What if someone could get through to them?
While it was tempting to despair that Westboro would ever change, I couldn’t forget the obvious counterpoint: that I had changed. I had been zealous, dedicated, and absolutely convinced of our cause. True, I had spent my final months at the church trying without success to change their hearts and minds—but if I could be convinced, it stood to reason that others could be, as well. Part of my motive was undeniably selfish: I was desperate to have my loved ones back in my life, to lose the howling pain that held my insides in a vise grip. But it was becoming clear that this wasn’t the only reason we should try to persuade church members away from their views.
Like the rest of the country, I had watched in horror at the news coverage of the December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I knew what my family would say, but I was still saddened and dismayed to watch the scene play out the way it had so many times before: an eruption of tweets and news releases pouring salt into the gaping wounds of the victims’ families, celebrating the mass murder of first-graders as the condign wrath of God, and vowing to protest the memorials. PRAY FOR MORE DEAD KIDS, the sign read. My relief at not participating was tempered by distress at the number of times I had done exactly the same—and to more families than I could guess. I couldn’t undo anything I’d done, but didn’t I have a responsibility to do something? If Grace and I could find a way to convince our family to change their minds, or even to moderate their positions, maybe we could help save other families some of this added pain.
Scrolling through my family’s tweets that morning, though, I understood that Twitter was a double-edged sword. #WhereIsMeganPhelpsRoper was the hashtag, speculation by Westboro detractors who noted my unusual absence from the platform. Twitter connected one especially hard-core critic with a Topekan, who was dispatched to drive by my home in search of my car, and by church protests to see if I could be spotted on the picket line. I panicked reading their exchanges and their taunts to my mother, bile continuing to rise in my throat as I found a Facebook message from a Topeka reporter—cleverly worded such that if I didn’t provide a response, she could assume that I had left Westboro.
I pounced on Grace the moment she woke up, trying not to let myself become overwhelmed by my panic as I read the messages aloud. It felt like being hunted. Forced to publicly reckon with a past I was still trying to understand, a present I was wholly unprepared to navigate, and a future that remained a terrifying abyss. Clearly, we were going to have to say something—but what?
Grace led the way out of the attic and down the hidden stairway to the kitchen, where we found Dustin and Laura eating breakfast. They would help us figure this out.
“Why do we owe anyone an explanation for anything? Why do they get to care?!” Grace exploded in the middle of the discussion, angry at our having been put in this position. I couldn’t blame her, exactly, but the question felt shortsighted to me.
“The way we did things at home…” I started. “We put everything out there. We lived our whole lives in front of cameras and reporters. We spent our days preaching a message that hurt so many people, and all of that is public—so public—and we spent years working hard to make it that way. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all those interviews and news articles … all those things are still out there. Maybe we don’t ‘owe’ people anything … but I feel like we do.”
“And right now,” Dustin pointed out, “that’s who you guys are to the world. You are ‘God Hates Fags.’ If you don’t think that’s true anymore, you’ll want to do something to change that.”
Laura looked pensive and nodded. “I understand how you feel, Grace. I think I’d feel the same way in your position … but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Okay,” I said, after a tense silence. “I’ll try to write something, and we can look at it together later.”
I picked up my phone and wandered out to the living room, tucking myself into the green couch by the big window and staring, unseeing, at the pine forests up the hill.
Where would I even begin? Should I try to explain why I had done and said the things I had while I was at Westboro? Should I unequivocally apologize for everything? What exactly did I feel sorry for?
When I saw Laura shuffling across the hardwood floor in her stocking feet, I turned sideways, pushing myself up to sit on the arm of the sofa while she took the seat next to me. It hadn’t taken long for Grace and me to invite her into our circle of shoulder massages and head scratches, and I was comforted by the remnants of our happy life back home. Laura sat quietly as my mind leafed through the pages of my memory, searching, but I wasn’t sure what for. I narrated the scenes to her aloud. Those sweltering early days at Gage Park, surrounded by loved ones in fanny packs, my tiny fists wrapped around the edges of a sign I couldn’t read. How upset I’d been at age twelve after Matthew Shepard’s death, not because of his murder, but because it wasn’t my turn to travel to picket his funeral. I remembered the day Josh left—I’d been eighteen for a few months at that point, so I could have left the church then. Technically, I’d had that choice.
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” Laura said.
“I guess I’m looking for a line,” I told her. “Am I responsible for what I did at Westboro after I turned eighteen—and my parents, everything before?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “But turning eighteen didn’t magically wipe out all the years before it. I might have had the legal choice to leave, but how could I possibly have done it? Every part of my life hinged on the belief that leaving would only bring me Hell and destruction—and that staying was good and righteous. I just couldn’t leave until I saw differently. How could I?”
