Members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church protested the public memorial service for murdered MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, last Sunday. Kirk was shot to death on September 10, and right-wing online commenters mistook the church’s protestors at Kirk’s memorial as “liberals” and Democrats.

Best known for holding their large “God Hates F**s” signs at public events in the early 2000s, the members of the Kansas-based hate church who demonstrated at held signs that read, “God sent the shooter in fury,” “Sins breed violence,” and “America is doomed.”

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In a brief TikTok video (below), someone asks two of the protestors why they’re demonstrating at the memorial. One replies, “God has sent us.” Another says, “All of these people have come here to worship a dead man who didn’t preach Christ, who has taught this world the Satanic lie that is free will, as if people in general can choose to serve Christ. The father has to draw you to him.”

While right-wing social media users claimed that “thousands” of left-wing demonstrators had “raided” the memorial, a fact-check by Germany’s international public news broadcaster Deutsche Welle found that only a “handful” of protestors demonstrated at the memorial — almost all of them from the Westboro Baptist Church.

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@rovingreporter Westboro Baptist Church protests Charlie Kirk’s funeral service in Glendale, Arizona #charliekirk #glendale #arizona #christianity #news ♬ original sound – rovingreporter

The church announced its intention to protest the memorial, writing, “The killing of Charlie Kirk has propelled this nation and the faux-Christians the world over — into cultural fits… Social and mainstream media is utterly filled with the calls for action, including over-the-top worshipping of a dead man’s carcass.”

The announcement also mentioned “rank idolotry, filthy fornication, slaughtering unborn babies … and low-key sodomy … tra**ies, child groomers, and baby-rapists,” in the church’s trademark inflammatory style.

The church’s now-deceased founder, Fred Phelps, founded the Westboro church in Topeka, Kansas, in 1955. Since at least 1991, Westboro has been actively involved in demonstrations against gay people. The church is reportedly comprised of fewer than 50 members, almost all of whom are members of Phelps’ extended family.

The group came into the national spotlight in 1998, when it picketed at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, an out gay student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured near Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998, then tied to a fence and left to die.

Numerous administration officials spoke at the memorial

At the memorial, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the return of Jesus will bring “a new heaven and a new earth” and a “great reunion with Charlie.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared Kirk to Christ. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that the country is engaged in “a spiritual war.” White House advisor Stephen Miller promised to “crush” unnamed enemies.

During his speech, Donald Trump said, “Some of the very same people who spent the last eight years trying to sit in moral judgment of anyone who disagreed with them about politics suddenly started cheering for [Kirk’s] murder… Some of the very people who call you a ‘hater’ for using the wrong pronoun were filled with glee at the killing of a father with two young children.”

Kirk had a long history of animus toward the LGBTQ+ community in his Christian nationalist vision for the country, particularly with transgender people. He characterized being gay as an “error,” compared homosexuality to alcoholism and drug addiction, notoriously called stoning gay people to death “God’s perfect law,” called trans people “pure evil,” a “social contagion,” and an “abomination to God,” and compared gender-affirming medical professionals to child-mutilating Nazis.

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