Graduates marching toward banner-filled Tercentenary Theatre were faced with placards of another sort Commencement day, as they passed roughly a dozen members of an anti-gay rights group carrying signs with messages such as “God Hates Fags.”

Members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church, an organization started by anti-gay activist Fred W. Phelps, flew to Cambridge from their native Kansas to protest a Harvard Law School (HLS) committee established to study offensive speech at that school.

The protest drew a counter-demonstration of roughly equal numbers, as members of gay rights groups including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) arrived and stood on an opposite street corner.

According to church member Shirley Phelps-Roper—daughter of Fred Phelps and a constitutional lawyer, like 11 of her 12 siblings, several of whom were also present—the demonstrators were there to protest Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz’s leadership of an HLS group looking at an anti-harassment code.

Dershowitz chairs the HLS group, called the Committee on Healthy Diversity, which was formed after the Black Law Students Association called for the school to adopt a code to protect students from racial insensitivity.

“Alan Dershowitz should be ashamed of himself,” she said. “They want to make it so you cannot say, ‘God hates fags’…In other words, he’s taken a big fat chisel and hammer to the First Amendment.”

As early as 7:40 a.m., the men, women and young children marched in circles on a patch of sidewalk at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Harvard Street, bearing colorful signs that read “AIDS is God’s curse,” “God hates fags; prepare to meet thy God” and “Thank God for Sept. 11.”

Across the street, Cambridge resident and NGLTF field organizer Sue Hyde said she had come to protest the Phelps family’s “disgusting, hate-filled message.”

Rev. Irving Cummings, the openly gay pastor of Old Cambridge Baptist Church, which had helped to organize the counter-protest, said he was not worried their demonstration would give weight to the Phelps campaign.

“When hate is done like this, the best thing to do is to cast as much light on it as possible,” he said.

There were no confrontations between the two groups except for a few snide remarks made on each side.

Phelps-Roper called the counter-protest “a wimpy wussy little counter-protest” of “freaks…who put Kool-Aid in their hair.”

Phelps-Roper brought her 7-year-old son Gabriel, one of her 11 children, who was carrying a sign reading “God hates America.”

As soon-to-be-graduates passed by and stared at the protest, Phelps-Roper said: “They’re going to hell. You’re looking at dead people walking.”

When one undergraduate walked by and cracked a joke about one of the protester’s Sept. 11 sign, Phelps-Roper said the student’s sarcasm indicated that her message had gotten through.

“You see, he got the message,” she said. “In the day of judgment…that guy is not going to be able to say ‘I didn’t know.’”

A handful of Cambridge Police Department officers stood around the protest and urged passers-by to keep moving.

Although an announcement about the counter-protest was sent out over the e-mail list of Harvard’s Bisexual Gay Lesbian Transgender and Supporters Alliance, no undergraduates participated in the counter-protest.

Topeka-based minister Fred Phelps has been in the national spotlight for his group’s staunch opposition to homosexuality and frequent protests with strongly-worded signs. After commencement, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which was preparing to rule in a case concerning same-sex marriage.

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.