“The womb business is God’s business,” Mom summarized. “You can’t outsmart the Lord!”
The Catholic stance against artificial contraception was a relatively fringe position, but—in a pattern that would extend to virtually every aspect of our lives—Westboro Baptist Church was prepared to take it even further, to the letter of the Scriptures as we understood them. And when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren. It was for God alone to give or withhold children, and even the “natural family planning” endorsed by Catholics was unacceptable. The single time I heard about an aunt of mine attempting to defy God and “counting the days” to avoid pregnancy, it was in the context of her miscounting. She and her husband had been struggling to provide for the six children they had already, but when she’d tried to take matters into her own hands, she’d ended up pregnant with twins. God was teaching her a lesson, my mother said, because my aunt had failed to trust Him. It wasn’t for her to decide when or how many children to have, it wasn’t for her to have any feeling or opinion on the matter at all, except to be grateful to the Lord for each one.
And oh, was my mama grateful. I remember feeling it most in the music, when she would sing to us, always singing. Before I turned five and had to join in with the rank and file for Saturday morning cleaning marathons, my little sister Bekah and I would dance on matching window seats in the living room, mouthing along as Christopher Cross or Fleetwood Mac blared from the big stereo while the others cleaned. Dad would pick us up and twirl us around, and Mom would sashay over with a dusting rag in one hand and a can of Pledge in the other—that sickly sweet scent of chemical lemons filtering through the whole house—and she’d lean in to kiss our cheeks, serenading us at the top of her voice: “No, I will never be the same without your love / I’ll live alone, try so hard to rise above.” This was the same era in which I sat just to her left during church, when she belted out the hymns so high and so loud that it hurt my ears. I discovered that to protect myself from the sonic onslaught, I could stick a finger into my left ear, press myself into my mother’s side, and listen to her sing from inside her body. It was so soothing, the warmth and the vibrations and the feeling of her arm holding me close as I tucked into her. I didn’t know then that this special place at her side would always be mine. That as her eldest daughter, I would become to her what she had become to her father—and as that relationship had defined my mother, so this one would define me. For I was tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother.
Samuel. Joshua. Megan. Rebekah. Isaiah. Zacharias. Grace. Gabriel. Jonah. Noah. Luke.
Sam. Josh. Meg. Bek. Zay. Zach. Grace. Gabe. Jonah. Noah. Luke.
SamJoshMegBekZayZachGraceGabeJonahNoahLuke.
It would be entirely reasonable to expect that my mother’s dedication to doing it all might wane with the birth of each additional child, that it would be impossible for her to maintain that commitment to having her children, her legal career, and her work for our church. Instead, the opposite was true. As our family swelled with each passing year, so, too, did the church’s profile and the added pressure we all faced as a result. I’ve never known another woman who could have stood up under the strain of the burden my mother carried, not without collapsing under the weight of it. She had an inexhaustible supply of strength, tenacity, and resourcefulness—whose origins, it seemed to me, must surely have been divine.
* * *
Soon after our initial protests at Gage Park, our war with the city of Topeka began to escalate. Every anti-Westboro effort they made only served to strengthen our resolve, and we answered each one by dramatically expanding the pace and variety of our pickets. Nearly two years in, we now targeted the newspaper (which regularly editorialized against us), the police department (which failed to protect us from the violent criminals who frequently came out to attack and threaten us), the city government (which worked to draft anti-picketing ordinances), many local churches (which joined the counterprotests against us), and any location related to any person who made any public statement against us or for gays.
Even our language had intensified. The word gay had disappeared entirely from our signs and vocabulary—a misnomer, Gramps said—and it was replaced by fag, a word that literally signified a bundle of sticks used for kindling. “Fag is an elegant metaphor!” Gramps insisted. “In the same way a literal fag is used to kindle the fires of nature, these metaphorical fags fuel the flames of Hell and the fires of God’s wrath!” Of course, fag also had the added benefit of being scandalous and offensive, which only garnered more attention for our message.
One of the verses that Gramps quoted often included a command from God to shew my people their transgression—and as with the rest of the Bible, my grandfather took this literally. For my cousins and me, this resulted in a precocious knowledge of gay sex practices, at least insofar as they were presented by our pastor. Revulsion filled his voice as he spoke of gay people “anally copulating their brains out,” and “suckin’ around on each other, lickin’ around on each other.” He started adding stick figure depictions of anal sex to our picket signs, one man bent over in front of another. I could articulate the meanings of “scat,” “rimming,” and “golden showers” all before my eighth birthday, though I was loath to do so. To publicly accuse gays of these filthy behaviors would leave a girl open to challenge—“How do you know?”—and thus put her in the unenviable position of having to explain that it’s in a book called The Joys of Gay Sex … which, no, she had not read … but her grandfather had told her about it … during church … from the pulpit.
