The Osbournes issued a statement the following day, “disgusted and appalled that WBC would use Ozzy’s music to represent such hateful and despicable beliefs.”
It was perfect.
We knew that the Court wouldn’t deliver its opinion for several months, and after a long year of litigation involving courts in Nebraska and Missouri, too, I expected something of a lull in the interim. Instead, the six months following oral arguments were among the most intense the church had ever seen. The explosions of media coverage wherever we roamed, the growing mobs of angry counterprotesters, the teams of journalists who continued to arrive on our doorstep—all of it was proof that God was with us, strengthening our hands for this good work, and causing our efforts to prosper. I loved every second of it. My place as my mother’s right hand came with high standards and high costs, but I paid them happily, growing more devoted to our cause with each passing day. The world held no allure for me. How could it? I was squarely in the middle of a sea of activity that was being attended to by the angels of God, ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation. That was us: “heirs of salvation.”
Living in my parents’ home as a single, childless woman with a college degree and a flexible work schedule, I had the freedom and financial wherewithal to journey far and wide to propagate the church’s message. A few days after we returned home from D.C., I traveled to New York to picket gays and Jews. A week later, to Idaho and Washington State to protest schools. Ten days after, to Michigan for Muslims and more Jews. And then off to a Jewish convention in New Orleans, where God led us to a serendipitous post-picket encounter with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and his security detail, pausing a few feet away to listen carefully to our somber parody of the Israeli national anthem: Wrath will soon pour on you for your awful sin / Your great affliction, it will soon begin. The next week, a soldier’s funeral in Maryland. A high school in Ohio. A Philadelphia television studio for a debate between my mother and Senator Arlen Specter. New York to be on the Mike Gallagher Show in lieu of protesting the funerals of the victims of the Tucson shooting that killed a nine-year-old girl and injured U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords. The funeral of a sledding accident victim in Oklahoma. The Super Bowl in Texas. The Grammys. The Oscars. Interviews in Spanish with a television crew from Barcelona. The Sundance Film Festival, where the director Kevin Smith—my longtime Twitter nemesis—counterprotested us following the premiere of his Westboro-inspired film Red State. (I’d gotten Smith’s attention back in 2009, when comedians Michael Ian Black and Rainn Wilson—and their millions of followers—came after me for tweets I’d posted in celebration of World AIDS Day: “Thank God for AIDS! You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought His wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse!” I was twenty-three, and this was some of the earliest success I’d found on Twitter. When the kerfuffle reached Smith, who was best known for his films Clerks and Dogma, he launched what would become a years-long Twitter campaign to #SaveMegan, in which he regularly encouraged his millions of followers to inundate me with messages persuading me of the errors of Westboro’s ways. GOD HATES PHELPS, his picket sign at Sundance read, EXCEPT MEGHAN—GOD THINKS MEGHAN’S HOT. I forgave him the mockery and misspelling of my name. It was good press.)
I traveled with my mother and Margie as guest speakers invited to university classes, to a college media convention in a Times Square hotel, and to the FBI National Academy at Quantico, whose primary purpose seemed to be a thinly veiled experiment in psychoanalysis—an attempt to understand the perspectives of extremists. Each of these was a fascinating engagement with communities that had long despised us. My laptop accompanied me everywhere, and I’d connect it to classroom projection systems so I could show the class in real time that the Bible really did say what we claimed it did. Everywhere we ventured, it seemed, the city would explode in outrage. The tongue is a fire. These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also. The events of those six months brought more sustained attention, exposure, and legitimacy to the church and our message than ever before, and a spirit of triumphalism and invulnerability took hold of Westboro. I found myself completely in its thrall, blind to the peril until it was too late.
5. The Lust of the Flesh
The only thing he ever lied to me about was his age. Since we were living in the golden era of catfishing, it occurred to me that this was nothing short of a true miracle. I wasn’t even sure it counted as a lie, either, since the number he gave me without context (“Age 38.”) was his age when we first met. It was February 2011, and my church’s website, GodHatesFags.com, had just been taken over by the hacker collective known as Anonymous, which replaced our Gospel preaching with a mocking message. The takeover happened live on a popular web show during a joint interview with the hacker and my mother—defiant even in the face of ostensible defeat—and the video spread rapidly, garnering half a million views in twelve hours and featured on YouTube’s home page. We responded predictably, my aunt Margie penning a provocative press release that I immediately posted to Twitter along with our challenge to Anonymous: “Bring it, cowards.” Westboro and Anonymous are each notorious in their own right, and with the added spectacle of a mid-interview hack, the story was irresistible. The drama was reported by major news outlets across the country—which is how my name and photo ended up in the RSS feed of a man living in a tiny town in eastern South Dakota.
