My father spent a full year immersed in the postproduction of his documentary. He needed my room to serve as his editing suite, so I shared a bunk bed with Taylor in her room. We were very close and I didn’t mind sacrificing my privacy to bunk with her. Besides, I was rarely home, spending most of my days out with my friends at the pool, the beach, or the mall, or playing softball. Dad filled the suite with all sorts of fancy equipment—two screens, two computers, and a synthesizer for making music since he was doing the whole sound track himself. I was intrigued by his project—the church’s pure fanaticism was pretty interesting, and I trusted my father’s judgment that he knew what he was getting himself into.
Dad’s assistant in the postproduction phase was a female friend of his from the University of South Florida. Again, the fact he was working with a college-aged female bugged my mother. This one was also funding his venture. The story he told us was that her father had died and left her a ton of money that she wanted to invest in something. She and my father had originally planned to do a film about a local artist, but my father convinced her that Westboro would be a better subject for a documentary. The woman seemed to flirt with my father, but he said he was only her mentor. She was going through a hard time and Dad was warm and supportive, so the relationship seemed to be mutually beneficial. Mom still didn’t like it.
While Dad was immersing himself in the film, I was beginning to really like boys. Like those of most fourteen-year-olds, my hormones were raging. I started experimenting with makeup, wearing modest amounts of eyeliner and mascara, and I wanted to dress crazy and go to parties and school dances. A year earlier, before my first-ever school dance, Dad sat me down for “the talk.” He told me the responsibilities that went along with being social at my age, and said that if I was thinking about sex, he wanted me to come to him and my mother so that they could get me on birth control. Dad also said I should go to them if I was thinking about experimenting with drugs, because buying them from a stranger was extremely risky, and he didn’t want me to end up dead. He had been appropriately protective, but not overly so, and above all he’d been very open and honest.
But now, when I went to talk to my father about a particular boy at school named Will, I was shocked at his reaction. He said he had changed his mind about a lot of things and he didn’t want me to date at all. Ever since Dad had come back from Topeka, he had become superstrict. There was no dating in the WBC, and he said I, too, needed to stay away from bad influences. My father thought Will was bad news, even though he was in my grade and from the neighborhood. I considered him to be cool because he had piercings and rode motocross bikes, but Dad said those things reminded him of himself as a teenager, and that he would never let someone with such a wild side date his daughter.
I had never heard these things from him before, even when he’d first embraced religion back in Kansas. He seemed to have gotten ultraconservative in his views. All of a sudden, when he thought I was being disobedient, he became very angry and aggressive. He wanted me to get rid of my friends and come home immediately after school every afternoon. I thought he was being way too overprotective, but I didn’t dare let him know how I felt. Even though I wanted to keep our relationship open, he was becoming such a control freak that I found it was easier to lie if I wanted to do things that he wouldn’t let me do, so I resorted to sneaking around in order to still be able to socialize with my friends. Never mind that I was a great student in all the honors classes, I played JV softball, and I never got in trouble—he was getting more and more overbearing. I knew it had to do with his growing connection to the WBC.
Dad started calling Shirley Phelps-Roper nonstop on the phone, but from what I could overhear from my room, the calls were now mostly about me, not the documentary. Upset that I was talking to boys, he sought Shirley’s advice on the matter. She directed him in ways to correct me, telling him that as head of the household he had no choice. My father now wanted to control every aspect of my life, including my crushes. He knew high school was dangerous territory, at a time when so many kids took the wrong path. Shirley, his new confidante, warned him, “Do whatever you can to stop her. This is a war between the flesh and the spirit, and if you don’t win, you are not the proper head of the household.” Shirley told Dad there was hope for me, but he had to be forceful. If he waited too long, I would be too far gone. He was fighting for my salvation, and it was his fault that he had brought me to the age of fourteen without being a good Christian girl.
As he was getting harder on me, I noticed by the edits he was making that his film was going in a different direction. His original slant, that the group was a bunch of insane zealots, was entirely gone from the film. The new edit portrayed the Westboro Baptist Church as an organization with a sincere message and a maligned, misunderstood pastor. The signs at protests were hateful and provocative because that was the only way to get noticed, Dad explained to me. The picketers only had so much time to catch the attention of people in passing cars.
Dad told us that the church members wanted people to change for the good. They didn’t want to see people sinning. They shouldn’t be blamed for being the messengers; they were only trying to make an impression. He even compared them to figures from the Bible like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Luke, who had been compelled to resort to violence, like setting trees or idols on fire, to get people’s attention.
