The only one who gave me any hope was Ben, the pastor’s oldest grandchild, who married a few months before we arrived in Topeka. Ben called me on the phone to tell me that Margie didn’t get to make the rules, despite her very strong influence over the other members. He said that it wasn’t up to Margie to declare a ban on marriage. Ben’s opinion was that I could marry anyone I wanted, as long as my choice proved to be a good person and joined the church. If it was God’s will, God would bring me somebody, and it would all work out. To me, it seemed so unlikely. But at least I didn’t have to resign myself to not marrying at all.
I couldn’t help but think that Margie’s crusade was motivated by an overwhelming desire to ensure I didn’t end up with her son. She had never been married herself, so there was just the two of them. I had never felt that she liked me much, nor did she seem to like anyone in my family. Margie and my dad frequently butted heads. Both of them had type-A personalities, so if my dad was speaking, Margie couldn’t be talking, and vice versa. Margie was extremely overbearing and overprotective of Jacob. Nobody was ever going to be good enough for him. Banning marriage was a surefire way to keep him close.
Besides Ben, the rest of the church members still thought I was marriage obsessed, and I couldn’t seem to please anybody. Any time I thought I had a grasp on the behaviors that defined a good Christian, the rules changed. If I asked for clarifications, I was attacked for that as well. Our focus in life was supposed to be our pickets and protests. I was told by several of the elders that I didn’t need to be married to do that. In fact, if you were married, you were going to have kids, and you couldn’t be out protesting with tiny infants. Infants tied you down and took you away from what you were meant to do. Besides, no one was good enough to marry Shirley’s or Margie’s kids. No one could possibly prove to be as Christian as they were. They had been doing this ministry since they had been born.
Shirley ripped into me for objecting to the marriage ban, which made me think that she didn’t want the rest of her kids married, either. “How dare you question God and his plan?” she asked me. “The Lord is returning soon and the world will end. Everyone will be judged. The Lord is going to destroy the world, save the people who are good, and send the rest to hell for all eternity.” I had no hidden agenda. I was only twenty-one, and I just couldn’t accept the idea that I would never be married.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.
—1 Peter 3:15
Jael and I finished nursing school and graduated together near the top of our class. In keeping with tradition, we picketed our college graduation, and neither of us went to our pinning ceremony. We accepted full-time jobs in the cardiac wing of St. Francis Hospital, where we had both worked part-time for several years. If I wasn’t working, I was focusing on everything the church expected of me, studying the Bible without being contentious or splitting hairs. I was successfully staying away from boys and evil, spreading the Word of God, and contributing financially to the church coffers and to my family.
On top of my usual contributions for room and board, I used my $5,000 signing bonus from St. Francis to cover the down payment for Dad’s new Ford F-150 at his request. He said the truck he was driving was too old, and he needed a new one for the church to use. Mom and Dad said my paying for these things was a good idea, because they had taken care of me my whole childhood. I wasn’t particularly happy about that, but having feelings was lame, anyway. Shirley liked to let us know that God didn’t mention feelings all that often in scripture. “He didn’t mention one word about the feelings of the sixteen billion rebels he sent straight to hell in Noah’s flood,” she wisely pointed out.
By the time I finished nursing school, I had already been picketing on behalf of the church for five years and still found it thrilling. More so than ever, picketing was the favorite tactic of the church, and the pastor was definitely working hard to give us a presence at the location of any calamity or sinful behavior in the nation we could get to. As far as he was concerned, doomsday was undeniably imminent. Although no specific date was on the calendar, the day was getting closer, and the church started firing up its rhetoric against Jews. They didn’t see the message as anti-Semitic—the pastor was actually welcoming of any Jew who might be one of the chosen few. I had never had any Jewish friends, so I wasn’t personally offended. I wasn’t the one hating Jews, God was, and it was all in the Bible. It wasn’t meant to be an ethnic slur. The pastor said it was prophesied in Revelation that in the end, all nations of the world would march on Israel, and only 144,000 righteous Jews would survive. He said the rest of the Jews were false prophets and Jesus killers who mistakenly considered themselves the chosen ones. He even put out an invitation that if any of the 144,000 Jews eligible for heaven read his message, which he’d posted on godhatesfags.com, they could emerge and join our ranks. “Join the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ! We are your friends and brethren, we are eager to meet you; to oppose the Wicked with you; and to join Christ in the air with you, when he comes in power and glory to claim his own and punish the disobedient!”
Atheists, Catholics, Muslims, Irish, Australians, and Swedes made the list of the specific kinds of people God hated as well. Although the ignorant might think some of our targets were ludicrous, God was guiding us to the locations that piqued his wrath, usually on the grounds of homosexuality or religious practice. Our godhatestheworld.com website had a map of the world on it, where you could click on any country to find out why God hated that country. All the countries had subcategories: “Filthy Manner of Life,” “God’s Wrath Revealed,” “False Religious Systems,” “Government,” “Poster Children for Sin,” which gave more details about our specific objections. We picketed appliance stores that sold Swedish vacuums, because God hated Swedes for their tolerance of homosexuality. We picketed Coretta Scott King’s funeral, because she supported gay rights. The late Princess Diana was referred to as a royal whore. Anyone at all who was prominent in society should use his or her position to take a stand against sin. If he didn’t, he was abusing his power, like Caesar. The more powerful and prominent someone was, the more likely he or she was to be the subject of one of our pickets.
