There are some things we do know.
We know that we’ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren’t so, and regret that hurt.
We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.
We know that we can’t undo our whole lives. We can’t even say we’d want to if we could; we are who we are because of all the experiences that brought us to this point. What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on. That’s our focus.
Up until now, our names have been synonymous with “God Hates Fags.” Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what we did. We hope Ms. Kyle was right about the other part, too, though—that everything sticks—and that the changes we make in our lives will speak for themselves.
Megan and Grace
February 6, 2013
As I flew back to Rapid City from New York, my eyes traced the final version of the “statement” again and again, until I was on the verge of vomiting. I knew that the only people who might care about these paragraphs were my family and a handful of curious Twitter followers, but I was still terrified of how they would be received. Public apologies in the age of social media could be brutal, every word parsed to ensure that no unacceptable sentiment remained in the offending party—and anything less than full repudiation of one’s “sins” would exacerbate the public flogging. Twitter mobs could tear a person’s reputation to shreds, demanding that they lose their job over an errant tweet or a joke that didn’t land—transgressions that were far less egregious than the dedicated campaign of condemnation in which I had been a willing participant for many years.
My apology was not a blanket condemnation of Westboro, a desperate plea for forgiveness, or a complete recanting of all my previous words and deeds. As I’d stood weeping and packing the day I left the church, Jael had insisted that these were my only options—that the world would make my life a living Hell otherwise. But even though they might have seemed like better strategies, I could not bring myself to employ them. This apology would not be for show. I would not begin this new life guided by expedience over truth. Regardless of the response, I could only be honest and hope for the best.
I had put agonizing thought into writing the words that would be published the following morning, to be sure they conveyed exactly what I felt, meant, and believed in that moment. It seemed to me that part of the enormous disconnection between Westboro and the rest of the world resulted from how we communicated. We had long invited confusion and hostility with language and methods that were deliberately grievous, provocative, and recondite. “Westboro is responsible for their own PR,” a friend told me one day, articulating a sentiment I had found so frustrating after I joined Twitter: that the church’s refusal to consider how our words and actions would be construed by our targets had caused much unnecessary pain for everyone involved. Why were we endlessly translating our signs and behaviors so that outsiders could understand them? Why didn’t we just begin our efforts by speaking with clarity, gentleness, reasonableness? Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air.
Honesty and good intentions weren’t worth much, I decided, if they were lost in translation.
To ensure that mine wouldn’t be, I had turned to a group of family members and new friends. In the multitude of counsellers there is safety. Among these were two writers I had met while they’d been visiting Westboro for research, and with whom I had maintained friendly communication via Twitter after their departures. Daniel Shannon and Jeff Chu were both incredibly kind, both gay, and both living in New York. I spoke with them by phone from the inn’s living room, but by chance, I had the opportunity to visit them in person—another occasion to push back at the Us/Them divide. As one of very few ex-members of Westboro who had chosen to be open about her experiences, my cousin Libby had been invited to New York to be interviewed on the Today Show and Anderson Cooper’s Anderson Live at the end of January. She asked me to accompany her for moral support, but when the producers pressed me to join her for the interviews, I insisted that it was impossible. I could not imagine standing in front of an audience—not now, not ever.
Away from the studios, I arranged for us to meet Daniel for dinner in Manhattan, and then Jeff and his husband, Tristan, for coffee in Brooklyn the following morning. We spoke of Daniel’s atheism and Jeff’s Christianity, and how strange it all felt, this transition from picketing gays in Topeka to brunching together in New York. Like so much of this new world, it was head-spinning. Watching Jeff and Tristan interact in the warm light of the diner, I was surprised to realize that I had no bad feelings about their relationship. They reminded me a bit of my parents, teasing and doting on each other. “Jeffy,” Tristan called him. The situation felt awkward only because it was new and foreign, and the only trace of negativity in me was a sense of betrayal: that my mother would be disappointed to know that I no longer felt that disgust she’d been describing to reporters all my life. “When you think of these fags, there’s something that just rises up inside you and says”—and here she would bellow—“yuck! You all know it!” But I felt no such thing—and I doubted she would have if not for her own upbringing.
When I shared my epiphany about interpretation with Jeff, he said, “That’s one thing I have never understood about your family. They’re all lawyers, right? The U.S. Constitution was written some two hundred years ago in essentially modern English, and there’s so much disagreement about how the U.S. Supreme Court should interpret and apply those words today. The Bible was written thousands of years ago in languages no one speaks anymore … and somehow, Westboro alone has figured out its one true meaning?” Articulated that way, the arrogance of our position seemed even more incomprehensible. In court, Margie’s job was to present and defend her interpretation of the facts and the law before a judge, who would hear all sides before making a final decision, which was subject to review by higher courts. But when it came to the purported Word of God, in all its complexity, we considered our judgment to be so reliable as to merit absolute confidence, so unquestionable that we could insist that all of humankind follow it. I shook my head and inwardly cringed. Coming face-to-face with my arrogance, aggressive in its misplaced certainty, was a special sort of shame.