I knew that my father’s criticism of me didn’t mean he hated me—we had always had a great relationship. I felt if he was going to act this irrationally, he must have a reason. I just needed to figure out what was going on with him and get our relationship back on track. And I couldn’t afford to have him angry with me, because when he was, the whole house was filled with discord. He’d yell at me in front of Mom and Taylor, who would both just stare at us without saying anything. Taylor didn’t understand it, and she didn’t like it at all. She didn’t pick sides, but as soon as the argument would cool, she’d try to change the subject or distract us. “Let’s play a card game or watch a movie,” she’d say, trying to make sure that everything seemed normal. On rare occasions, Mom would get involved. “Steve, stop! You’re getting too loud. Be gentle on her,” she’d say, defending me in a lukewarm tone. But my being a teenager seemed to scare her, too, so she would follow Dad’s lead.
I knew that Will had a serious crush on me, and I liked him back, so despite the objections I knew my father would have, I started sneaking over to his house to hang out. The first time I visited, I was there for only about half an hour before my father showed up. He didn’t say anything to Will’s mother when she answered the door, just brushed past her rudely, grabbed me, and pulled me out of the house. Once we were home, he forbade me from ever going there again. The following week, I went again, but this time my dad didn’t catch me. I knew I was defying him, but the forbidden nature of the rendezvous made it that much more exciting.
For my part, the real problem was that despite my parents’ disapproval, I wanted to see Will. I even thought I was in love with him. Besides, it was impossible to avoid him. He lived on our street, rode the same school bus I did, and was in two of my classes. I flirted with him when I saw him in the hallway, and he would sometimes stay after school to watch me play softball. He clearly wanted me to be his girlfriend. He’d hand me notes before class, with cute messages like “I came in third place at my motocross tournament” or “I wish you could come to some of my events and meet my parents.”
One day, I came home from softball practice to find Dad waiting for me at the front door. “You little whore,” he raged, waving a stack of papers in his hand. “How dare you defy the Lord!”
I had no idea what was making him so angry, and when he said he had intercepted some notes from Will, I was even more confused. Apparently, Will had been writing me love notes and sneaking them into an outside pocket of my softball bag while I was on the field practicing. My father had found about twenty of them and started reading them to me one by one. I had never seen them before, and
unlike the ones he’d slipped me in class, in a lot of them Will was describing his sexual fantasies. I thought they were slightly funny, embarrassing, and flattering, but my father disagreed.
“You whore! You whore!” he said over and over. He went on in a rage, calling me a long list of other names, scaring me with how out of control he was. “You cannot be anywhere near this guy anymore,” he warned me.
I should have been the one angry with my father for violating my privacy, but here he was, calling me a chain of degrading slurs without even stopping for breath. I tried to fight back. “I didn’t even do anything,” I screamed, trying to get a word in. “I am not a whore!” It made no difference what I said. My father thought that I had been engaged in a physical relationship with Will, which wasn’t true. I hadn’t even known about the notes until that day.
To my horror, Dad told me he had already been over to Will’s house with the letters and that when Will had answered the door, he told him he had better stay away from me. According to Dad, Will had been very snide, so my father had head-butted him and broken his nose. I couldn’t believe that he had taken it this far and actually attacked him. “You ruined everything,” I blurted out, which enraged him even more. Now, he began kicking and slapping at me, backing me into a corner. I was absolutely terrified. Mom and Taylor were home, but neither of them was coming to my rescue.
“You think you can disobey me, you little bitch?”
“Daddy, please stop,” I begged. “We weren’t doing anything.”
I ran down the hall to my room and climbed up into my top bunk, with Dad following on my heels. Seemingly possessed by his rage, he pulled me to the edge of the bed and let me fall to the ground. His face was red and his temples were bulging as he hulked over me, practically spitting in my face. My father was a big, tall guy, and I was fourteen and weighed less than a hundred pounds. He unleashed a verbal attack on me for what felt like hours while I cowered on the floor, trying to protect my face from the spit spewing from his mouth. When his tirade was over, he stormed down the hall and out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
When I went to school the next day, I saw Will in the hallway. Several kids were crowded around him, asking him what had happened to his nose. I was mortified, and after making eye contact with him, I continued walking to my next class. A couple of days later, I saw him again at the community pool. He was way across on the far side, but when he saw me, he packed up his stuff and left.
Will’s parents filed an assault charge against my father the day after the attack, and when my father got the notice, he filed a counterclaim against Will. I didn’t attend the hearing, but apparently the judge took into consideration the lewd love notes Dad presented in court and ultimately dismissed the charges. My father even managed to get a restraining order against Will, preventing him from coming within twenty feet of me when we were in school and one hundred yards of me outside the school setting until I turned eighteen.
