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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  Shortly after I emerged on the message boards at thirteen, references to my grandfather’s expulsion from the courts began to crop up. He hadn’t stopped practicing law because he’d retired, my opponents said; he’d been disbarred. I knew it to be true, but I’d always heard his disbarment dismissed as an unjustified punishment, because “these people hated us.” I paid the accusers no mind at first, but it made me uneasy: disbarment wasn’t a matter of unsubstantiated opinion, but a verifiable fact. They started to lay out the case that cost my grandfather his license in 1979: that he had flown into a rage when a court reporter failed to have a transcript ready for him in time; that he had sued her in a frivolous lawsuit demanding $22,000 in damages; and that he had abused her on the witness stand, badgering her for days on end. When they began quoting from the disbarment proceedings, I couldn’t ignore it any longer: “The seriousness of the present case … leads this court to the conclusion that [Fred Phelps] has little regard for the ethics of his profession.” I needed to find out the facts so that I could learn how to respond to these allegations—something more than “everyone just hates us.” I went to my mother in her capacity as the keeper of our collective history, an informal role she played in the church because of her punctilious mind, unparalleled memory, and uniquely close relationship with Gramps. She would have the answer for me.

  Gramps had been disbarred, my mother told me, but it was in retaliation for his civil rights work—not for any actual transgression on his part. “Those people hated us for that work. The courts hated us, the businesses hated us, all because we won those big verdicts. We were holdin’ their feet to the fire in those discrimination cases, and they weren’t gonna get a free pass on any of their misdeeds. They could hardly be civil to us, they hated us so badly.” Yes, I pressed, but what about the court reporter? “Hon, do you think your Gramps is crazy? It wasn’t just because that woman was ‘late with a transcript.’ It was a strategic move on her part, delaying that transcript. It was an essential piece of evidence in a case, and her deliberate refusal to produce it on time was to ensure that we missed the deadline to file. There are all kinds of ways for people to screw you over in the courts with technicalities like that, and that’s exactly what she was doin’.” My mother explained that it wasn’t just our word against the court’s, either. Monroe Friedman, one of the nation’s leading experts in legal ethics, had written a dissertation in support of my grandfather, summarized in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in 1983:

  In a long dissertation filed in federal court in support of Phelps, Monroe Friedman, law professor and former dean of Hofstra University Law School, said, “It was as clear to me as could be that the kind of conduct that Fred Phelps was accused of is commonplace among the bar, that it is proper conduct, and that it would never be subjected to a disciplinary attack unless there was some other motive.”

  Friedman said the motive is the nature of Phelps’ clientele.

  “It has become professionally dangerous for a lawyer to be involved in representing poor people and in representing unpopular clients and unpopular cases,” he said.

  Still, my mother wasn’t finished. She pointed out that perhaps the clearest indicator of all that her father’s disbarment had been a sham was the fact that the federal court had refused to disbar him. “Normally, if you’ve got some ethics violation and the state court disbars you for it, the federal court just rubber-stamps it, and kicks you out of their courts, too. They wouldn’t do that to Gramps. They said he hadn’t done anything worthy of disbarment, and he kept practicing in the federal courts for another ten years.”

  My mother didn’t ask where I’d discovered the accusations I’d presented to her, likely assuming they’d come from our daily pickets—eight years in and still going strong. I didn’t volunteer their source, either. I was afraid she’d tell me not to waste time arguing with Topeka’s riffraff on the Internet, and I didn’t want to stop. I thought engaging with people was important, that it was a perfect opportunity to “maintain and defend pure Gospel truth,” like my grandfather was always encouraging us to do. He preached extensively about the believer’s duty to be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers. “Convince means confute!” he would say. “It means to overwhelm them with sound arguments, logic, and evidence, to prove the folly of their position.” I knew I would need to practice if I wanted to join Gramps in declaring with the Apostle Paul, I am set for the defence of the gospel.

