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Fred Phelps, daughter banned from United Kingdom

The British government has banned anti-gay preachers Fred Phelps and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper from entering the United Kingdom.

According to the Times Online of London, the Phelpses had planned to fly to the United Kingdom to protest a performance of "The Laramie Project," a play about the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was killed in Laramie, Wyo., in 1998. The play is scheduled to open Friday at Queen Mary's College in Basingstoke, Hamshire.

"You just have to wonder why they did it," Phelps-Roper, 51, said today from Topeka, where the Phelpses' Westboro Baptist Church is located. "We're going to picket a second-rate play, put on by a third-, fourth-rate college. What the heck?"

The Phelpses have become notorious in the U.S. for carrying provocative banners with the phrase, "God Hates Fags." They have picketed the funerals of U.S. servicemen who died in Iraq and Afghanistan because they believe their deaths were the result of the government's tolerance of gays.

They recently protested outside Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village over the school's selection of a gay homecoming king last year. Hundreds of students staged a counter protest and raised money for AIDS research.

"Both these individuals have engaged in unacceptable behavior by inciting hatred against a number of communities," said a UK Border Agency spokesman to the Times Online. "The government has made it clear it opposes extremism in all its forms."

The United Kingdom became aware of the planned protest when the Phelpses made an announcement on their Web site castigating the play and "the fag-infested UK."