I musta been out of the room, or maybe I missed Sunday school that week. But I don’t remember anything in the New Testament promoting hate. In fact, I thought the only real advance Christianity made, the only feature of import not taken directly from Egyptian myth or Buddhist practice from centuries or millennia earlier, was the command to love your enemy.

So how dumb must a preacher be to believe that “God Hates Fags”?

By protesting at the funeral of a 20-year-old Marine killed in Iraq, the morons from Westboro Baptist Church (how could it be any other denomination?) have managed to run up a $10.9 million fine, and in my opinion ten times that much would have been acceptable as well.

Fred W. Phelps Sr., Westboro’s founder, vowed to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in Richmond, Va.

“It’s going to be reversed in five minutes,” he said. This case, he added, “will elevate me to something important,” as it draws more publicity to his cause.

Likely true. Alan Dershowitz will probably show up, in between pro-torture speeches and articles, to defend Phelps’s right to be obnoxious, and money will pour in from morons around the country, now bereft of some of their favorite anti-gay ministers, for various reasons we needn’t go into at this moment.

These people are such idiots that they can stand on a street corner and sing “God hates America” to the obvious tune, and see no incompatibility with the message of the Prince of Peace. They’re not protesting war, or murder. They’re protesting sex. War is fine, as long as it’s purely heterosexual. Hey, anyone who’s seen Starship Troopers or Battlestar Galactica knows sex and war go together. Perhaps it’s only near the field of battle that Christianists can find a way to enjoy themselves. Oh, that’s right, enjoying things is a sin, I forgot. I’m supposed to be unhappy my whole life.

After the verdict, Phelps and his two daughters named in Snyder’s lawsuit said they believed that it was really their religious beliefs that were on trial.

“The goofy jury threw a fit at God,” Phelps said.

Sit on it, Westboro Baptist Church.