The first tweet he sent me must have been crude, because my response included a warning to “get your head outta the gutter.” His message was lost to me almost instantly, though, one among a deluge. With the advice and consent of my mother, I had become Westboro’s voice on Twitter eighteen months earlier, and had found great success at getting attention for our message. For years, my proximity to my mother had thrust me into the logistical work that powered Westboro’s picketing engine. Combined with my boundless energy and enthusiasm for our beliefs, that proximity had also given me a high-profile public voice that others of my peers lacked. Reporters would come to interview my mother as our de facto spokesperson, and then turn to me with questions about the perspective of the Phelps grandchildren—the first Westboro generation to have grown up on the picket line. I believed our doctrines to be the very definition of goodness and righteousness—not tedious or burdensome—and I loved them with all the fervor my mother had been modeling since I was a child. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. Though I was always afraid I wasn’t sufficiently articulate to speak for the church, I never let that stop me from stepping up to the plate—and the more I spoke, the more I learned how to speak. I was ever eager to fulfill my duty both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers with sound doctrine, and that trend had continued into the social media age.
Thanks to our rising profile after the oral arguments, I was now receiving sometimes hundreds of tweets a day and posting dozens more of my own. Although we protested at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, I’d come to love the platform dearly: a place for me to spread our message in a way that didn’t require the distorting lens of a journalist who just couldn’t seem to get it, no matter how much effort I spent trying to explain. I discovered I was far more effective at pleading our cause directly to the people on Twitter, absent the influence of Bible-ignorant hacks who wielded professional cameras and microphones. After two decades on the picket line, I was twenty-five years old and a skilled defender of Westboro and its many controversial doctrines. This random guy was just an anonymous face in the crowd asking the same questions I’d answered hundreds of thousands of times before. “‘God hates fags’ not ‘I hate fags,’” I clarified for him. “We love them more than anyone.”
MEGAN AMRAM (@meganamram): cool name
MEGAN PHELPS-ROPER (@meganphelps): Thanks! Sometimes your parents give you a cool name, sometimes you go to fiery eternal torment for hating God & teaching sin. =(
Less than two weeks after th
e Anonymous attack, the Supreme Court published its opinion in Snyder v. Phelps, and the media circus surrounding the church ramped up a hundredfold. God had worked in the hearts of the justices, and we had prevailed against our adversaries. Had the Snyder lawsuit succeeded, we knew that the much-vaunted American right to freedom of speech would have become little more than window dressing: if one person can label another’s opinions on public issues “offensive” and then sue the speaker for millions of dollars in damages, what protection does the First Amendment offer? By that logic, a member of the KKK could sue a black protester for protesting a Klan meeting while promoting the “offensive” belief that racism is a societal evil. The Snyder lawsuit had to fail, because, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority:
Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.
Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.
Emboldened by our success, we announced that we would quadruple our protests of soldiers’ funerals. In the days and weeks that followed, I was more active on social media than ever before or since, so thankful to be one of God’s representatives on earth and utterly exultant that He had put a megaphone to the mouth of our tiny church. I used Twitter to bait celebrities with anti-gay messages, to publicly celebrate Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, and to debate the merits of the Snyder case with anyone who would listen. Whether I was cooking dinner, sitting on an airplane, or standing at a protest holding two signs in one hand and my iPhone in the other, I spent every spare moment I could find answering thousands of users, whether they were curious, angry, confused, or mocking.
BRETT MICHAEL DYKES (@thecajunboy): Lil Wayne is making abstinence education videos now, apparently …
MEGAN PHELPS-ROPER (@meganphelps): With 1 in 4 U.S. girls aged 14–19 having an STD, abstinence is *clearly* the problem, @thecajunboy. Pssst: #GodHatesFornication!
BMD: Go fuck yourself.
MPR: Why yes—it HAS been too long since WBC’s been to [your area]! Picket ideas? You know who to tweet.;) #Obey
And in the midst of it all, him. Over the weeks, I started to notice his name and photo each time they appeared among the flood of messages I was receiving, though neither gave me any hint as to who he could be. His name was “FormerlyKnownAs,” his profile picture that iconic image of Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, leaning against the yellow convertible; I studiously ignored the spike in my heart rate and the dopamine rush I experienced whenever I saw them. So many of those who messaged me were enraged—understandably so, given that we were disposed to celebrating the deaths of children and blaming their parents for the tragedies that took them—and while he was certainly perplexed by our doctrines, anger had no part in his response after that first tweet. Instead he lurked, his infrequent questions belying the fact that he was reading each and every word I posted. His careful attention was intimidating and intoxicating, and all the more so as a figure of him started to form in my mind: exceptionally witty, quietly dignified, deeply curious, and above all, respectful and kind. The thoughts he shared were never what I anticipated: reverent praise of my grammar, critiques of the font used on our picket signs, and literary and film recommendations as diverse as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Gilead and the comedy blockbuster The Hangover. Apart from his typical questions about the church, he was all over the board and never where I expected.
