Stop Westboro Baptist Church

This petition is for state governments around the country to follow the lead of others and ban the protesting of funerals by enacting legislation to protect the privacy and sanctity of mourners.

This group has been recognized as a hate group by organizations, such as The Southern Poverty Law Center, and has repeatedly displayed the actions typical of hate groups.Their actions have been directed at many groups, including homosexuals, military, Jewish people and even other Christians. They pose a threat to the welfare and treatment of others and will not improve without some form of imposed regulation.

Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America. The group is basically a family-based cult of personality built around its patriarch, Fred Phelps. Typified by its slogan, "God Hates Fags," WBC is known for its harsh anti-gay beliefs and the crude signs its members carry at their frequent protests

Background
The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is made up of its leader, Pastor Fred Waldron Phelps, nine of his 13 children (the other four are estranged), their children and spouses, and a small number of other families and individuals. Phelps has maintained tight control over the group. His estranged son Nathan says the elder Phelps abused his children and his wife, cultivating an atmosphere of fear to maintain his authority.

According to the group, America has damned itself through its tolerance of homosexuality, and God is punishing the country by inflicting tragedies on its citizens.All five of the firms' attorneys are his children. The Kansas Supreme Court disbarred Phelps in 1979, stating that Phelps showed "little regard for the ethics of his profession."

In June 2005, WBC began picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The group maintains that God is punishing America for tolerating homosexuality and persecuting WBC. They even claimed that God had chosen to use improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, to kill American soldiers because of an August 1995 attack on the WBC compound with a small explosive device. In a June 2005 interview with Fox News, Fred Phelps said: "God is visiting the sins upon America by killing their kids with IEDs ... and the more the merrier."

WBC members have been banned from other countries because of their hateful views. In August 2008, WBC announced its plans to protest the funeral of a man beheaded on a Greyhound Bus in Canada. In response, Canada barred the group's members from entering the country, and the funeral was conducted uninterrupted. In February 2009, the group planned to travel to Britain to protest a staging of "The Laramie Project," a highly respected play that documents the hate murder of gay student Matthew Shepard and how the incident impacted the community. In response, Britain banned Fred Phelps and Shirley Phelps-Roper from traveling to the United Kingdom.