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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  As soon as my mother disconnected the call, the cogs of the Westboro war machine kicked into high gear. She phoned Margie and Gramps, and a plan was hatched. If those men were going to file a lawsuit on Monday, we were going to respond with a press conference on Tuesday. After the case was filed, I emailed and faxed out the press release Margie had drafted to national media outlets: “So long as the families, military, media, veterans groups, and community-at-large, use funerals or memorial services of dead soldiers as platforms for political patriotic pep rallies, we will continue to picket those pep rallies. If they put the flags down and go home, we’ll go home. Not before then.”

  The trick was that our press conference would be at Arlington National Cemetery, where Mom, Margie, and I would simultaneously protest another soldier’s funeral. This was not a move I would have thought to make, but all three of them—my grandfather, my aunt, and my mother—had an uncanny knack for finding ways to heighten the drama for the cameras. Addressing journalists was always a bit nerve-racking, but I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about it much with my mom and Margie on the scene.

  * * *

  Before the lawsuit had even been filed, its effect on the church was far-reaching, momentous, instantaneous.

  My parents, siblings, and I filed out of the van that Friday evening, into the house, and down to the church. There would be a meeting to strategize about our response. Gramps sat near the pulpit, wary and weary, and we took our pews near the front. True to his extreme nature, my grandfather began hyperbolizing about worst-case scenarios, appearing to grow more sick with fear and paranoia by the minute. Did the court have jurisdiction to force us to stand trial in Maryland? What if they won? Wouldn’t other families begin to sue us in other courts and jurisdictions? What if they made us litigate these funeral pickets all over the country? What if they bankrupted us all? What were we going to do about all this? Most of us waited in silence as my parents, Margie, and the rest of my aunt- and uncle-attorneys weighed in on these questions. They tried to answer him calmly and reasonably, to assuage his rising panic, but the longer the meeting went on, the more they began to mirror his dread.

  My grandfather fixed his stare on a nearby wall for a moment, and then spoke matter-of-factly into the strained silence. “The Lord could just kill them, you know.”

  And thus we began to pray for the Lord to kill the father of the Marine and his accomplices.

  Someone googled the names of the lawyers who were filing the complaint—former JAG officers—and for the first time in all my life, we slid down off our pews and prostrated ourselves on the floor of the church sanctuary. The men took turns making elaborate prayers to God to kill these men that very weekend, before they had the opportunity to attack the Lord’s church in this way. We were the representatives of the Most High God, and we prayed He would show Himself strong on our behalf. Our requests were made in the spirit of King David’s imprecatory prayers—prayers of cursing, invocations of the wrath of God. When David was being pursued by his enemy, he prayed that the Lord would

  Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

  Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

  Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg.

  Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.

  Our enemies did not die over the weekend, but this pervasive doctrinal shift would affect the church for years to come, pushing us ever more to the extreme. As with Westboro’s decision to shift our focus to military funeral pickets, our new imprecatory prayers caused me significant consternation—but I had trouble discerning its root. King David had plainly made these prayers about his enemies, and God had called David a man after mine own heart. Even Jesus Himself had promised vengeance to His people: And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Clearly, our imprecatory prayers were consistent with Scripture.

  But if that was true, why did they unsettle me so?

  This was not a line of questioning that I could pursue. I was in the habit of suppressing thoughts that conflicted with the Bible as my family understood it, and by the time I was twenty, that tendency was nearly as second nature as breathing. My feelings were irrelevant. I would sacrifice them on the altar of submission to the church, because that was my first and foremost duty in this life. As Margie had told me in the email that sat in my top drawer: “Sometimes you have to step away from being the one with all the analysis and all the answers, and just submit.”

  It is disconcerting—shamefully, unimaginably so—to look back and accept that my fellow church members and I were collectively engaging in the most egregious display of logical blindness that I have ever witnessed. I cannot account for my failure to recognize that our new imprecatory prayers were entirely and fundamentally at odds with our long-standing, oft-professed desire to love thy neighbor, that they were perfect contradictions of Jesus’s command to love your enemies. Both positions had been derived from the Scriptures—but how could we have sincerely held such deeply incompatible views for so many years? It should have been inconceivable in a group of Westboro’s size and intelligence. Still, the partition between the piece of my mind that confessed love for my neighbors and the piece that asked God to dash the young men to pieces was vast, opaque, and impenetrable. That brief spark of nagging discomfort was snuffed out, and I carried on.

  A deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?

