Westboro Baptist Church to picket 'evil, perverted boy band' One Direction at upcoming Kansas gig

A US Baptist Church is to picket a One Direction concert because they believe the British boy band are “crotch-grabbing little perverts”.

In a statement titled ‘God hates fag enablers,’ Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) said it will picket line One Direction's July concert in Kansas.

The group said it believes the boy band are “a perfect representation of this filthy world and the sin-chasing, fag-enabling, Christ-rejecting UK who has banned WBC from preaching within her borders.”

The religious group added: “These freaks and their fans think it’s funny for these five perverts to grab each other’s asses on stage. They glamorise sin and mock of God’s standards. Their one purpose is to encourage the youth of this generation to pursue every lust their evil hearts can imagine.”

In an effort to spread its message, Westboro Baptist Church has created a parody of One Direction’s number one single "One Thing".

The evangelical group’s rendition starts: “We’ll be playing it cool/ When God’s wrath is on you/ None of you will be brave/ When god ends this human race.”

Its chorus continues: “Get all those lies right out of your head/ Focus on obeying instead/ You know, you know, you know what it is/ Obeying that one thing.”

Westboro Baptist Church’s public condemnation of One Direction comes days after the group called Taylor Swift a “whore” and promised to picket line her concert in August.

The group said the singer: “works her ‘girl next door’ country-singer shtick, while hopping from one young man to the next and strutting across the world stage like a proud whore.”

Founded in 1955, the Westboro Baptist Church believes God will punish the West for its acceptance of homosexuality. The group has picketed dozens of funerals of US servicemen in the belief that war is God’s way of punishing America for its ‘evil’ acts.

The evangelical group was the focus of Louis Theroux’s 2007 documentary The Most Hated Family in America, in which the filmmaker followed the church’s famous leader Fred Phelps, who pioneered the group’s defining slogan “God hates fags.”

In 2012 the Westboro Baptist Church picket lined a Missouri school production of The Laramie Project, a play about the murder of gay student Matthew Shepherd at the University of Wyoming.

The church threatened to picket line a 2009 British production of the play in Basingstoke, but the group was banned from entering the UK.