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. (The Advocate)