  * * *

  I had decided to follow my mom and Margie to law school as a kindergartner, but the Snyder lawsuit was the first Westboro case I was able to follow up-close. I’d been too young to understand the broader context and the legal significance of the ones that came before, even though my mother had never been hesitant to teach me about them. And then as I got older, I became skeptical of my mother’s portrayals of the cases, anyway. Margie had an inclination to steel-man her opponent’s arguments—depicting them in the best possible light, and then expertly dismantling them to their foundations, brick by crumbling brick—but my mother tended to straw-man. She presented facts in such a way that our side came out as a paragon of virtue, and our opponents as the nadir of evil. Her analysis was just too intense and one-sided to be objective, and it became important for me to read the records for myself. My mother would always encourage me to do so. She seemed to sense that I’d begun to view her as a bit of an unreliable narrator, but she was confident that examining the primary source material would lead me to the same conclusions she had come to.

  As the case progressed, one point became abundantly clear: the Maryland funeral at the heart of this conflict was beset by the worst possible set of facts for the men who had filed the suit. We had protested well over a hundred funerals by the time this lawsuit was filed, and there were times when only narrow spaces had separated us from our targets. We’d stood in clear view of the funeral entrances where our chilling melodies had shattered the silence, echoing off church facades and into the unwilling ears of the mourners, their sorrow at the mercy of our joy:

  God sinks your battle ships, you little wimps

  Throw out your lifelines, boys

  Your time has come to die, die, die, die

  There had been no such scene at the Snyder funeral. Police had “stuck us off in the north forty!” as my mother exclaimed. They had used orange snow fencing to corral her and six other picketers into a small area located more than a thousand feet from the church, on public land, and there was no one around to see them but members of the media and law enforcement officers. The picket was over before the funeral began, and the funeral procession had even been routed so that it didn’t pass by Westboro picketers at all. A professional videographer would shoot footage showing that a hill prevented funeral-goers from seeing Westboro’s neon signs from the procession route, though the deceased’s father testified that he’d seen �
��the tops of them.” We took it as a signal of divine favor that this was the funeral we’d been sued for. God was going to use this lawsuit as a preaching tool, and He was going to lead us to victory such that no other family would dare to take us on over this issue again.

  At Westboro, it was all hands on deck. Everyone with any skill would have a part to play. My mother and Margie would be at the helm with their familiar split focus of logistics and law; the other lawyers would help Margie with research and strategy; and the young adults would do the menial but important work of transcribing news stories to use as evidence. We were a well-oiled machine, always shifting to make sure that every need was met. Did a mother have to work late? Another would make sure her children got to the evening pickets in Topeka on time. Had Margie finished writing a brief? Her siblings were standing by to edit. Did anyone seem pressed beyond measure? Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

  The Maryland case was a dream for a wannabe lawyer like me. At the time, I was pursuing a degree in business at Washburn University, a small public institution that had been the destination for nearly all Westboro members’ post-secondary education ever since Gramps had graduated from its law school. My time at Washburn didn’t fit the typical experience of college as a time of questioning and independence. The university was located less than two miles from my home, and we had protested there at least weekly from the early days of our picketing ministry—an unlikely place for a Westboro member to find, or even to seek, intellectual freedom. I loved that the university system allowed me to focus on classes and subjects I found most interesting, and it was an improvement over high school in other ways, as well. I was only required to be on campus for classes and had almost no interaction with fellow students outside of that—which made things a lot easier for me. Westboro’s beliefs and public protests had always been such a huge part of my identity, and ever more so as I got older. Having to keep that mostly separated from my life at school—largely ignoring the very most important part of me—hadn’t been easy. In college, I didn’t have to work nearly as hard to maintain that separation. I already had far more distance from my peers, and I also felt less inhibited about using any relevant university assignments as an opportunity to detail and expound on Westboro’s activities—to address how I really saw the world.

  I couldn’t wait to get to law school, but in the meantime, I relished learning the nuts and bolts of the Snyder case. The number and scope of legal issues seemed to multiply with each passing day, but one of the central questions was whether a state’s tort law—claims of civil wrongs—could be used to punish speakers whose words and actions would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. The father of the fallen Marine claimed that Westboro’s words had caused severe emotional injury and deterioration in his health, ruined the memory of his son, and turned the funeral into “a media circus.” Could Westboro be found responsible for those damages? Could we be held liable for “intruding upon the seclusion” of the Marine’s family—even though we had been standing on public land that was far from the funeral and unseen by its attendees? And even if they had seen our signs, was their grief or offense enough to render our words punishable under the law?

  In the legal arguments Margie would eventually make, the answer to these questions was a resounding “No.” She argued that even if the court considered the Snyder family to be private figures, Westboro’s speech could not give rise to a cause of action. Because the Marine’s father had repeatedly made public comments about the war in Iraq and published private details about the family, “a church or anybody has the right to answer that public comment.” In protesting the young man’s funeral, church members had only stated their religious opinions on matters of public interest, which falls under “the umbrella of protection under the First Amendment that this Court has established firmly.”

  Or as Gramps put it succinctly: “If these cockeyed lawyers can use tort law to do an end run around the First Amendment, then there is no freedom of speech in this country!”