When my flight landed in Rapid City, I picked up some essentials at Walmart—peanut butter, chocolate, apples, and English muffins—and then pointed my car to Deadwood, my little sister, and our new friends. Laura had convinced us to audition for a play at the local theater, and so—less than twenty-four hours before our scheduled return to Kansas in mid-January—Grace had agreed to stay in South Dakota. The spring semester had been set to begin the very next day, and we had scrambled to remove her from all of her Topeka classes, exchanging them for online coursework that would allow us some distance from Westboro. I would interview for a job working with Dustin at TDG—as a public relations assistant, ironically, not so different from work I’d done for Westboro—and Grace and I would stay in Deadwood at least until the play’s final performance. I was elated, and the promise I received from Chad made me feel all the more hopeful.
CHAD: You’ll be back in SD. I’ll figure out the math and approach the chalkboard. I promise.
After unloading the groceries, I found Grace in the attic and told her the plan: the statement would go up the following morning on a new blogging platform called Medium, along with a short article Jeff had written while I was in New York. “Your statement actually creates more questions than it answers,” he had told me. “If you don’t explain a bit more about why you left, it will leave people to speculate and fill in the blanks on their own.”
I watched as my sister read over both documents. She seemed so calm about it all. Poised. Graceful, I thought, and laughed out loud.
Her bright hazel eyes narrowed slightly, and she nodded.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Let’s do this.”
* * *
CHAD: I’m just happy for you today. I’m sure it’s a weight lifted. If it’s not, it should be. Recognize it thusly.
MEGAN: It is. I have a hard time believing nice things people say anyway, so on this scale, it’s all just unbelievable.
Both in tone and in magnitude, the response to what Jeff and I had posted was nothing like I had expected. Messages of encouragement and well-wishing flooded my Twitter account, and I was floored by how rare were the people who chose to denounce Grace and me. To tell us that we could never be forgiven. People from across the country and all over the world offered my sister and me friendship, places to sleep, and invitations to church by the hundreds. Dozens of newspapers and blogs around the world picked up the story, and even Gawker—notorious for its lack of scruples—had kind things to say.
… good for them for escaping what is essentially a cult and defying its wrath by going public about it. As far as the deprogramming process goes, Megan says, “I don’t know what I believe,” but she claims that she wants to determine how she can be “an influence for good.” And she has the rest of her life to atone.
Happy coming out day, girls.
Particularly moving were the messages from those with whom I had sparred on Twitter over the years—people I had come to know and like, people who had seen me regularly sling around condescension, condemnation, and words like “fag” and “whore.” Chad Darnell was one such person, a gay man living in Los Angeles. Our exchanges had been full of Bible verses, friendly sarcasm, and sincerity—but as with all outsiders, I had been suspicious of his kindness and concern. His response to my post about leaving Westboro was an open letter, which read in part:
Dear Megan:
Hey, girl, hey.
When I woke up to messages from family and friends that you had left the church, I literally burst into tears. I sat in bed for 20 minutes reading your letter with ugly tears (like bad Oprah crying) streaming down my face and I couldn’t stop.
I am so proud of you.
I am so happy for you.
I (we) never felt hate in our hearts toward YOU. Sure, we didn’t like you that much, but the action of you physically removing yourself from that situation is a strength that most humans will never know. That was your family and your main source of interaction with people. We get it. Trust me, we ALL get it.
Megan, it would be the great honor of my church, my people to have you as a guest. We just want you to come and breathe and feel what a community trying to make the world a better place should be. We feel a special bond to you after all your tweeting over the years.
And know that we all, everyone at our church, forgive you. And we wish you support and kindness and love.
Love,
Chad (and everyone at Hollywood United Methodist Church)
With each new kindness, I understood with ever greater clarity the depths of my ignorance about the world. Clearly, the people writing these words were not the demons I had been warned about. They didn’t hate Grace and me, and they didn’t expect us to hate our family. They understood that the same people who taught us to curse Westboro’s enemies were the ones who had kissed our cheeks and tucked us in at night. Though we had shown these people hostility and contempt in their most vulnerable moments, they extended generosity and compassion to us in ours. They empathized with us in our pain and wanted good things for our future. Dustin and Laura, Newbery and C.G., Cora the bartender and Ryan the dealer—I had seen them as exceptions, but it was starting to occur to me that there might be a lot more goodness in the world than I had believed. I’d been so sure that it was filled with hateful, selfish, vindictive people, and I had never found so much hope in being proved wrong.
