When people are in the thrall of poisonous ideology, it's really not all about deliberate ill will, or inherent hatred, or a lack of intelligence. It's about the unbelievable destructiveness and staying power of bad ideas and about finding ways to equip people with the tools they need to fight them.
Megan Phelps-Roper
I remember feeling like we at WBC were a persecuted minority, triumphant in the face of evil people 'worshipping the dead' as we picketed funerals or rejoiced at the destruction of the Twin Towers.
Several people I had conversations with were hugely influential. People who found internal inconsistency in Westboro's ideology. It was the first thing that allowed me to recognize that Westboro was wrong.
Because of the dynamics on the picket line all my life, I had these expectations of people. It was all the things that I had learned about outsiders from the time I was tiny, that they were evil, that if they were being nice to me they were trying to seduce me away from the truth.
Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise.
I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it.
Assuming ill motives almost instantly cuts us off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do.
There's a rich history at Westboro of parodying pop culture. The thing about pop culture is that it gives us a shared language. We were constantly trying to co-opt things that were popular to deliver our own message.
The very first soldier's funeral protest that I went to was in Omaha, Neb.
My friends on Twitter didn't abandon their beliefs or their principles - only their scorn. They channeled their infinitely justifiable offense and came to me with pointed questions tempered with kindness and humor. They approached me as a human being, and that was more transformative than two full decades of outrage, disdain, and violence.
You know, I had grown up standing on public sidewalks, saying things that people, you know, were very provoked by and were upset by. And - but standing outside that first soldier's funeral, it was eerily quiet.
In 2014, as a Christmas gift, I wrote an essay for my husband, about our story. Writing that showed me there was value in interrogating my experiences while they were fresh - especially because I was terrified of forgetting.
Loving someone whose ideas we find detestable can seem impossible, and empathizing with them isn't much easier - but it's so important to remember that listening is not agreeing.
If you can see these people... as human beings and capable of change, there is hope. We should be willing to reach out. Imagine what could happen if we kept reaching out to people like Westboro members?
I had grown up seeing people in school where I felt like I needed to keep them at arm's length, or on the picket line, where there was a tonne of hostility and no time to build rapport with people.
Our duty was to declare God's standards to the world: no adultery, no fornication, no gays, no idolatry.
For my grandfather, there was no distinction. There was no tension between his support for civil rights for black people and his animus toward gay people because both of those positions were scripturally derived.
Discussing and dissecting opposing viewpoints with others on Twitter opened up a whole new way of thinking for me.
Westboro would quote this passage from the book of Leviticus that, for them, shows that the definition of 'love thy neighbor' is to rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning. And if you don't do that, then you hate your neighbor in your heart.
I went to my mother right before I was set to go protest my first soldier's funeral and asked my mother: 'I need to understand why we're doing this.'
Empathy is not a betrayal of one's cause.
I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: 'Gays are worthy of death.'
Twitter was an alternative community for me. A different kind of community. I knew I was making people angry. But it didn't matter, they weren't my community. But the longer I was on Twitter and the more I came to know these people, to like and respect them, the more I could see the empathy and grief and sorrow they were expressing.
My husband and I eventually want to start a nonprofit and call it the Westboro Foundation. It was his idea, and I love it. I would love for Westboro to come to mean something besides 'God hates gays.'
All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And - given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for - forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me.
In the era of Donald Trump the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own.
My family thought - and thinks - very seriously about words. About language and what it means and how it shapes us and how it should shape us and change us.
When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view.
In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012.
I think for some people who leave Westboro, losing that sense of specialness feels like you've lost something really valuable and important. I had the opposite experience. I was so grateful to know that I wasn't uniquely evil. I was just a human being who had had this set of experiences that were outside of my control.
I do send messages to my family; I send letters in the mail, and when I'm in town, I almost always leave something in the door of my house in Topeka.
You hear stories about Scientology, where people are prevented from leaving, and Westboro's not like that. If you decide that you don't want to be there, then they will help you leave. The shunning, cutting people off - they're doing that because they believe it is for our highest good.
Growing up in Westboro, there was a culture of celebrating death and tragedy... a very calloused way of seeing other people's pain. After I left, it took me a while to be able to really empathize with what it must have been like for the loved ones of people whose funerals we protested.
I had never experienced the death of someone close to me until my grandfather passed away.
I no longer believe that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. And I don't believe in God as a figure in the sky listening to your prayers, things like that.
If you look at who you were a year ago and aren't somewhat embarrassed, you're not growing as a person.
It's important to see people as being on a journey.
There's so much power in seeing the possibility of change.
My first memories are of picketing ex-servicemen's funerals and telling their families they were going to burn in hell.
We believed it was a Good vs Evil situation: that the WBC was right and everybody else was wrong, so there was no questioning. It was a very public war we were waging against the 'sinners.'
I miss my family every single day.
I wanted to do everything right. I wanted to be good, and I wanted to be obedient, and I wanted to be the object of my parents' pride. I wanted to go to Heaven.
Arguing is fun when you think you have all the answers.
We did lots of fun normal-kids stuff.
If organizations like Westboro were universally bad, they wouldn't exist. There had to be some draw, and at Westboro, there was a lot of draw. The church was almost entirely made up of my extended family, and everyone in the church felt like family.
At Westboro, the depictions of hell are extremely vivid. The only thing that changes in hell, according to the church, is your capacity to feel pain. As the capacity to feel pain increases, so does the pain. It's absolutely terrifying. I believed God was going to curse me for having left this group of people.
There are aspects of Westboro that are, of course, more extreme in the way that certain religious practices manifest. But the idea that the Bible is the infallible word of God, that it's unquestionable - this is common.
Some people cannot believe there is an alternative interpretation of the Bible aside from their own.
We know that we've done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn't the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren't so, and regret that hurt.
We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.