  * * *

  Hunched over the keys of the living room computer, I continued to pore over the message boards whenever I had a spare moment. The accusations kept coming. One impugned my grandfather’s motives in battling racism, saying his goals were not moral but financial, that he only represented blacks because he could make money off of them: exploitation of the black cause masquerading as noble sacrifice. “I made a lot of money,” my grandfather told the Capital Journal, “I have to admit that.” I couldn’t accept this view. I’d heard Gramps preach against racism with the same venom he employed against gays, and it was clear that he saw his civil rights work in the same way he saw our daily picketing—as a moral imperative. I noted a similar accusation people made about our protesting, too, the insistence that the true heart of Westboro was an elaborate scheme to make money. We would provoke onlookers into assaulting us on the picket line, they proffered, and then we would sue both our attackers and the police for failing to protect us. Such a scenario never played out even a single time, but that never stopped people from believing it was true. It struck me that this desire to exchange a financial motive for an ideological one was a convenient evasion of a distressing truth: it was easier to dismiss our stated intentions than to acknowledge that people who were otherwise bright and well-intentioned could believe and behave as we did as members of Westboro.

  I didn’t want to bring too many of these Internet accusations to my mother, so I reasoned with myself about whether the money my grandfather had earned devalued his civil rights work. Didn’t my grandparents have thirteen children to support? Was it wrong for him to try to make a good living for them? And hadn’t he represented many people who couldn’t pay him at all? If he hadn’t made money on the cases he won, he couldn’t have afforded to represent those who didn’t have money. Was justice only for the rich? Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked. This allegation, too, was a nonstarter for me.

  But there was another that nearly proved ruinous.

  Rumors of extreme child abuse had filtered in and out of my awareness for almost as many years as I had memories. Their source: the two uncles whom I had never met, Mark and Nate. I knew to find them odious and repugnant from the way my mother and her siblings spoke of them, even when ostensibly paying them a compliment. “Those two boys were very smart, probably smarter than many of us who’re still here—but they thought they were smarter than God.” My aunt’s voice was loaded with derision. “They’re just rebels, and that’s all there is to it.” The dismissal was final, the door to discussion firmly shut.

  Except it wasn’t. The rumors resurfaced time and again, and had even been printed in a series of articles the Capital Journal had published about my grandfather in 1994: “Hate for the Love of God.” Reporters Steve Fry and Joe Taschler had done extensive research into my grandfather’s past, looking up childhood friends and neighbors, interviewing classmates, and chronicling the evolution of the man who had laid siege to the city of Topeka with more than three years of daily protesting against all who crossed him. They had also found his estranged sons, then living in California. Mark and Nate described brutal violence: beatings that lasted for hours as my grandfather yelled and cursed them, the heavy leather straps and a mattock handle he used, bloodcurdling screams, bruises on top of bruises that would split open their skin. The eerie joy he took at their pain, grinning at the wounds he had caused. There were so many examples, so many specifics.

  Publicly, my
mom and her siblings always vehemently denied the stories told by their estranged brothers: no, they had not been abused—only spanked. Disciplined. Their brothers were just angry because they hated God. Because they wanted to fornicate and commit adultery and live as they pleased. Those two boys were throwing a public hissy fit because they didn’t want to obey their father or the Lord, and they didn’t want anyone to interfere with their disobedience. Incredulity would creep into the voices of reporters as they somberly repeated my uncles’ allegations for comment: Was my mother really going to suggest that every one of her brothers’ stories was entirely exaggerated? Was she going to deny that there had been any abuse at all?

  She was, indeed. Her siblings would deny it, as well, though they avoided addressing it whenever possible. They’d laugh out loud at the reporter’s queries and ask rhetorical questions intended to shame him for his lack of insight: Would nine of the thirteen Phelps children have remained at Westboro if they’d been subjected to savage abuse? How was it that the loyal children were all so well-educated and professionally accomplished—meanwhile, Nathan had dropped out of school and was driving a cab for a living? My grandfather also dismissed their charges, telling the Capital Journal, “Hardly a word of truth to that stuff. Those boys didn’t want to stay in this church. It was too hard. They took up with girls they liked, and the last thing them girls was gonna do was come into this church. These boys wanted to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. I can’t blame them. I just feel sorry for them that they’re not bound for the promised land.”

