Bikers and Angels to block Westboro Baptists picket on childs funeral

Stheno wrote: »

Agreed Violence only begets violence.

The child however deserves a respectful and peaceful funeral without people needing to make a point.

Any protest which helps that is welcome in my opinion.

Laws are currently being drafted to reduce the Westboro Baptists ability to protest as they do.

stovelid wrote: »

Is it just me or does Phelps-Roper sound like a sex act?

df1985 wrote: »

I dont get how people at these funerals dont just go over and kick mountains of ****e out of them, police there or not. Their blood must be boiling!

Ireland is the newest target of the WBC's internet assault and at the end of July they set up godhatesireland.com. The site has as its mascot a cartoon redhead boy being buggered by a surly-looking leprechaun. Somewhat incongruously, the cartoon character has a smile on his face and, in a play on the commercial catchphrase for the popular Lucky Charms cereal, he utters the lines: "They're always after me little Catholic lads, they're tragically pernicious." There's a photo of a girl, Shirley's niece, dancing an Irish jig on the Irish flag. I ask Shirley if her niece took any Irish dancing lessons in preparation for this piece of al fresco theatre, or if there was any music playing, and she told me: "No, she didn't take lessons. She's just talented. And there was definitely no music playing. You're killing me here."

So why does God hate Ireland? Because, according to Shirley, it's "the pink isle of the sodomite damned" and home to "*** Irish senator David Norris and dyke-enabler Mary Robinson". Among other wild claims about 90 per cent of Irish priests being homosexuals. Shirley added that she heard we had lovely landscape here and, if we weren't all perverts, she'd like to think she might have paid a visit some day.

The spur to set up the site is believed to be an invitation from UCD's Literary and Historical Society to what they called the WBC's "esteemed" leader and founder, Fred Phelps, to speak at a debate on gay adoption.

Phelps feared that if he came and did his usual shtick he would be arrested under the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act (which is "a draconian, antichristic (sic) cup of Satan's slimy vomit, straight from the maw of hell") and that he was thus being set up by the UCD society. Shirley Phelps-Roper said Fred would come to Ireland only if pigs fly. "And," she added, "I mean really fly, not in a retouched photograph, or shot out of a catapult".

Their hateful rhetoric has its "respectable" echoes in laws across much of America and Europe where gay people are in many instances still not allowed to marry or adopt children and can be dismissed from their jobs simply for living their lives openly. And is the God Hates Fags slogan all that different from the Catholic Church's "hate the sin, not the sinner?"

Like the established religions it claims to hate, the WBC is not for turning on the gay issue. Shirley tells me she is "sorry I was raised for the devil" and adds that she has a message for the people of Ireland.

"Your nation is doomed. But each of you has a never-dying soul. If you care about where you are going to spend eternity -- for ever, with no time off for good behaviour and no change except your increased capacity to withstand pain and with that capacity comes more pain -- then you will repent.

"Otherwise, the worms will eat out of you and the smoke of your torment will ascend upward for ever and ever and you'll have flames coming out of your eyes."

I tell her that we are working on the flying pig.

GR88 wrote: »

I remember Sean Moncrieff ripping into Phelps daughter a few years ago, Was a pretty entertaining interview.