God Hates Fags preachers banned from UK
The fundamentalist Phelps family, who picket dead soldiers’ funerals with chants of ‘God hates fags’ have been banned from entering the UK.
Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper are on a list of 16 individuals banned from entering the country since October due to their extremist views.
Home secretary Jacqui Smith said she had decided to make the list public in order to make clear what behaviour would not be tolerated in the UK.
Speaking on GMTV, she said: “I think it’s important that people understand the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here, the fact that it’s a privilege to come and the sort of things that mean you won’t be welcome in this country.
“Coming to this country is a privilege. If you can’t live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what’s more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded.”
The Phelps family believe that the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq are God’s “punishment” homosexuality and those who tolerate it.
They have threatened to picket in the UK on previous occasions.
As reported in PinkNews.co.uk in February, they targeted Queen Mary’s College in Basingstoke for staging a production of the Laramie Project, about murdered gay teenager Matthew Shepard.
Mrs Phelps-Roper told BBC News the decision would “bring great wrath upon your heads”.
She said as many members of the church do not have the surname Phelps, UK authorities would “have their work cut out for them”.
“Unless they intend to begin checking the bare backsides of every person coming into that country to find that tattoo that says ‘Property of WBC [Westboro Baptist Church]’, they will have no way of identifying who is from WBC.”
She added that the British government was “filthy” for attempting “to keep the word of God from coming into her borders”.
Other individuals on the list include Hamas MP Yunis Al-Astal, ex-Ku Klux Klan leader Stephen “Don” Black, neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe and two leaders of a violent Russian skinhead gang.
Controversial radio host Michael Savage is also on the list for his views on immigration, Islam and rape. He has described autism as the “illness du jour” and claimed that the “homosexual mafia” are “raping our children’s minds”.