For their part, Westboro members responded exactly as I expected—which didn’t stop my heart from racing or my insides from twisting in anguish. It was everything they had said about ex-members before, but I couldn’t grasp that they were saying such things about me. How could they? Knowing everything that had happened, how could my parents? The church issued a statement with one assumption at its heart: that the church was blameless in the departure of any member, because there could be no legitimate reason to leave Westboro. I read the words of an elder in several newspapers with growing bitterness, the same self-serving position we had always assumed when church members departed. “She just decided that she didn’t want to obey God,” Steve said. “They wanted to serve themselves.” Years would pass and the lies would continue unabated. Steve seemed to have no compunction about publicly denying every fact that revealed the church as flawed, hypocritical. He denied the takeover by the elders, the petty backbiting among church members, the merciless shunning of my mother. He pretended their cruel treatment of her—removing my mother from the work she had done for decades as a way of shaming and isolating her—wasn’t punishment but kindness. “We lifted her burden,” he said. It was an especially embittering fabrication because it was exactly what they should have done—what I’d wished so often that they had done.
And then, amid the deluge of words, this paragraph:
Shirley Phelps-Roper, the mother of the sisters, is doing OK in the wake of her daughters leaving the church, Drain said. On Wednesday, she was at a local facility welcoming the birth that morning of a grandson, Jason Brent.
Jason Brent. Sam’s son. A nephew I might never know.
Sitting on the green couch by the inn’s living room window, I watched a whitetail deer cross Lincoln Avenue and disappear around the side of the house. My efforts at remaining calm were proving unsuccessful, and I sobbed tears of desperation—not because outsiders might believe Steve’s dissembling, but because church members would. Just as I had done with Nate and Josh and Libby, they would accept these narratives about Grace and me. We would be painted as evil, and they would be disposed to listen. I had tried to preempt this process back at home, to thwart it in as many ways as I could, even turning my final tweet as a Westboro member into a message to my sister Bekah. An angry person on Twitter had told her that “nobody loves you,” and she had retorted, “That’s not true! @MeganPhelps loves me.;)” My response remained there for months, and I had refused to post anything else afterward. It was a reference to a line from a movie we had watched together, delivered forcefully by Jack Nicholson—a standing reminder to her in my absence.
“You’re goddamn right I do!”—A Few Good Men
They had to do it, though. Demonizing Grace and me was the only way to protect their image of Westboro as not just benign but wholly good. They couldn’t allow themselves to truly contemplate the idea that Westboro might be wrong about the ideals to which they had dedicated their lives. They needed to believe in the righteousness of their cause just as much as we needed them to see its destructiveness.
What were they telling my siblings right now? That I had traded them in because I wanted the approval and love and attention of outsiders—that I wanted to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, because I loved the world more. Had I chosen the love of the world over the love of my family? My mind rebelled at the thought, at the crippling guilt. I would never have willingly made such an exchange. This had never been a choice between strangers and family, between the world’s love and its hatred. It wasn’t the desire for an easy life that led me to leave. Losing them was the price of honesty. A shredded heart for a quiet conscience.
* * *
There was silence on the other end of the line for a beat.
“What?”
I sat down at the kitchen table at the inn, watching Luna stalk across the hardwood floor. She was one of the Floyds’ two black ca
ts, a stray they’d taken in not long before Grace and I arrived. Animals made me anxious, because we’d never had pets in our home—“We had brothers and allergies, instead,” I always joked—but Luna was beautiful, her fur thick and lustrous, her eyes a piercing yellow. She suddenly turned and scampered up the stairs, spooked, and I switched my phone to the other ear. “Yeah,” I said. “You’ve definitely got part of the blame for my leaving.”
It had been a few days since Jeff and I had published our posts online, and I was catching up with another of my new friends and counselors. David Abitbol was an Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem, and the two of us were discussing a question that had been on my mind frequently in the months since it had first occurred to me to leave the church: How had this happened? How had my perspective changed so much in such a short amount of time, from an obedient follower who instinctively suppressed doubts to a malcontent who just couldn’t leave well enough alone? I had spent endless hours racking my brain for clues, tracking the changes in my perspective over time, and I found myself returning again and again to Twitter and to my complicated friendship with David—the source of my first conscious disagreement with one of Westboro’s doctrines. I had reflexively suppressed it, but it had come rushing back the day that I first considered leaving Westboro, painting in that cold basement.
David and I had met on Twitter in 2009, almost immediately after I had brought Westboro’s message to the platform. He ran a popular Jewish blog called “Jewlicious” and was active on social media, so the Jewish Telegraphic Agency had listed him second in their ranking of the “100 Most Influential Jewish Twitterers.” He had become one of my first targets. Our initial exchanges were plagued by unbridled antagonism—I told David that Jewish customs were “dead, rote rituals,” while he maintained that my grandfather was a closet case—but it didn’t take long for him to tone it down, and for me to follow his lead.
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