Picketers from the Westboro Baptist Church have been given the green light by the US Park Service to protest on Inauguration Day. They will be stationed at the northeast corner of John Marshal Park protesting military funerals and gays.

Westboro Church has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The church is headed up by Fred Phelps, who has made a name for himself by picketing the funerals of gay people, AIDS victims, soldiers and others who he believes have fallen short of the twisted standards of his imaginary God.

Phelps is a hater in a class of his own. He described Elizabeth Taylor, a fundraiser for AIDS research, as a "world-famous filthy Jew whore."

He has picketed numerous gay pride parades, holding aloft homophobic signs that include messages such as "when gays die God laughs." His hatred also extends to Islam. He characterized Mohammad as "a demon-possessed whore monger and pedophile who contrived a 300-page work of Satanic fiction." Italians are also a target... he has referred to them as "mobster-breeding perverts."

There is no depth to which Phelps won't sink in order to thrust himself and his twisted message into the media spotlight.

Last year in Canada a 22-year old man named Tim McLean was brutally murdered in a Greyhound bus. He was decapitated by a passenger who attacked him with a knife.

The Westboro ghouls were intent on picketing McLean's funeral, on the grounds that McLean's murder was God's vengeance for Canadian policies on abortion, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage.

Whackjob though he is, Phelps has garnered substantial awards over the years by contesting cases in which it was claimed Westboro Church members had been improperly prevented from picketing. So long as he is determined to exercise his right-to-picket he and his crew of haters will continue to grab media attention.