As I reasoned aloud, another thought occurred to me: Wasn’t the same true of my mom? The indoctrination, the physical enforcement, the absolute unwillingness to tolerate dissent of any kind—all of these had been hallmarks of my mother’s upbringing, too. The fact that she was now in her fifties didn’t suddenly give her the freedom to throw off the shackles of those beliefs. If anything, it just meant that she’d had more years to marinate in them. She could no more decide to deny those ideas than she could spontaneously decide not to believe in the existence of gravity.
“Who do you think is responsible, then?” Laura asked. “Your grandfather?”
I shook my head and continued to pull my fingers through her hair. “I don’t know. He didn’t invent these ideas, either.” I told her about the sermon that Gramps gave after the September 11 attacks, how amazed I’d been to see that the doctrines we preached had once been mainstream. In high school, one of my English textbooks had contained “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a famous fire-and-brimstone sermon by the influential American theologian Jonathan Edwards. The sermon sounded so much like my grandfather that it was startling, and the beliefs it espoused were by no means fringe at the time it was preached. Edwards himself was even president of the college that would later become known as Princeton University—not a reviled man, but honored and respected.
“So here’s a question for you, Megan.” Laura’s voice was gentle. “Does it really matter where that line of responsibility lies? Would knowing that change anything about where you go from here?”
“It really is a moot point, isn’t it?” I said after a minute. She was right. Ultimately, it didn’t matter how much any single one of us was responsible for any particular wrong we had wrought in the world. It was good that we hadn’t intended to do evil, but our intentions didn’t erase the harm we’d done. The fact was that harm was done, and what mattered now was finding a way to address it.
“I guess I just want to say that I’m truly not looking to avoid taking responsibility for my actions,” I clarified. “That isn’t really the point of the question. I think the point is that … I just have a hard time blaming my family. I don’t think they’re bad people. I think they’re good people who have been trapped by bad ideas … There just has to be a way out.”
* * *<
br />
He finally called me on the phone late one snowy evening.
I’d already known that I loved his words and his humor and his biting wit, but that night I fell in love with his voice: soft and sonorous with just a hint of country twang. I paced the creaky wood floors of the inn’s old library as Chad and I talked for nearly an hour, my fingers twisting in my curls, daydreaming of the time when his would do the same. Other than to have my family back, I can’t recall ever wanting anything in my life as much as I wanted to meet him, to see him with my real eyes for really real in real life.
It seemed that he didn’t want the same, though, despite his words to the contrary: he had already twice reneged on his commitment to come see me in Deadwood. Back in December, he hadn’t told me that he had canceled his plans to visit the Hills after Christmas. He just became withdrawn. Slow to respond. I got the message.
MEGAN: You’re so careful with me, Chad. Oh, so careful. Are you always so cautious?
CHAD: I’m not cautious. I’m Scandinavian. I’m shy and loud. I like the intimacy of large parties.
Meg. I’m almost 40. You’re not.
MEGAN: I’ve face-planted so many more times than you.
I talk too fast.
I used to picket soldiers’ funerals.
CHAD: When I smile, the sides of my eyes wrinkle. I smile often. When I was 26, that didn’t happen.
I’ll see you out there somehow, before you leave.
In spite of myself, I fell for his promise. My heart soared at the prospect of finally laying eyes on my constant companion, this friend who also happened to be—quite literally—the man of my dreams. And then, as the day of my departure from Deadwood neared, mid-January, it happened again. I knew that Chad had more than a little anxiety about our situation, but my feelings for him far outweighed my own doubts and caused me to dismiss the ones he described so elliptically. Some of his worries were of the more average kind: whether we would be attracted to one another in person, whether our age difference would prove insurmountable. But there were far more significant ones, too. Though it felt like years to me, I’d only lived outside of Westboro for two months at that point—certainly not enough time to have developed an entirely new worldview and identity. He didn’t know who I was becoming or what I believed, and neither did I. He also suspected that I might still be a member of the church, sent to try to lure him to Topeka. I’d heard that this was a tactic sometimes used by other fringe groups to boost membership, but it was so utterly unthinkable at Westboro that I laughed out loud at this scenario. At the time, I just couldn’t conceive that the weight of these anxieties was enough to justify all the hesitation and mixed signals.
MEGAN: I literally feel insane.
I had hoped you would come, but I thought this would happen.
In the future, you should be careful. Especially when you know you’re being misunderstood. You’ll save a heart (or hearts) a lot of pain.
CHAD: Seems a little dramatic and precious for a guy that was trying to get the nerve to ask her to dance.
It’s a common plot line, and the movie rarely ends with it.
I felt pathetic for trying to convince him, for wanting so badly something that he so clearly did not. Did I have so little self-respect that I couldn’t just take the hint? I decided to spend my final days in South Dakota with Daisy, Gatsby, and their doomed romance—a nod to our beginnings and apropos for our demise.