Every untimely death, from murders perpetrated by madmen to deaths in storms, floods, or accidents, was really an angry sign from an angry God. The pastor believed that God sent warnings before total destruction. There were the minor destructions, sent to wake up the nation to a grand revival. God hadn’t destroyed our entire country during his September 11 wake-up call. Things happened for a reason, and our nation didn’t wake up; we were doomed. Sometimes, the punishment of a minor calamity woke you up to your spiritual side.
But a year or so after September 11, nobody was protesting the sins that provoked the attacks. We realized that there was no more hope for this country. We had to pray for God to destroy it, because there was no enlightenment here. The pastor told us that the apple of America had gone rotten, and though we were the elect, there still could be hope of enlightening a few. All the other churches were praying for God to bless this nation. He had blessed it, but no one had been listening. In January 2006, Shirley began signing people up to picket the funerals of twelve West Virginia coal miners who had lost their lives in a mine accident in Sago, West Virginia. “Thank God for this tragedy on America,” the pastor said in his flyer. The pickets no longer had to have direct links to homosexuality or the military, because God created havoc wherever there was tolerance of homosexuality, which was in every corner of our depraved nation. We went where the news trucks went, basically. God’s anger toward America was obvious to us, even though the mining community and the rest of the world might have thought their miners were innocent victims.
Within twenty-four hours of sending out the protest request to the municipal hall of Buckhannon, West Virginia, the church received its highest-eve
r number of angry phone calls. “You better not come here, we have guns,” some of the messages warned. Shirley decided no one under eighteen could go. She said she was going to replay the messages for the police department to hear, so that they could be prepared to protect us properly. Our picket location had to be relocated after West Virginia Wesleyan College refused to let us stand on campus property, but other than that, nothing extraordinarily violent took place. There was just the usual hurling of insults and vulgar names by the counterprotesters. My father was among those who went on the picket. He, Shirley, and the other in-your-face people always signed up for the pickets that stirred the most controversy and grabbed the most media attention.
Mass shootings were another way God was punishing America. When a milkman shot and killed five Amish schoolgirls in their one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, before killing himself, we were planning to picket the funerals. However, Shirley made a deal with Mike Gallagher of the nationally syndicated Mike Gallagher Show: In exchange for an hour of airtime on his program, we would forgo our demonstration. On the show, Shirley commented that the girls deserved to die because the Amish created their own form of righteousness.
The pastor also agreed with her that the slayings were justified. They demonstrated God’s retaliation for sins committed by the blasphemous governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell. The governor had recently signed legislation that made it a crime to picket within five hundred feet of funerals or memorial services in Pennsylvania, and then slandered the WBC on Fox News. In truth, the logic of God taking the lives of the young Amish schoolgirls made sense to me. If God was mad at America, He was going to hurt its people where it hurt the most—by killing their children.
The contrast between how the Amish community looked at the tragedy and how we viewed it was stunning. Both communities were strict adherents to the Word of God in every aspect of their lives. However, the Amish, through God’s grace, forgave the shooter and prayed that God would judge him with mercy. We, on the other hand, just knew everybody was going to hell. If it was God’s will that I spread His Word at these kinds of events, then even if I personally found it distasteful and exploitative to picket the funerals of small children, I was in no position to say no.
Dad always wanted to sign up for the high-profile, controversial pickets, like one declaring the Sago miners going to hell, and he was happy to take vacation days to travel to them. He didn’t want my mother or me to go to the same ones, however, because he thought we were inferior picketers. At least Shirley had the generosity and genuine pride to share the big ones with her children. She said they could represent our message just as well as she could. My father never made me feel that way. He seemed to prefer pointing out my shortcomings or not trusting me with responsibility at all.
Once, Shirley was away for almost a week and had her phone calls forwarded to our house. She frequently got calls from the press, outraged strangers, or people with a fascination about us. That entire week, Dad didn’t allow me to answer the phone, thinking I wouldn’t be able to handle myself in the event that a phone call came in from somebody wanting to mix it up. Only he knew how to do that.
I was still permitted to answer some of the e-mails we received from people on the outside. Once in a while, they would even turn into more of a correspondence. Because we were a community determined to be visible and provocative, so many people out there knew exactly who we were. On pickets, we’d identify ourselves by name if anyone asked, and would even encourage people to contact us. People knew about the websites because we advertised them a lot, on the T-shirts we wore at every picket, on our church building. We directed any media person who approached us to our website. We’d get phone calls and e-mails from almost every picket, and every kid had a responsibility to answer certain ones. That was how we kept up with our “fan mail,” a couple of e-mails a week for each person. I was in charge of corresponding with about seventy people. One of them was a guy about my age named Scott, who e-mailed the church for the first time in July 2007 and showed a lot of interest in our religion. I was the one assigned to respond to his query.
