The White House released an official response this past Tuesday to the Westboro Baptist Church petitions and their opinions on the matter.

The White House is under pressure to classify the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group, especially in light of recent picketing and petitions filed in the deaths of Arizona firefighters, the Boston Marathon bombings and Newtown victims back in December 2012, according to ABC News.

The Westboro Baptist Church is an unaffiliated Baptist Church best known for the unconventional behaviors of its 50 members, including picketing and protesting the deaths of service members, Newtown victims, school shooting victims, and its blazing anti-gay ideology.

Their most recent press coverage has been in response to their Twitter announcement discussing the plan to picket the funerals of the 19 Arizona firefighters whose lives were taken fighting an uncontrollable wildfire.
The tweet read, "Praise God. A consuming fire!"

The Westboro Baptist Church, led by pastor Fred Phelps, has been scrutinized for some time based on past behaviors and outbursts, including the defamation of President Barack Obama as the “Antichrist,” approval of shootings, bombings, and soldiers' deaths as part of God's retribution on the United States for "the sin of homosexuality,” and for yelling obscenities to grief-stricken families at funerals, yelling "Thank God for dead soldiers," "God blew up the troops" and "AIDS cures fags,” picket signs.

Despite these actions, the White House recently released a statement that it will not identify the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group because it is not their place to label it as such. Label or no label, the White House does not have to reserve judgment on the group and spoke out about its opinions.

The official White House response released this past Tuesday stated, "As a matter of practice, the federal government doesn't maintain a list of hate groups. That all said, we agree that practices such as protesting at the funerals of men and women who died in service to this country and preventing their families from mourning peacefully are reprehensible."

The aforementioned acts of the Westboro Baptist Church did lead President Barack Obama and Congress to enact a 2012 law limiting protesters' time at, and proximity to, military services and burials. However, past Supreme Court rulings on the church – like in 2011 - still uphold the members' right to protest at the funerals under the First Amendment.

Though the White House will not label the group, they have chronicled the five circulating petitions and the hundreds of thousands of petitioners – over 367,000 - attempting to classify the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group and retract its IRS tax-exempt status, according to CNN.

The petitions focused on most are those that cross the threshold of 100,000 signatures. According to White House officials, policy staff reviews these petitions and provides a response. The largest petition to date is the "Legally recognize Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group" with 367,180 signatures, mostly concentrated around the Kansas region, the home of the Westboro Baptist Church, and Newtown, Connecticut, where funerals of children and victims of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting were picketed.