexuality.

But this week, the Westboro Baptist Church is in court, fighting a lawsuit brought by the father of a Marine slain in Iraq, who claims the WBC’s hateful protest at his son’s funeral—featuring placards reading “Thank God for Dead Soliders”—amounts to invasion of privacy with intent to inflict emotional distress.

And more on Fred Phelps: