Phelps seeks to advertise his hate at sports venue

Groan. Fred Phelps, our community's hate-spewing "preacher" who seems to have endless resources to spread his "God Hates Fags" message, is now seeking to pay $50,000 to advertise his upside down American flags and God Hates Fags banners at our community's sports park. It's bad enough that we have to be subjected to his family's billboards depicting anal sex, but we certainly don't need to have that message exposed to our children at the sports park.

"It's an area of law where there really hasn't been a lot of precedent, and so it's a little bit difficult to know in advance just where the courts are going to draw the lines," said Bill Rich, a law professor at Washburn University.

Since the sports park is a public venue, I wonder what legal recourse the city could take to restrict the advertising to acceptable messages. The sad thing is I imagine they could rule that religious organizations can't advertise because that would be a separation of church and state. The result, of course, is that legitimate churches couldn't use those places for advertising in order to block this cult from using their billboards for spreading their filth.