WCVB: Protesters To Disrupt Soldier's Funeral

A Marblehead soldier who was killed in Afghanistan is scheduled to be laid to rest Monday, but a church group from Kansas is expected to try to disrupt the services and police are on alert for any problems.

NewsCenter 5's Gail Huff reported that Staff Sgt. Christoper Piper, 43, served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and was awarded a bronze star for his combat service. The Green Beret died when his convoy was bombed June 3 in Afghanistan and a right-wing Protestant Christian church group from Topeka, Kansas is planning to demonstrate at Piper's funeral services at the Old North Church. They claim U.S. soldiers like Piper are dying because the country is being punished for its tolerance of what they see as immoral behavior, such as homosexuality.

The group, from the Westboro Baptist Church, protested several weeks ago in Dracut and Lexington, Mass., carrying signs depicting homosexual sex, with slogans such as "Pope In Hell" and "God Hates Fags," and "God Hates The U.S." Police called in extra officers to handle the demonstrations.



http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=383&e=1&u=/ibsys/20050627/lo_WCVB/2795149

Was Sgt Piper gay? What does this have to do with him or his family trying to bury him with dignity after their devastating loss?

These Westover people are lunatics!

until moderate/progressive churches excommunicate them for hijacking Christianity. They have to make it clear: THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT CHRISTIANS.



http://www.cafepress.com/liberalissues/472476

The little men in the white coats would be rounding them up if we had proper care for mental illness in this country.

Hopefully, this guy has about 15 big beefy brothers and cousins and friends and Fred and Family will spend July 4 eating with a straw.

but it's a distinct possibility. ;)

have never made sense, though I must admit, this newest wrinkle is definitely jumping the shark.

Why wasn't his "God Hates Fags" at yesterday's Gay Pride parade in Houston with 250,000 marchers...

No he shows up a soldiers funeral.....

He's so far around the bend, he's circling himself. His church burned, so now God hates everyone. :crazy:

The only reason to pay attention to what he does is morbid interest. :popcorn:

the gays here can kick their asses. You have to be tough down here regardless and you have to be double tough to be gay.

Remember after 9/11 when Jerry falwell and Pat Robertson said it was Gays and lesbians and others fault, well Here's Falwells statement.


http://mediamatters.org/items/200411290008
Here's what Pat Robertson said in prayer while he "totally concurs" with Falwell..

when that hurricane almost wiped snooty Dade County in Southern Florida off the map. I wonder if God was pissed at the rich folk?

Pat Robertson is praying to no one. He is a believer of nonsense.

to the situation, and let the shredded remains chips fall where they may

:nuke:

I'm tired of right wingnuts exploiting death and suffereing for their own little pet causes.

...at some astronomical level like $1 billion.

There is absolutely NO place for that kind of crap at the funeral of a soldier.

open a can of whoop ass on them.

he and his merry band of henchmen (and women) threatened to disrupt a funeral here in central Wisconsin and never showed up. After all why should they, the media has made there position very clear. The media did their work for them so why should they spend their money and time to show up when their message has been sent loud and clear.

I wish the media would go back to reporting events rather than forecasting them.

Or maybe they were confused by some of the names or they had a 10 year old map

Will blame the left for this.

Hell, I can write the screed for them. "Rev. Phelps, emboldened by Senator Durbin's remarks..."

...and morans like these were only too happy to comply.

This man is horrible beyond words. The only good I see in this is that maybe some fundies who approved of his protesting AIDS victim's funerals will realize that some things are sacred no matter what your political opinion - one of them is the solemn ceremony when we say goodbye to the dead.

wonder how many people will see that headline and not really read it, then start the inevitable 'those liberals are protesting soldier's funerals' talk.

How awful for the family.

Is there no law that Phelps might be breaking? He's completely insane. Someone like that describing himself as Christian would be enuff to convert me to something else.. oh, wait, it already has.

It doesn't cease to amaze me how uninformed people are, simply because they are too lazy.

http://www.cafepress.com/liberalissues.14744291

the protestors.

. . deal with this crap.

But the more these scumbags show their true colors (under the first Amendment) the sooner more Americans will understand what separation of church and state really means.

Somebody needs to violently open up these scumsuckers eyes, barring that they need to be swollen shut, and their jaws wired. I'm so fucking sick of these "people".

but * has the right to have anyone ejected from taxpayer-funded events in case they might say something he doesn't like?

