Westboro Baptist Church pickets KSD, Sheriff's office

KELLOGG –– Members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) made their presence known in Shoshone County on Monday morning.

The group held two brief demonstrations, picketing outside of the Kellogg School District Office and again in front of the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office in Wallace.

According to member Timothy Phelps, the protest was the direct result of the recent incident at Kellogg High School – where the comment “Guys are guys and girls are girls. There is no in-between,” was made by a student during a school-wide assembly, which resulted in him not being allowed to participate in the school’s graduation commencement ceremony.

In the fallout from that decision, a parent protest and student walk-out were staged, which led to the school district deciding to cancel the graduation ceremony, citing a warning from the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office concerning the potential safety of the event.

Several online conservative groups began to dig into the school and its staff, where it was discovered that the Shoshone County Sheriff is married to a teacher at Kellogg High School, which resulted in numerous, unfounded accusations and insinuations across multiple platforms.

“It got our attention that a person stated something that is nothing more than reality and because it offends somebody the power of government drops on his head,” Phelps said. “But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because, in every place we can, where this society sprouts up, we’re going to put our words out there from the Lord God.”

Those words included signs that read “Fags doom nations” and “Abortion is bloody murder” – as well as the signing of parody covers of pop songs entitled “Fag Marriage it can’t be,” (a parody of Sam Smith’s Stay With Me) and “American Sodomite” (a parody of Green Day’s American Idiot). The songs’ lyrics and signage don’t attempt to mask the church’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, which is the foundation of their organization and what they spend the bulk of their time actively protesting.

“We’ve been doing this for more than 30 years all over the country – we’ve seen everything,” Phelps said. “It’s even more offensive to anyone that has any affection for the First Amendment, that there be a government action silencing and punishing speech just because the government disagrees with the speech, that’s such an open and shut case.”

The student who made the original comment had been adamant that his statement wasn't meant to alienate or attack any groups – that didn't seem to deter the WBC picketers.

While a small group of counter-protestors was on-hand for both protests, outside of a brief shouting match of conflicting ideologies on the lawn outside of the KSD office between a few of the WBC members and one of the counter-protestors – both protests were peaceful. No Kellogg School District personnel were on-site during the protest

Phelps is the son of WBC founder Fred Phelps and has been active with the church since he was eight years old, including when they began actively protesting the LGBTQ community in the early 1990s. Like several of his siblings, he also has a law degree, which he uses to ensure that the protests he and his family members stage fall under the legal umbrella of the First Amendment.

The Topeka, Kansas, based Westboro Baptist Church was founded in 1955 and has been designated as a hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Over the years, the group has used its disdain for the LGBTQ community to protest Pride events, the United States Military, military funerals, various celebrities, abortion clinics, breast cancer fundraisers, Santa Claus, as well as several other churches.