Phelps' tirades are known to Internet browsers at his controversial site: godhatesfags.com. He calls AIDS God's cure for homosexuality and insists that being gay is synonymous with being a child-molester.

Provincetown's School and Community Anti-Bias Project, a plan to teach respect for racial, gender or sexual orientation differences, has drawn the Topeka, Kansas Westboro Baptist Church leader's ire.

Phelps had originally planned to be in Provincetown October 17, but reportedly rescheduled his trip to allow children in his congregation to take part in his anti-gay church protest.

Phelps' best-known protest tactic revolves around funerals for people who have died of AIDS. He travels long distances and then appears among mourners and the families of the deceased as a boisterous heckler, preaching that their departed loved one has gone to roast in the eternally torturous flames of hell.

Provincetown city officials are asking visitors and residents to avoid direct conflict with Phelps and his entourage. Topeka Deputy Police Chief Edward Klumpp has stressed that ignoring Phelps is by far the superior response to his deranged hate campaign.

One Provincetown resident with AIDS has indicated that it will be difficult for him to show indifference if either he or others he knows come face to face with Phelps' heckling. He called for a peaceful counter-demonstration.

In fact such a demonstration has already taken place, showing another side to Christianity. The Provincetown Interfaith Coalition of Congregations, a group composed of all local churches held a candlelight procession on the night of October 16. Marchers handed out yellow ribbons meant to show resident wearers to be supporters of a "hate-free zone."

The city's Town Manager, Keith Bergman, insists that even the interfaith procession says nothing about Phelps. "This has to do with us," he told residents, "and what sort of community we are."

The Reverend Jennifer Justice of Provincetown's Unitarian Universalist Meeting House reflected how "It's quite a rare event that hatred would create such an amazing response of unity and hope."

She quoted the words of another Christian minister, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "We cannot reach good ends through evil means…Love is the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend."