The indefatigable gay-hating Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas, announced in October that he would take advantage of the Casper, Wyoming, City Council’s earlier decision to allow a religious monument (the Ten Commandments) in a city park by erecting his own religious monument: a statue celebrating the 1998 fatal gay bashing (and descent into hell) of Casper’s Matthew Shepard. (A U.S. Court of Appeals had ruled that a city cannot discriminate among religious messages.) The City Council subsequently decided that its Ten Commandments monument was a bad idea and voted to remove it and ban all religious messages from the park.