Baptist group to protest at Amish funerals

PENNSYLVANIA Governor Ed Rendell yesterday offered Amish elders state police protection from an extremist church group that plans to demonstrate at the funerals of five girls fatally shot in an attack on their one-room schoolhouse.

Mr Rendell also asked the members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, as well as members of the public and news media, to allow the Amish to conduct their funerals in privacy.

“I won’t do anything that the Amish community doesn’t want us to do,” Mr Rendell said. “If they want us to do something, we will make sure that [church members] can demonstrate, but they demonstrate far enough away that they don’t interfere with the privacy of the funerals.”