“Golden showers” was a term featured in our parody of The Twelve Days of Christmas. On December evenings, I’d don my colorful winter coat, pick up a sign, and belt out the lyrics with gusto alongside my uncles and cousins, illuminated by streetlights or the glow of the marquee announcing The Nutcracker at the Topeka Performing Arts Center: “Five golden showers! Preparation H, three bloody rectums, two shaven gerbils, and a vat of K-Y Jelly!” I knew even then that this was transgressive, but there was something so delightful about it, so appealing: this sense that my family had some secret knowledge about the world, that we were not subject to its rules or its judgments. There might be an overabundance of regulations governing life within our own community, but the social niceties of the broader world held no sway over us in the context of the protests. In that respect, we were a law unto ourselves, and all bets were off as long as our words were justified by the Bible. Truth was an absolute defense against any and all claims made against us.
Unfortunately for us, it was not always an adequate defense.
One evening when I was seven, as my siblings and I cleaned up after dinner, there was the wail of a police siren, growing loud as it passed near our house and then fading. And then there was another. And another. My mother frowned. Our house sat just a block east of Gage Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, so sirens weren’t especially unusual. For some reason, these ones were making her uneasy.
“Maybe it’s our guys at the Vintage…”
The Vintage was a little restaurant advertising “Cocktails” and “Fine Foods” at the east end of a run-down shopping center just a few blocks from our house—targeted by Westboro because one of the managers was a lesbian serving on the Mayor’s Gay and Lesbian Task Force. I had desperately wanted to picket the Vintage that Friday night, because my cousin Jael had told me she would be there. She was one of my best friends, but since we now attended different elementary schools and lived on different blocks, the most regular time I had with her was when we were protesting. Jael and I had this great routine whereby we’d grab a sign from the truck—her favorite was FAG GOD = RECTUM while I preferred FAG = AIDS with the skull and crossbones underneath—and then we’d plant ourselves somewhere on the picket line and chat it up for half an hour. She’d bring those little patriotic-looking packages of Bazooka Bubble Gum, and we’d chomp noisily while I taught her the lyrics to songs I’d learned from my
big brother Sam (“Baby Got Back,” “Santeria,” etc.).
At the sound of the third siren, my mother’s anxiety shifted to alarm and we took off in the family van. The scene in front of the Vintage was chaos, the small parking lot filled with curious bystanders, half a dozen patrol cars with red and blue flashing lights, EMTs, and cops taking statements from my aunts and uncles, and from mean-looking men in sweats. We’d been attacked again, I saw, but worse than usual. Dad and I stayed in the van while Mom jumped out to help. She picked up a sign lying askew on the ground, which I sounded out—ABSTINENCE NOT CONDOMS—but didn’t understand. Here, my memory of staring out the van window gets fuzzy, fusing with images I got from photographs and home videos later: my uncle Tim, neck braced and nose bleeding, being treated by EMTs on the running board of a big red fire engine; my skinny cousin Ben, seventeen years old, strapped onto a gurney with a series of black belts, a white brace around his neck and a white strap across his forehead, his left hand outstretched to hold on to our aunt Margie. As Ben was being wheeled away, Margie seemed beside herself with outrage and grief. “Never, Jerry!” she bellowed across the parking lot. “Never. We’re never—gonna—stop—picketing!”
Sitting at our family Bible reading the next day, my mother explained it all. Jerry Berger, “the Jew lawyer” who owned the Vintage—the same guy we’d later see in a photo with his hands around my uncle’s neck, choking him unconscious—had hired a dozen bouncers from his strip club to come and beat us up for picketing his restaurant. A local priest had witnessed the attack from the bank next door, and wrote a letter to the mayor: “The attackers walked with deliberate speed and apparent determination toward the picketers. Then I saw the signs falling like sunflowers being cut down by cornknifes and bodies being knocked down and into Gage Boulevard.” Eight of our people were taken to the hospital that night. Three were teenagers.
As tensions with the city continued to mount in the months following what Gramps called “The Vintage Massacre,” my mother helped me piece everything together. She liked for pickets to do double duty as preaching and exercise, so I’d listen to her stories as we walked the picket line from end to end. There was a new prosecutor in our county, my mom told me, a woman who had campaigned on the promise that she would get us off the streets. We were bad for the city, bad for its image, bad for commerce, bad for children, and she represented a community that was as determined to shut us up as we were to be heard.
Ever since this woman had taken office as district attorney, my mother explained, she was doing everything in her power to stop us. It was her encouragement that had the cops arresting us so often now, it was she who charged us with crimes we hadn’t committed. And now people were attacking us more frequently because of her refusal to file charges when we were victims, like at the Vintage. The prosecutor had gotten search warrants so that sheriff’s deputies could beat down the church doors with battering rams and confiscate our property—even though we hadn’t done anything wrong and the officers had had to give it all back. They raided the law office, as well, even though the vast majority of Phelps-Chartered’s work involved representing individual members of the public—criminal cases, personal injury, family law—and had nothing to do with Westboro. No matter how careful we were to follow the law, the DA could have us arrested, and Mom would have to run downtown and bail our loved ones out of jail again.
