c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It’s going to take more than a $10.9 million jury award to stop Pastor Fred Phelps and his Kansas church from picketing military funerals with anti-gay signs.

In fact, his daughter said Thursday (Nov. 1) it will only push them forward.

“We are the No. 1 story on Google around the world,” said Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of Westboro Baptist Church’s pastor. “You can’t buy that kind of advertising, even with $10.9 million.”

The Topeka, Kan., church was sued by Albert Snyder, whose son was killed in Iraq, after members picketed at his son’s funeral in March 2006. On Wednesday (Oct. 31), a federal jury awarded Snyder $10.9 million in damages.

Members of Phelps’ church, who believe God is punishing the United States for its acceptance of homosexuality with the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, routinely picket military funerals. They hold signs with slogans like “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags.”

Phelps-Roper, just returned from Baltimore where the case was decided, expressed joy at the “huge door of utterance” that has been opened to her church’s cause.

“We have told this nation faithfully that there is a God … who expects obedience, and if you won’t obey you get the curses,” Phelps-Roper said.

The Rev. Mel White, president of Soulforce, a gay rights organization based in Lynchburg, Va., said his organization receives frequent visits from the picketers, but their presence doesn’t discourage him.

“Every time Fred Phelps comes to harass us … I am delighted, because his extremism makes us look like loving angels,” he said.

White, who once met Phelps and spent a couple of hours talking with him, said that though Phelps is fully convinced of what he believes, both the secular world and the mainstream church community think he’s “crazy as a bedbug.”

The nation should at least pay some attention to Phelps’ message, though, White said, because he thinks Phelps is “just a herald” of the many people who believe the same things he does, but keep quiet about it.

White predicted that Phelps and his church will try to capitalize on the jury’s verdict, making waves in the national media and turning their situation into “a public relations coup.”

“There’s no chance of slowing him down,” he said.

Some, like Gary Glenn of the Michigan chapter of the American Family Association, think both Phelps and gay groups are wrong. In May 2006, after hearing that Phelps’ church would picket at a military funeral in Michigan, Glenn responded in an online statement.

Asked for comment Thursday, he referred a reporter to that same statement.

“We … condemn Fred Phelps’ rejection of the Christian gospel of redemption and his expressly hate-motivated attacks … on individuals ensnared in the homosexual lifestyle” and “on American military personnel and their families,” Glenn said.

The Anti-Defamation League, for its part, called the jury’s verdict a rejection of the church’s “hateful ideology.”

“It (the verdict) sends a strong message to those who would use their bigotry and hatred to threaten and intimidate others that there can be serious consequences for their actions,” said ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman.

In spite of the consequences, though, it seems Westboro Baptist isn’t deterred one bit.

“It says plainly in the Scripture, `No going back,”’ Phelps-Roper said. “We’re not going to run.”

KRE/PH END DONCKELS575 words