I relished confounding his expectations, too. Like many others, he’d arrived at my Twitter under the impression that my church was filled with hillbillies and rednecks, an assumption I was only too happy to dispel. Upon my trumpeting of our Supreme Court victory, he learned that my family is full of lawyers, and I learned that it was a profession he shared—another piece of the puzzle that I meticulously filed away. He was shocked to find that my grandfather had been honored by the NAACP for his civil rights work in Kansas. Still anonymous, he wrote this message to a researcher who was looking into the ways Westboro used Twitter:
I became aware of WBC via Anonymous. I immediately sent MPR a nasty tweet. She responded in a charming way. I was charmed. I wiki’d WBC which led me to wiki Fred Phelps. I learned that he, like me, was a lawyer. I learned that he was a civil rights pioneer in Kansas, which was contrary to what I expected. I studied more. During that study, WBC won a Supreme Court decision I didn’t realize was pending. Whether you love them or hate them or think they’re good or evil, you can’t deny that it’s a fascinating, complex American story. If MPR hadn’t sent a witty, charming response to a nasty tweet from me, I wouldn’t know the first thing about WBC, and I wouldn’t have written this to you. That’s the power of Twitter. That’s influence. That’s the power of an @.
Witty, he said. Charming. I found myself blushing at his compliments, but failed to recognize the deeper import of what he was saying. It was only much later that I noticed the pattern, that the dynamic he described had played itself out repeatedly during my time on Twitter—among many others, it happened with a friendly college student in Canada, a sassy start-up employee in Chicago, a hilarious Australian guy who tweeted political jokes, even an American soldier to whom I had sent a care package in Afghanistan. At the time I had been vaguely aware of the changes that communication on Twitter was working in me, but it was only in hindsight that its effects became clear. The 140-character limit caused me to drastically cut back on my use of insults, which Westboro members made a habit of stringing together in long, alliterative lists: “bombastic, blowhard, bigmouth, bimbo, bastard.” Not only was there no space for insults in tweets, there was also an almost immediate feedback loop: unlike with email, I could watch a Twitter conversation derail in real time whenever I included personally disparaging language. The exchange would swiftly devolve from a theological debate to a playground quarrel. It became clear to me that causing offense with needless ad hominem attacks did nothing to communicate our core message, and I learned to avoid it. Hostile tweeters became almost like a game to me, and I delighted in learning to use humor, pop culture, and self-deprecation to diffuse and disarm antagonism. To change the nature of the conversation and convey our message in a way that outsiders could better hear it. The tongue might be a fire, I was learning, but it didn’t always have to be.
“So, when do you drink the Kool-aid?” one guy tweeted at me.
“More of a Sunkist lemonade drinker, myself. =)” I told him.
By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.
Somewhere along the line, my anonymous lawyer bragged about his Words With Friends prowess, and I impulsively responded with my username in a hashtag. Two days later, he started a match with me, and the game began in earnest.
* * *
I was about six when I first thought seriously about marriage. Gramps had spoken from the pulpit one Sunday morning about the foundation for proper marriage: serving the Lord together. Marrying an unbeliever was verboten, and for us, that meant only other Westboro members were permissible partners. Since the church was composed almost entirely of my immediate and extended family, it occurred to my child mind that if I were ever to marry, it would have to be someone from outside, someone who hadn’t grown up
in this peculiar faith of ours. I’d been seeing outsiders on the picket line for about a year by then—angry, screeching, violent, wearers of neon muscle shirts and fanny packs—and I was afraid.
“What if I get married to someone who acts like a good person, but then it turns out they’re bad? Gramps says you can’t get divorced. What will happen to me, Mama?” I was clutching her hand as we walked down our street after school one sunny afternoon, my little tum churning with dread at the thought of being hoodwinked by one of Satan’s boys. I’d only just conjured this scenario, but my thoughts were already tumbling all over themselves, my tendency toward melodrama completely unhelpful. Instead of seeming like some far-off possibility, the danger felt real, immediate, pulsing from heart to limbs and back again.
“The Lord will keep you, little Meg.” My mama’s voice was gentle, reassuring. “He knows the hearts of all men. If you’re supposed to have a husband, the Lord knows how to make sure he’s a good one. He won’t let us be tricked.” Her quiet certainty was calming. She’s right, I thought. The Lord will take care of us. We have to trust Him. They were the words I always heard the adults repeating.
My tiny death grip on her palm must have given away how truly scared I was, because she shook her head, laughing indulgently, and went on: “And anyway, you won’t have to think about that for a long, long time.”
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