The six protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church arrived
shortly after 2 p.m. Friday at the area police cordoned off for
them near Dorothy Lane – far away from the services for Master Sgt.
Thomas Maholic, held at the St. Bernard School.

The protesters quietly filed out of a minivan bearing
Connecticut plates, went through the police tape into their protest
area and promptly threw the American flag on the ground. And stood
on it.

More than a dozen police officers guarded the perimeter of the
protesters, backs to them, keeping angry locals away from the
protesters. Each protester carried at least two signs, each with
messages or drawings on them.

“You’re the evil nation that needs preaching to,” yelled one
protester to a group of citizens walking past carrying flags.

Jacob Phelps, 22-year-old grandson of church founder Fred
Phelps, carried signs bearing messages “God Hates Fags” and “God
Hates America.”

His group came here, he explained, “because this soldier has
died for this fag nation.”

Even though Maholic had nothing to do with the homosexual
lifestyle the church disdains, the church believes that America
tolerates homosexuals. Therefore, the wrath of God is being felt by
American and the country’s troops.

“Congress is passing laws to shut us up,” Phelps said. “The
moment you lose that freedom, it goes down hill from there.

“All Americans are doomed,” he said, adding that his church
plans to travel to “every funeral, every church” where a solider is
being laid to rest to picket.

“We are a very small group, but we can get around to a lot of
places,” Phelps said. He added that it is costly for the church to
do so much traveling. However, he said, rumors that they fund their
trips by suing towns when they are injured by angry locals are not
true.

“We haven’t done that,” he said. “It’s a good thing to be mocked
and ridiculed in God’s name. The people in Jesus’s time crucified
him.

“To lose our lives for this would be a great reward,” Phelps
said.

He said they fund the church’s trips by holding down jobs.

“A lot of Americans spend their money on vacations. We don’t,”
he said. “We accept no money from outsiders.”

Phelps said that he has participated in about 10,000 protests in
the past 16 years. It’s been in the past two years that the group
has begun protesting funerals.

“Matthew Shepard, we picketed his funeral,” he said. Shepard was
a Wyoming college student who was tortured and murdered in an
anti-gay crime in 1998. “They were holding him up as an idol.”

The church does not picket all gay funerals, he added, saying,
“what would be the point? We only do the ones that have the biggest
publicity in it. We’re the best publishing house in America.”

He said the church’s Web site gets 5,000 or more hits an hour,
which he acknowledged could be largely from people who despise
their messages checking to see what they have to say.

The group sang songs, such as “God Hates America,” and “shame on
those who claim the title of United States Marines.” Their taunts
were quickly drowned out when a neighborhood resident, Valerie
Abers, turned on the stereo in her Jeep loudly, playing country
music over top of their voices.

After that, the group kept relatively quiet until the television
cameras from Buffalo, N.Y., got close enough to record sound.

At 3 p.m., apparently the time the group’s permit for picketing
ran out, the six protesters got back in their van and drove away,
to the applause of the crowd of people assembled.