Missouri’s tight restrictions on protests and picketing outside military funerals were tossed out by a federal judge Monday, over free speech concerns.

A small Kansas church had brought suit over its claimed right to loudly march outside the burials and memorial services of those killed in overseas conflicts. The state legislature had passed a law to keep members of the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church from demonstrating within 300 feet of such private services.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia are backing the family of fallen Marine Matthew Snyder in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case that could decide the constitutionality of laws restricting protests at private family funerals.

The respondent, Phelps, has staged loud protests with members of his Westboro Baptist Church at military funerals around the country. He argues his signs, bearing messages such as “You’re in hell” and “God hates you,” are protected forms of speech.

The Home Secretary has banned two extremist anti-gay preachers from entering Britain. Fred Phelps and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, who belong to the US Westboro Baptist Church, were planning to come to the UK to protest outside a performance of a youth play which recounts the death of gay university student.

Other members of their hate group will be stopped from entering the country as well.

Canadian border guards have been told to bar members of a fanatical American church from entering the country after they announced plans to protest at the funeral of the man decapitated on a Greyhound bus, says a Winnipeg MP.

The hate group — which masquerades as a Christian church — is known for its despicable behavior at funerals and elsewhere.

A despicable hate group that masquerades as a Christian church is helping to advertise a play about its founder by doing what it does best: spewing putrid hatred.

The Westboro Baptist Church also plans to protest at the funeral of a young man decapitated on a Greyhound bus last week.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church — a hate group masquerading as a Christian church — label a fire that occured at the garage next to the ‘church’ as a religious hate crime.

The cult’s followers are known primarily for their despicable practice of picketing funerals of people they hate.

The Westboro hate group, which masquerades as a church, may loose all its property.