I really wish these people would get deported but for now a law will do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/us...dde&ei=5087%0A
NASHVILLE, April 11 — As dozens of mourners streamed solemnly into church to bury Cpl. David A. Bass, a fresh-faced 20-year-old marine who was killed in Iraq on April 2, a small clutch of protesters stood across the street on Tuesday, celebrating his violent death.
"Thank God for Dead Soldiers," read one of their placards. "Thank God for I.E.D.'s," read another, a reference to the bombs used to kill service members in the war. To drive home their point — that God is killing soldiers to punish America for condoning homosexuality — members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., a tiny fundamentalist splinter group, kicked around an American flag and shouted, if someone approached, that the dead soldiers were rotting in hell.
Since last summer, a Westboro contingent, numbering 6 to 20 people, has been showing up at the funerals of soldiers with their telltale placards, chants and tattered American flags. The protests, viewed by many as cruel and unpatriotic, have set off a wave of grass-roots outrage and a flurry of laws seeking to restrict demonstrations at funerals and burials.
"Repugnant, outrageous, despicable, do not adequately describe what I feel they do to these families," said Representative Steve Buyer, an Indiana Republican who is a co-sponsor of a Congressional bill to regulate demonstrations at federal cemeteries. "They have a right to freedom of speech. But someone also has a right to bury a loved one in peace."
In the past few months, nine states, including Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Indiana, have approved laws that restrict demonstrations at a funeral or burial. In addition, 23 state legislatures are getting ready to vote on similar bills, and Congress, which has received thousands of e-mail messages on the issue, expects to take up legislation in May dealing with demonstrations at federal cemeteries.
The Westboro Baptist Church, led by the Rev. Fred Phelps, is not affiliated with the mainstream Baptist church. It first gained publicity when it picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was beaten to death in 1998 in Wyoming.
Over the past decade, the church, which consists almost entirely of 75 of Mr. Phelps's relatives, made its name by demonstrating outside businesses, disaster zones and the funerals of gay people. Late last year, though, it changed tactics and members began showing up at the funerals of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has put it on its watch list.
-Rudey
--A church of your family members...sounds like a big winner.
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