A new billboard with the message "Gods Loves Gays" debuted Monday in Topeka, Kansas, the home city of the Westboro Baptist Church, the notorious congregation known for picketing funerals with signs bearing anti-gay slogans.
"The Facebook God," a satirical Facebook page with more than 1.7 million "likes," raised more than $80,000 on the crowd-funding platform Indiegogo in order to mount the billboard. "This hate group goes around saying that God hates gay people," an animated depiction of God says in a YouTube video uploaded to the Indiegogo page. "Nonsense! I love gay people. These Westboro psychos protest at the funerals of soldiers, murdered children and more. How dare they!"
Westboro Baptist Church followers believe misfortunes that befall Americans, most infamously 9/11 and the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, are God's punishment for the country's tolerance of homosexuality, according to the church's website. The South Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization that tracks extremist movements, describes Westboro as a hate group.