The attacks at Topeka protests and the vandalism of our homes grew worse during the term of that prosecutor. I woke up one summer morning and followed my mom into the backyard we shared with the church, only to find that it had been torn apart. There was patio furniture at the bottom of the pool, the seat cushions slashed open and strewn across the yard. The weights my uncle used to benchpress had been dropped and broken into heavy chunks. All of our garden hoses had been sliced open, and a huge gash in our beloved trampoline had rendered it worthless. As a kid, I was most frightened by the lacerated state of the trampoline; anyone who could do harm to such a beautiful object clearly would not hesitate to turn the knife on a person. Later on, someone did take a knife to my cousin’s tiny Westie, nearly beheading the poor creature for being on the wrong picketer’s property at the wrong time. Little April managed to pull through, but we took this as just another in a long line of violent criminal attacks we faced for lawfully standing on public sidewalks to preach the standards of God. Persecution in the purest sense of the word.
2. The Bounds of Our Habitation
Throughout my childhood, my mother was determined to make my siblings and me understand one idea above all: We were not in charge of our lives, but God—and that God ruled via the parents and elders He had set over us. Our duty was singular: to obey them. Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. Their power over us was absolute, and we would do well to accept that without question or protest. These were, as the New Testament put it, the bounds of our habitation. It was one of my mother’s favorite phrases.
In Westboro’s theology, obedience was about more than family life. My mother began trying to get this across to us as soon as we were old enough to understand words, and my earliest understanding of it came during a car ride we took together. I was settled in the backseat of our white Toyota Camry, with Bekah buckled into the seat next to me and our mother at the wheel. I think we were headed to or from the family law office, but some parts of the recollection are slippery—sometimes I look over and Bekah is in a car seat, sometimes not, sometimes it’s winter, sometimes spring—so I can’t be sure. What I do remember is that we were young enough to each have a Barbie doll in our laps, and that Mom was telling us about predestination.
My mother’s ardent love for the Scriptures manifested itself in many ways, but it was especially apparent in the joy she took in teaching the Bible for its own sake—not when one of us had disobeyed and needed correction, but while she read and expounded upon the stories to us, taking care to make sure we understood the complexities as well as we could at any given age, going a little deeper each time we returned to the same story. For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little. She was revealing to us the secret ways in which the world worked, and Bekah and I were full of questions. In the car that day, we were trying for the first time—but certainly not the last—to wrap our young minds around the idea that everything we did, every word, every deed, every blink of an eye, beat of the heart, twitch of a muscle—all had been caused by God, who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. My first response to this assertion was to do what I assume many people do upon discovering predestination: to make a split-second decision and suddenly shift course in an attempt to prove the idea false. With all my strength, I squeezed my fists into tiny balls, fingernails biting into my palms, and then released. Had God seen that coming? My eyes widened as I realized that the doctrine of predestination was impossible to thwart; God controlled even those impulsive flailings, even the impulses themselves. (“Unfalsifiability” was not yet a term in my repertoire, and so presented no difficulty for me at the time.)
Mom continued on, telling the story of Jacob and Esau to illustrate predestination. It wasn’t the long version of their story from the Old Testament, of Jacob’s deceit in securing the blessing of the firstborn and of Esau’s vow of murderous revenge. Instead, our mother focused on the most salient part of their tale, found in the book of Romans: their fates. Jacob and Esau had been grandsons of the patriarch Abraham—twin grandsons, Mom stressed, as biologically similar as it was possible for two humans to be. “And yet! Before those two boys were even born, God loved Jacob and hated Esau. They hadn’t done anything good or bad to deserve it. They were still in their mother’s womb!” In the Bible, she told us, God is likened to a heavenly Potter, with humans as clay in His hands to mold as He pleases. Cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand. God had elected—chosen—the beloved
Jacob for honor, to be welcomed into Heaven for an eternity of bliss. His twin brother, Esau, meanwhile, had been created to be condemned to Hellfire—all through no fault or cause of his own. For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works … As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.
But Jacob and Esau weren’t the only ones created with their fates predetermined, Mom continued. Indeed, these twins were the standing symbols of the two types of people living in the world: the elect, represented by Jacob, chosen by God for love, mercy, honor, glory; and the reprobate, represented by Esau, chosen by God for hatred, cruelty, wrath, destruction. Of all the people who had ever existed or ever would, only a precious few were God’s elect. Narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. The vast majority, both of the living and of the dead, were created for destruction. For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. My mother must have been through this story over and over ad nauseam through the years, but she spoke as if it were the first time, her tone filled with impossible awe—as if she still couldn’t believe the elegance of this scenario, as if the beauty of this divine truth could come only from the mind of God Himself.
I was puzzled. My mother seemed elated at something that sounded so dreadfully unfair: that God would create these two brothers to give mercy to one and cruelty to the other, when they had done nothing to deserve either. Of course, it wasn’t the undeserved kindness that disturbed me—it was the hatred. Why would God make Esau for evil, and then send Esau to Hell for being evil? Wasn’t God Himself responsible? It seemed wrong to condemn Esau for doing what God created him to do. When I piped up from the backseat to say so, Mom was only too pleased to go on. I had posed just the objection that the Apostle Paul addresses in his own account of the story: Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth [God] yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? If we are what God created us to be, how could it be just for Him to punish us?
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