Westboro Baptist Church Planning To Picket WWE Raw

The Westboro Baptist Church - the subject of Louis Theroux's 'The Most Hated Family In America' docuseries - have announced they plan to picket an upcoming episode of Monday Night Raw.

WWE will head to the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Missouri and the Westboro Baptist Church have issued a press release announcing plans to picket at the event. The church is planning to picket the taping of Raw over the sex trafficking, sexual assault, and physical and emotional abuse allegations made against Vince McMahon in the lawsuit filed by Janel Grant. The church is also picketing due to past storylines on WWE TV. 

Vince McMahon is no longer involved with the day-to-day running of WWE after resigning as TKO Executive Chairman in January following the filing of Grant's lawsuit. He remains a major shareholder in TKO, owning around eight per cent of the organisation. 

The Westboro Baptist Church often pickets WWE shows from Kansas City's T-Mobile Center. 

The Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Kansas, was founded by Fred Phelps in 1955 and many of his 13 children continue to be involved with the church. The church is widely considered a hate group due to their public protests against homosexuality and they spread hate speech against atheists, Jews, Muslims, and other Christian denominations. The group also claimed Barack Obama's presidency was a sign of the apocalypse.

The group believes the United States of America has damned itself by tolerating homosexuality and that the Christian god is punishing the nation by inflicting tragedies upon its citizens, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The WBC has a "picketing ministry" that has seen the church hold more than 40,000 pickets since June 1991, including at military funerals and at funerals for victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.