<ALERT! FOUL LANGUAGE ALERT!>

I don't see how more of these crazy bastards, Robertson, Falwell and the rest included, walk around without concussions. It's just a matter of common decency.

Anything driven by fear and hate is disgusting. It only succeeds in bringing out the worst in humanity.
I wonder what it will be next? Maybe your religion or political choices. Discrimination for having bad DNA?

It would be the new black if race relations had been resolved. Sadly, they are still very much an issue.

You're absolutely correct though. This is just disgusting.

Around here I'm seeing signs that neo-paganism and Wicca could be next. We've got two churches with anti-witchcraft signage on them and this area doesn't even have particularly strong pagan/Wicca groups. *shrug*

I think I'll go...

set up a "First Amendment Zone" approximately
three miles out of town. Or does this work
both ways?

:grr: :grr: :grr:

who might say something like: "these people keep doing stuff that drives good people to do things like shooting them".

But for these dopes I'm willing to make an exception.

Deputy Fife, do your duty.

He needs to be added to the danger list. He is really going off.

that had been killed, and these assholes were planning to show up at the funeral, they'd be well advised to arm themselves. I'm not sure that, in my grief, I'd be fully in command of my emotions.

These people are insane, or evil, I haven't figured out which.

and honor the sacrifice of the soldier, I would really like to see some of the mourners kick the living snot out of these cretins. The minute the family is out of sight, I'd love to see some of the dead soldier's buddies practice a little vigilante justice.

"Life is tough. It's even tougher if you're stupid"

Make some ugly "GOD HATES PHELPS" signs or, if you have a really large one, "GOD LOVES EVERYONE, EVEN YOU, YOU MISERABLE WASTE OF SPACE. GOOD RIDDANCE."

it would be veeeeery fucking tempting :mad:

I've been away a few days and just read this (too late).

Did we get any live reports?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=158&topic_id=5267&mesg_id=5267

From Saturday.

Disgusting display of the extreme religious right's insanity.

I may not agree with the war, but a soldier's funeral is no place for this lunacy.

I'm going to say: "You think our Liberals are crazy? You should see our Republicans!"

...and then relate this story.

He and has family have moved to Kansas.....where they are not wanted.

Just thought I'd set the record straight. This crazy man is from Mississippi.

a shithouse rat. Protesting a soldier's funeral? And they say that WE hate America.

I wonder what it's really like to have the Looney Tunes living in your head 24/7.

My question is, can the Democrat party revoke his membership/registration? I don't know how it works in the states.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1999/03/lauerman.html

His career as a lawyer ended in 1979, when Phelps was disbarred by the state of Kansas for allegedly being too abusive to witnesses. Phelps seems to have compensated for being forced to leave the law by grooming his children to take up the profession: Eleven of his children now have law degrees.

Phelps remained prominent in state and local politics, working for years as a major organizer for the state's Democratic Party. (He still calls himself a Democrat, refusing to change just because his party has.) In 1988, Phelps housed campaign workers for Al Gore's first presidential run; in 1989, his eldest son, Fred Jr., hosted a fundraiser for Gore's Senate campaign at his home.

Phelps has frequently run for public office -- for governor in 1990, '94, and '98, for the Senate in '92 -- always losing the primaries by a landslide. Because of their years as loyal Democrats, the Phelpses have even been invited to -- and attended -- both of Clinton's inaugurations. They protested at the second one. But Phelps' campaign against homosexuality actually began in earnest just before the 1992 campaign, when politicians, especially Democrats, began to openly court gay voters.

So *this* is what one of those Democrats who get all alienated by policies that support things like the equal protection of the law, and whose votes cost the Democrats elections, looks like. ;)

I think that "registration" as a particular party voter is different from party membership up here (where we are simply placed on the list of electors as individuals, with no hint of party affiliation), and can't be controlled by the party. Never did understand that arrangement, m'self.

why do you have to register as any particular thing, i.e. Democrat, Republican? It seems to me an invasion of privacy.

I'm with you; it's weird.

Up here where you and I are at, if you want to have input into a party's policy-making and candidate-selection, you pay the $10 membership fee (... or get Dave Basi to pay it for you ...) and become a member and get the membership privileges. Being "registered" to vote is a totally separate issue. I don't at all mind the idea that if somebody wants to influence *my* party, s/he might have to show up at a meeting or some such.