And still—still—I couldn’t let it go.
Jan. 11, 2013—Day 25
The Great Gatsby
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
* * *
“You know … you guys don’t actually have to leave if you don’t want to.”
My knife froze mid-chop, and I stared up at Laura, who was busy transferring a loaf of homemade sourdough into a hot cast-iron pan. Dinnertime at the inn.
“Yeah,” Dustin agreed. “You can stay with us for as long as you need or as long as it’s helpful.”
Grace and I looked at each other with wide eyes. “Really?” she asked.
“Oh, my God!” I gasped, and we all laughed. The prospect overwhelmed me with gratitude. We were nearing the end of our time in Deadwood, and the thought of returning to Kansas filled me with dread. I loved my brother Josh and his family, and I wanted to spend time with Libby—but they lived at the epicenter of trauma. How could I leave this place and return to that? The inn was the first place I had felt safe, tucked in among the expanse of the Black Hills. The landscape was so muted and lovely, and it made me feel small in the very best way. It gave me hope. I knew that Grace didn’t feel the same way, that I’d have to work hard to convince her—but at least now there was a chance we could stay.
I wondered what the Floyds were thinking to offer such generosity to two girls they had only just met—but in that moment, I was afraid to ask for fear they might reconsider. Years later, as Dustin and Laura and I reminisced about the earliest days of our friendship, Laura would answer that question by sharing a few of her journal entries with me.
I so much want to help. I know Megan really loves it out here, and seems to be enjoying the time away. Grace is on less comfortable footing, I think. She doesn’t like the snow (it’s been doing that a lot), she’s homesick, and she seems to be—I actually don’t know how I was going to finish that sentence. I’ve been trying to draw her out with bribes of fresh-baked bread and access to all the local libraries. More than anything, I suspect the most useful thing I can do is be a friend.
We went out into the Hills for the Grand Tour yesterday and they started in with questions about what we believe. We talked about free will and hell and birth control and gay marriage and a dozen things in between. I am quite amazed about how many basic beliefs we have in common, which “regular” churches do according to tradition rather than biblical guidelines (not celebrating holidays, staying out of politics, the desire to warn other people that their course may be wrong, etc.). But where we choose a path based on showing love in a kind, humble and patient way, the WBC is, well … accused of being a hate group.
They also took the opportunity of our outing to revel a bit in certain new-found freedoms. They talked about getting haircuts and bought clip-on earrings (for a test-drive before committing to actual holes), and were flaunting flashy colors of nail polish. Yesterday evening they went out looking for a New Year’s party to crash and today Megan was trying to get a buzz (off 7up and brandy) in order to write a tipsy letter. It’s kind of fun to see them trying to find their feet in this new life of theirs. And I’m pleased to say that we’re probably the mildest possible influences for such an exploration. I’d also like to say that I really like them, and am so delighted that we’ve had this opportunity to get to know them, and hopefully help in some way.
Reading Laura’s account of those times, I laughed remembering how childlike we could be, that roller coaster of trepidation and wonder, guilt and exuberance, despair at our loss and delight at the smallest of freedoms. I marveled again at my good fortune, at how a random booking on Airbnb had brought my sister and me to such warmhearted people to help us navigate the squalls of our new reality. At how quickly our friendship helped me understand that it was possible to love someone—to be close to someone—even while seeing the world in a wildly different way. Can two walk together, except they be agreed? The answer to this rhetorical question—“Of course not!”—had always been obvious and obviously true, but it seemed like such a simplistic notion to me now. The idea that agreement was a prerequisite for friendship. That comity required conformity. My friendship with Dustin and Laura had so quickly helped me arrive at the opposite conclusion, and it seemed as obvious to me now as the original once had.
Can two walk together, even if they disagree?
Of course we could.
Not exactly revolutionary, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was.
9. Lift Up Thy Voice
Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise
“
There’s no fresh start in today’s world. Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what you did. Everything we do is collated and quantified. Everything sticks.”
Don’t act surprised that I’m quoting Batman. At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses—and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context. So put Selina Kyle’s words in a different framework:
In a city in a state in the center of a country lives a group of people who believe they are the center of the universe; they know Right and Wrong, and they are Right. They work hard and go to school and get married and have kids who they take to church and teach that continually protesting the lives, deaths, and daily activities of The World is the only genuine statement of compassion that a God-loving human can sincerely make. As parents, they are attentive and engaged, and the children learn their lessons well.
This is my framework.
Until very recently, this is what I lived, breathed, studied, believed, preached—loudly, daily, and for nearly 27 years.
I never thought it would change. I never wanted it to.
Then suddenly: it did.
And I left.
Where do you go from there?
I don’t know, exactly. My sister Grace is with me, though. We’re trying to figure it out together.
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