Saturday, August 09, 2008

'Canada Denies Entry to Westboro Baptist Church Members'

Good for Canada! Story here.

The Canadian government has notified border patrol guards to prevent extremist antigay church leader Fred Phelps from entering the country, the Canadian Press reported Friday. Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., was scheduled to take church members to Winnipeg to protest a funeral for a man who was killed by a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus. The cause of death, Phelps says, was God's response to Canada's laws allowing abortion and gay marriage.

According to the report, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day alerted border patrol about people with signs and pamphlets that fit the church's hateful messages, urging them to keep them out of the country. A group of church members was stopped at the border on Tuesday and turned away.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, Phelps's daughter, said that a smaller group of protesters will cross into Canada at a different point of entry.

"They’ll have to strip-search everyone who crosses that border, or they won’t know who we are," she told the Canadian Press. "They’ll have to see the WBC tattoo on our butts."

Tim McLean, 22, was on the bus bound for Winnipeg when he was stabbed and decapitated by a man in the seat next to him on July 30. Vince Weiguang Li, 40, has been charged with second-degree murder.

The church is known for protesting funerals of fallen U.S. soldiers and those lost to HIV/AIDS as a means to disseminate its belief that God hates gays.

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