Btw ... didya know that Canada's capital (the home of the Supreme Court of Canada, one of the things that Fred Phelps loves to hate) has its very own Westboro Baptist Church?


http://www.citywidechurch.ca

I gather it's changed its name (yeah: "Citywide Church (formerly Westboro Baptist"). It's pretty much a fellow traveller of Phelps's outfit, but it may have got tired of being confused with it on line.

Anyway, I've asked the question over in GD. Hopefully an American can answer it. Thanks for your help!

...you declare party affiliation when you register so that you can only vote in your party's primary.

It keeps a whole bunch of Republicans from voting for total asswipes in the Democratic Primary, so that during the actual election, the Republicans would have an easier time.

Not that it matters, exactly, because Charles Manson could run for office in this state and would get elected if he ran as a Republican ("Well, we know how he stands on the death penalty, and at least we have someone who's pro-environment in the party.")

Evil Kumquat

A few states have open primaries, so registration there is completely optional, but most still follow the paradigm of requiring membership to vote in a primary election.

first of all not all states have party affiliation registered.

The states that DO do it, however, usually do so to prevent republicans voting in a democratic primary or vice versa.

You can always register "Independent" or "none". You don't have to register democrat or republican.... but you can only vote in the party primary you register as. (as it should be)

We Canadians understand the mechanics of it -- we just find it weird anyhow. ;)

Party "primaries" here are internal party matters -- local riding associations hold nomination meetings, and interested members attend and elect the local candidate. Party leaders (i.e. the people who will become PM if the party wins a majority) are elected at party conventions, without any prior public run-off process.

There are of course huge membership drives held in some ridings by some parties. For instance, in one riding I know, the proverbial pig would get elected if it ran as a Liberal, so the Liberals put more effort into the nomination process -- whenever a sitting Member of Parliament retires, which ain't too often -- than the election, because whoever gets that nomination will get the seat in the House.

It's also why there are perennial cries of foul in some electoral districts, particularly in the Liberal Party, because of people who have gone out and sold memberships en masse to people who promise to vote for their candidate, sometimes in an apparently less than honest fashion. The ethnic card is frequently played; the Liberals tend to be seen by immigrants as "their" party because the Liberals were so often in power when immigrants arrived, and the Liberals exploit and manipulate immigrant communities. And there are common suspicions of illegal practices, like candidates' organizers paying multiple people's membership fees.

In my former riding, an individual who had no previous association with the party (and was known to be tight with a particularly corrupt Liberal MP) decided he wanted the NDP nomination a few years back; nobody could really figure out why, since the NDP was no threat to the Liberals there. (Unlike the situation in another riding I know, where the Conservatives got their guy the Green Party nomination, in an obvious attempt to take votes away from the NDP, which was a serious contender there.) Anyhow, the individual in question went out and corralled a whole lot of members of the ethnic community to which he belonged (a well-established one) and of another very recently arrived ethnic community, and actually had some of them illegally transfer their driver's licences into our electoral district (i.e. by claiming to live there when they didn't), which I found out because I was also tight with some members of that community. We defeated him by about 5 votes ... mostly, because enough of the new Canadians in question recognized me, on the other side of the room, as their former lawyer and did some political math.

Now that I think about it, the US system would probably go a long way to solving this problem. It's a lot harder for parties to control their membership to exclude people legally ineligible to vote in local nomination processes (e.g. they have no way of verifying identity and residence) than for the electoral authorities to do it.

But still, our system keeps party membership as a private matter, separate from the electoral system, and it also places the control of the party under the authority of the party, which can accept or reject memberships.

It seems that the US system is open to takeover by fake party supporters registering to vote in party primaries without the party having any say, while the Canadian system gives parties more formal control over their membership but perhaps less practical power to do that.

Whatever happened to that neocon mantra, "with us, or against us"???


Westboro Baptist Church - Home Page
http://www.godhatesfags.com/main/index.html

Same loons...other website...
http://www.godhatesamerica.com/

He's a kook, they go everywhere - but seems somebody would draw the line and have him arrested for something. Harassment maybe, the families have suffered enough, this group is sick!

another. The Westboro Baptist Church congregation consists of the homophobe Fred Phelps and his extended family of inbreds. The Phelps family is evidence of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, that a species that fails to adapt to its environment will die. Look at the Phelps's, their vacant stare, their constant drooling, their evident lust for their siblings and children. What a bunch!

They're constantly on the road, it seems, have well-made signage, etc. The money's coming from somewhere, so--where?

As long as you have vocal extremists like him, the GOP moves what is considered to be the political center farther to the right.