  At home, other details painted a more complicated picture. My mother and her siblings dodged the word “abuse,” and always maintained that Mark and Nathan were liars—but even at thirteen, I recognized the obfuscation. I knew my uncles could be “liars” (technically, weren’t we all liars?), and still be telling the truth on this question. My grandfather had nearly always been gentle and sweet to me, and I would forever strive to earn his approval. I found such joy in being his go-to tech assistant, my phone number written on a Post-it and taped to his computer screen. At his slightest erroneous mouse click, I’d take off running through the backyard, in the church’s west door, up the stairs, and into his office. Once, when I was demonstrating the correct keystrokes to save his work, he showed me the icon he clicked—“that little button,” he called it—to accomplish the same thing. We looked at the icon together for a second, and I said, “It’s actually an old floppy disc.” Gramps laughed. “That sounds like what I feel! An old, floppy, disc.” We cracked up, and as always, he gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek to see me out. “I think I’ll take that as my new nickname!” he declared. For the work I did for the ministry, for my aptitude in memorizing and defending church doctrines, and for my increasingly loud and zealous voice for Westboro in the media, I had my grandfather’s approval, and he liberally showed me his love and praise. “I just love all that good work you do, sug’. I love it, I love it, I love it! You learned how to put together a sentence like that from your ol’ Gramps, didn’tcha? Ha!” That little twinkle in his eye when he’d tease us, and then toss his head back and chuckle …

  But growing up, I was also a bit afraid of him, of what would happen if I stepped out of line. The few times I gave him occasion to be dissatisfied with me—as when I failed to play a hymn at the correct tempo the single time I was accompanist at our Sunday church service—he berated me without pity, his harsh temper provoked at the slightest displeasure. The fear I had was also passed down by my parents’ generation, by the way they spoke of anything that might upset or disappoint my grandfather: in hushed tones with intense strategizing about the best way to reveal a problem to him. It was not uncommon to hear, “Stay clear, Daddy’s throwing one of his fits again!”

  And then there was my mother. Sometimes she seemed exhausted just thinking about the years growing up with her father. The Phelps children spent long days at school, followed by hours of selling boxes of candy on the streets of Topeka, Kansas City, Wichita, to support the family and the church, followed by a daily ten-mile run. My grandfather had found the running program on the back of a Wheaties box and forced all his children to join him in following it—even the ones in elementary school. When he decided they would start training for marathons, their Saturday mileage increased to twenty-six. “His motto has always been, ‘If a little’s good, a lot’s better.’ No moderation, always to the extreme,” my mother told me more than once. When they ran the Heart of America marathon in Columbia, Missouri, my uncle Tim was the youngest to compete. He’d turned seven just a few weeks before the race. It took him seven hours to finish. Runner’s World thought it was a great story and published it in their November 1970 issue, which hung proudly on the wall of the church office next to the Time profile. “We were too young to be doin’ that—sellin’ candy and runnin’ like that,” my mom would say. “Too damn young. He shouldn’t have had us out there like that, and that’s all there is to it. Nothin’ to do about it now, though.”

  It was in the past. Gramps didn’t do that anymore.

  Such was the essence of the position my mother took when I came to her one day in tears of outrage and despair: my sleuthing on the message boards had led me to a book. It had been referenced a few dozen times before my curiosity got the better of me. I knew it was full of lies, per my parents. They explained that even the Capital Journal—certainly no friend of ours—had refused to print what they referred to as an “agenda-driven” manuscript. The ex-intern who’d authored the book had been fired by the newspaper “as a result of our inability to place any reliance on his judgment and his work product. His actions as an employee here were unprofessional and ethically questionable.” I clicked the link and began to read.

