Every movement has its cross to bear, and Westboro Baptist Church apparently is Christianity’s. The hate group’s latest stunt is to picket several Washington, D.C., schools, including the one that President Obama’s daughters attend, with messages including “God is your enemy.”

The protest at Sidwell Friends School and others was surely calculated for maximum media coverage. Sidwell has long been the private school of choice for prominent politicians and star reporters. Administrators there should expect politically oriented protests. But the Phelps’ protests reach a new low; we won’t dignify what they publicly say about the Obama girls and their father, but it almost caused us to lose our breakfast.

Westboro Baptist Church is nominally based in Kansas, but is most accurately described as an itinerant band of followers of the seriously deluded Fred Phelps. They have construed the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior to mean that He also hates the people who practice it, and has carried that twisted message in spectacularly inappropriate venues like the funerals of U.S. soldiers. Reports indicate that one of its oft-used signs is “Thank God for AIDS.” Disgusting.

There are protestors on both sides of most political issues who can’t be reasoned with. What makes Westboro so detestable is that it claims that their hateful rhetoric comes from the heart of God, and social liberals inevitably portray them as mainstream Christians. Our liberal, secular friends (yes, we have them, and you do too) want to know why we want to be associated with garbage like this.

The fact of the matter is, we don’t. Phelps will get his due correction in the next life.