You know, it’s never good when religion gets involved with these things.

The Westboro Baptist Church (aka We’re Bugfuck Crazy) is hailing Jared Lee Loughner as a hero and going to picket at the funerals of the shooting victims.

Your federal judge is dead and your (fag-promoting, baby-killing, proud-sinner) Congresswoman fights for her life. God is avenging Himself on this rebellious house! WBC prays for your destruction–more shooters, more dead carcasses piling up, young, old, leader and commoner–all. Your doom is upon you!

So yeah, just to be clear, murdering innocents is what God does to make you like him. If the WBC turns out to be correct about God, does anyone want anything to do with that guy? I think I’d be even less likely to go to church. Could hell possibly be any worse than a god so capricious and evil?

And, of course, that’s not where religion’s involvement ends in this case. There are now reports that Jared Lee Loughner was linked to an anti-semitic group called American Renaissance — Gabrielle Giffords is Jewish.

The group subscribes to an ideology that is “anti-government, anti-immigration, anti -ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), anti-Semitic,” according to the DHS memo.

Giffords “is the first Jewish female elected to such a high position in the US government. She was also opposite this group’s ideology when it came to immigration debate,” the note said.

I’m not totally sure it matters who he was associated with unless they sent him to do this, which I have no reason to think they did.  It’s just disturbing all round.  The WBC is just horrible, so they’re easy to ignore, but I hope that this was just the act of one crazy person and that no one knew ahead of time what he was planning.  He seems very much to be someone who had had a psychotic break, but the rumors of connections to groups and another suspect can’t but make you wonder.