  An hour later, wailing with an anguish the likes of which I’d never known, I stormed out of the living room and into my mother’s office. She jumped out of her chair and rushed over. “Is it true?!” I demanded, hardly able to force my mouth to form words around the sobs, doubling over as I folded myself into her arms. This was not a tone I ever took with my mother, but I had no control. I had not asked her about all the accusations I’d found on those message boards. I needed to ask her about this.

  “Is what true?! Is what true?!”

  “Gran!” I squalled. The writer’s detailing of my grandfather’s child abuse had made me gasp as I read, yet I’d managed to hold on to the lifeline that this was not a trustworthy account. But when I read of my six-foot-three Gramps going after my tiny, gentle Gran decades earlier—punching her, beating her with heavy implements, dislocating her shoulder by throwing her down the stairs, and cutting her hair to the scalp because she wasn’t sufficiently in subjection to him—I instantly came apart. This was a reality I could not bear to consider. It contradicted everything I knew about my faith and my family, everything I needed to believe. That we were righteous. That we were loving. That we were the good guys.

  The truth was that my grandfather’s remarkable lack of self-restraint couldn’t help but extend to his discipline. And despite all the practice I had in denying it, I knew it. I had known only echoes of Gramps’s rage through my mother, but the intensity of even those echoes had been a frequent source of terror for my siblings and me—the way it transformed the features of my mother, twisting them into something sharp and menacing and filled with violence. I pushed away the memories of my five-year-old self, the nightmares that ensued when I failed to learn the week’s piano lesson. Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell. I’d cry out hysterically with each stroke of the wooden paddle until she finally stopped, but when I’d return to the piano bench a blubbering wreck, Mom wouldn’t leave me to work. Instead she’d slam the paddle down on the piano top and sit down next to me. “Go,” she would snarl, though I was shaking and could hardly see the music through tears. Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying
. There was no way to concentrate with her beside me, and yet she would sit for the next hour, yelling, jabbing the beat into my shoulder, yanking me up for another spanking every few minutes, the force of the blows rising with her ire. More discordant notes would ring out when she smacked the tops of my hands, smashing my little fingers into the keys. He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.

  My mother rarely mentioned her father’s abuse directly, but it was apparent nonetheless. It was in her tone when she spoke of her father “always going too far. His policy was to beat first and ask questions later.” It was in her despair when she would recall being “at—his—mercy!” It was in the way she responded to the howls of her children as she disciplined us: “These kids don’t know how good they have it!” Her outrage at our distress made it clear that whatever she was doing to us wasn’t even in the same league as what her father had done to her and her siblings. The Bible required strict discipline, but in her mind, she was delivering a more moderate version to my siblings and me. My mother didn’t tell me until I was twenty-five—almost surely because of the way I responded to the discovery of this book at thirteen—that her father had done permanent injury to her. She would have chronic pain for the rest of her life.

  “Stop it, stop it!” she pleaded, holding on to me. “No, it’s not true! And even if it were, you don’t think he’s doing that stuff today, do ya?!”

  “No,” I admitted. I needed to let myself be comforted. I needed her to convince me that it wasn’t true.

  “And if it were true, d’you think it’d be right to keep beatin’ a guy up for old sins?” Of course it wasn’t. We believed in repentance and forgiveness. If a person changed, their past had no bearing on the present. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. “I don’t want you reading that stuff anymore! There’s no value in it! Go shut that down, and don’t be goin’ back to it.” I was only too relieved to let her direct me away from these thoughts, because pressing at the edge of my consciousness was an uncomfortable parallel: between my grandfather’s physical brutality on the one hand, and the way our church responded to the suffering of outsiders on the other. Our joy at their demise. Our delight at their destruction. I took my leave of this line of thought and accepted the shield of my mother’s instruction, because I needed to believe that our ministry had not been influenced by the pathologies of a human being. I needed to see that Westboro’s monopoly on truth would continue to stand. I needed to know that the past had no bearing on the present.