Here’s a fun story. The Westboro Baptist Church was ordered to pay $10.9 million in Maryland after they were sued for protesting at the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. These are the “God Hates Fags” people, the “Thank God for AIDS” people, the “Thank God for IEDs” (Improvised Explosive Devices) people, and even the “Thank God for 9/11” people. Oh, and “Thank God for Dead Miners.”

They plan to appeal, but frankly, everything I’ve seen suggested that they have some pretty bad counsel. Their counsel, by the way, seems to consist of some of their members. (But if it can be overturned in a matter of minutes as Phelps said, why did they lose in the first place?)

From what I’ve read, their belief is basically that they — a very small church that the Baptist church has been careful to distance itself from — are the only ones in God’s favor, and that every bad event in the world is God taking vengeance on homosexuals and society’s tolerance of them. Shockingly, they haven’t been well-received anywhere they went.