More than likely, the harmless correspondence between us would have gone unnoticed save for the timing. The summer of 2007 had seen a lot more stressors for the church than usual, which gave rise to a lot of paranoia and exacerbated already strained relationships. A lawsuit against the church was heating up, and a few people really seemed to be cracking under the tension.
The lawsuit was bigger in scope and more far-reaching in consequences than most of the suits filed against us. The pastor, the primary defendant named in the case, was convinced the media was out to get us. He thought hidden in the horde of people always seeking to interview or needle us might be an undercover spy, using a deceitful tactic to gain access to us through an unsuspecting insider who would take him in confidence.
The lawsuit causing all the fear had been filed a year earlier in the U.S. District Court in Maryland. The pastor, Shirley, and Becky, as well as the church itself, were the defendants facing five felony charges, including defamation of character and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It had all come about after the picket of the military funeral of Matthew Snyder, a U.S. marine killed in Iraq in a noncombat accident. The church had the proper permits, stayed the required one thousand feet away from the Catholic church hosting the service, remained behind the police barriers, and carried its standard message by way of our signs, SEMPER FI, SEMPER FAGS and GOD HATES DEAD SOLDIERS, among others. We had already picketed dozens of military funerals by this point, and nobody from our church accused Matthew Snyder of being homosexual, saying only that God punished our nation for its tolerance of homosexuality in the military. The pastor’s position was no mystery; he’d say that “military funerals are pagan orgies of idolatrous blasphemy where they pray to the dunghill gods of Sodom and play taps to a fallen fool.” The Snyder family wanted financial redress in the millions of dollars from the Phelpses and the church for their personal pain and injury. The case was scheduled to go before the court that October.
The pastor usually took on lawsuits with full confidence and cocky arrogance. Because so many of the Phelpses were lawyers, using them hardly cost the church a thing, and as lawyers, Phelps family members involved in any case before the court were entitled to payment from the state for services provided. We never picketed illegally, so we could not be denied or fined on legal grounds. As to our message, we had systematically won any case against us that had to do with freedom of expression. The rulings allowed us to speak our opinion, no matter how distasteful. We won monetary judgments in those cases, as well, so being sued was kind of a win-win.
If the pastor wasn’t the defendant, he was the plaintiff. I had the feeling he loved suing people who came at us, anybody who tried to limit our First Amendment rights. I heard that he once had two hundred cases pending in federal court at one time. The pastor had a reputation for taking grievances to litigation, and they didn’t have to be related to free speech and freedom of religion. Years before my family arrived in Topeka, he sued Sears in a class-action suit for $50 million when they couldn’t locate a television set he had purchased on their layaway plan. Six years and many court appearances and adjournments later, he settled for a payment of $126. Lots of people who filed complaints against the church might find themselves served with a complaint of their own from Phelps Chartered.
As the lead attorney, Margie was taking on the brunt of the casework for the trial of Snyder v. Phelps. The matter was straightforward, but who was going to prevail—the Snyders, seeking tort compensation for the disruption of a private funeral, or the Westboro Baptist Church, exercising its rights so clearly protected under the Constitution—was never guaranteed. We thought what we said could not be considered slander because we were speaking “rhetorical hyperbole,” not “verifiable fact.” However, in the court of public opinion, we were extremely unpopular. The lawsuit, which had festered for more than a year before the trial date, ha
d Margie and the pastor convinced the media were out to get them. One way or another, the devil was always trying to ruin the church. In truth, we were all scared that we might lose our houses or the church, but no one was more up in arms than the pastor. He was so anxious about the lawsuit, his blood pressure was either way up or way down. He’d have Jael or me check it multiple times a day. He was seeing his doctors constantly for feelings of lightheadedness on his bicycle. He would do repetitive things, and fast on blueberries and lettuce for forty days or ride his bike for hours at a stretch.
We would tell him that he was being crazy, but we couldn’t get him to relax. He started badgering Marge and keeping her awake all night, asking her why God was forsaking them. She got so anxious that she left him and went to live with Shirley for a month.
The pastor seemed paranoid about people, too. He stopped doing interviews and became an extreme homebody, rarely leaving the house out of fear somebody was going to assault him. If he wanted a Subway sandwich from the nearby shop, he sent someone else to pick it up. Shirley had to set up a mission whereby every day two people would go into his house to feed him, but then they would leave immediately. He began freaking out that Shirley was trying to seize control of the church. She was just writing e-mails and talking to people about ecclesiastical matters, as she’d always done, but now he took it personally, and wrote up material in response. Flyers appeared on all of our doors claiming that Shirley was undermining his authority, with support from Bible verses. Not only was his attack on Shirley highly unlike him, it was also the only mission that took him outside his house or fenced-in compound the entire summer.
Banished : Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9781455518470) Page 22