  * * *

  During the years of the Maryland case, my mother would often send me over to Margie’s office to assist her with anything she might need. It gave me the sense of being on loan from one boss to another, but the feeling was a joyful one. There was no higher calling than to be useful to the church, and I cherished the time with my darling aunt as fiercely as I had when I was a little girl running errands with her around Topeka. Now, though, our travels would have us marching toward the nation’s capital.

  Westboro had lost at the trial court, and a Baltimore jury issued a stunning $10.9 million verdict against us for protesting the young marine’s funeral. The world had cheered at the idea that this judgment signaled the end of the church—that after two decades of violence and threats, unlawful police actions and impotent legal shenanigans of all kinds, America had finally, finally found a way to defeat Westboro and end our picketing forever. On its face, our loss seemed devastating and insurmountable—but still, the church adopted the sort of position we always took: one of exultation. We were utterly amazed at what the Lord was doing to our enemies. In allowing them to prevail at the trial court, He was lulling them into a false sense of hope. For two years, they reveled in their victory, throwing it in our faces, certain of their triumph. What fools! Did they not yet understand that God was with us? We knew that He would turn our apparent defeat into a victory—and their initial, illusory success would only cause them to rage all the more.

  And thus it was. Margie filed our appeal, and the appellate court ultimately reversed the trial court’s decision. They set aside the multimillion-dollar judgment, declaring that Westboro’s speech was, indeed, protected by the First Amendment. No matter who was offended by our religious opinion, Maryland’s tort law could not be used to circumvent our right to free speech.

  Now Snyder v. Phelps would come before the United States Supreme Court. The stakes were high, and the stage the most prestigious we’d ever had. We continued to ramp up our efforts with a constant stream of nationwide protests and endless interviews requested by major media outlets from around the world. We were racing to the finish line.

  It was September 2010, and Margie and I were making our way to meet with folks from the Thomas Jefferson Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Margie would rehearse the tough cross-examination she expected from Justice Scalia and his colleagues. The oral arguments were just a few weeks out, and she was preparing for the most daunting challenge she’d ever confronted as a lawyer, the pinnacle of her legal career. On that Saturday in September, though, one that belonged more to summer than to fall, it was evident that her thoughts weren’t on the case. Instead, as Margie and I walked through an idyllic university community, empty of students and full of autumn leaves in brilliant hues, she put her arm through mine and started to cry.

  “This is it,” she said quietly. “This is where I’d be. If the Lord hadn’t saved me … I imagine I’d be a professor … living in a place like this, one of these houses…” She trailed off, and we both walked together like that for a time, contemplating the choices we would have made if we’d had any choice at all. Margie’s words were echoes of a lament I’d been hearing from teachers and journalists for years: that a family as impressive as the Phelpses were wasting our lives and talents tormenting people on the streets. How startling it was to hear it in Margie’s voice, my mind stirring with the beginnings of a subtle realization: that even among the staunchest of us, the sacrifices we made in order to be at Westboro—our insistent rejection of the world outside—weren’t quite as simple and inevitable as they had always seemed.

  * * *

  Gathered on the marble plaza in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, the throng of reporters appeared stunned, and I laughed aloud at their bewilderment. Before them stood over a dozen Westboro members with my mom and Margie at the fore, all of us brimming with adrenaline and positively giddy. Just behind us shone all the imposing grandeur of the Court’s edifice: broad
steps leading up to a portico of Corinthian columns and a white marble façade proclaiming “Equal Justice Under Law,” evoking Greece’s Parthenon just as it was designed to. Oral arguments in Snyder v. Phelps had wrapped moments earlier, and I looked over Margie’s shoulder at the assembled mass of cameras and microphones as she and my mother fielded questions from the Supreme Court press corps. Margie had shown deference to the justices and respect for the Court’s pomp and pageantry while we were inside the courtroom itself, but we were back outside now. Our turf. When a journalist made the mistake of asking whether Westboro members ever considered the Snyder family’s feelings, the whole group of us spontaneously burst into song, as one:

  Cryin’ ’bout your feeeeeelings

  For your sin, no shame!

  You’re goin’ straight to Hell on your crazy train!

  Dozens of cameras chronicled the incongruity of the scene: the lawyer who had just calmly and cogently expounded First Amendment doctrine to the justices of the nation’s highest court, now leading a band of misfits in serenading America’s leading media outlets with a parody of “Crazy Train” by the British heavy metal vocalist Ozzy Osbourne—in three-part harmony. The footage went viral, and we delighted in the fact that NBC’s camera angle had allowed it to capture one extra piece of the picture: me, standing just behind my mom and Margie, lifting my hand for a high five and laughing with a cousin who promptly indulged me. “That’s our answer about feelings,” Margie told the crowd of dismayed reporters as we stood giggling just over her shoulder. “Stop worshipping your feelings, and start obeying God!”