From that point on, Dad seemed to be mad at me for everything I did or didn’t do. I couldn’t figure out what to do that was right, but everything I did was wrong. Despite, or perhaps because of, my father’s objections, I still had a crush on Will, and he still liked me, too. My dad knew I wasn’t going to stop trying to see Will, so he watched me more closely than ever. He wouldn’t let me take the bus to or from school anymore, insisting on driving me both ways. One afternoon, he arrived a little early to pick me up from softball practice and saw Will in the vicinity of the field. I had no idea he was even there—plenty of kids stayed after school, watching whatever practice was going on. When I got to the car, Dad said, “That’s it, I am pulling you out of school!” He pointed at Will in the bleachers and said, “That son of a bitch is still hanging around you. You will never see that boy again!”
True to his word, my father withdrew me from school later that week. I was going to be “Internet-schooled”—homeschooled online—until I graduated, he told me. I couldn’t do honors classes anymore because they weren’t offered online. All the time I had dedicated to my academics had been for nothing. I couldn’t play on sports teams anymore, even though the varsity softball team gave me more self-confidence and self-worth than anything else I did. My dad even forbade me to leave our street. Worst of all, I was not allowed to see a single one of my friends, even at my house. My father thought that they were invitations to temptation. If I was out with them, he thought I would have a chance to see Will.
In my father’s newfound moral crusade, he wasn’t picking on my mom or Taylor, only me. He started referring to me as the “evil daughter.” He said that it was his mission as the head of our household to correct me. My salvation was all that mattered to him, no matter the extreme measures he’d have to implement to ensure it.
CHAPTER THREE
Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.
—James 4:4
Slowly, I became used to being referred to as the “evil daughter.” I could do nothing right, my father was almost always angry with me, and he was making my life a living hell. My mother didn’t come to my rescue, which really hurt. She didn’t like voicing any opinion contrary to my father’s, especially when it came to me, and she agreed with his objective, even if she may have felt that his methods were a little extreme at times. But however desperately I wanted her to intervene and support me, she did nothing.
In 1999, I was a high school sophomore at the height of my adolescence, when peer relationships were absolutely critical to me. I hated not being able to go to school, play on the softball team, or hang out with my friends. I used to look forward to weekends, but now every day was the same. I felt like a prisoner all the time. Taylor was still attending public school, so I was home alone with my father for most of the day. When I’d still been at the high school, I had been able to sneak over to my friends’ houses by riding their buses after school. I had gotten in trouble a couple of times for doing that, but now the bus plan wasn’t even an option. I didn’t have a driver’s license, just my learner’s permit, so I had to have an adult with me if I wanted to use the car. All of the fun advantages of living in Florida were being taken away from me, one by one.
Somehow, I was still allowed to be on the computer, so I would talk to my friends online, using AOL Instant Messenger. They were upset that I had been withdrawn from school, and they understood that my father had done it to ground me, but didn’t understand their role in it and why I was not allowed to see them anymore. That part was kind of hard for me to explain. My father now thought they were evil, too, but I obviously didn’t want them to know that. Their parents just seemed to accept that I was being homeschooled for now.
Before long, I was cut off from AOL privileges, as well. My father found a conversation between me and a nineteen-year-old boy who had been a counselor at the summer camp I’d attended that past July. My father said it was highly inappropriate and again used the word whore before banning me from the Internet altogether.
The only communication I had now was with a few girls from the church. Dad had arranged for me to be pen pals and exchange letters with the ones around my age, all granddaughters of the pastor and cousins or siblings to one another. Shirley’s daughter, Megan, who was fifteen, was the one I began corresponding with regularly.
Dad was extremely passionate about what he was doing for me and why he was doing it. In the beginning, I’d say things to challenge him, which also ended in wrathful rampages. After a while, I would try to hear him out just to keep him from raging at me. He wanted me to understand that God had a purpose for us here on earth, and that life was not all about doing whatever we wanted to do, and that included dating “heathen boys.” And in the meantime, he had completely isolated me from everything and everybody. All I could do was sit alone in the room Taylor and I shared, all by myself, bored and miserable, trying to figure out ways to get back in his good graces,
and back to my friends and my school. He was definitely trying to break me. Every time I told him I would do whatever he wanted as long as I could go back to school, he’d tell me that I was saying that because I hadn’t given up on Will yet.
Any time I was defiant, his assaults went from verbal to physical in nature. Oftentimes, they crossed the line into abuse, as far as I was concerned. He would shove me or push me or hit me to get my attention so I would stop whatever I was doing and listen to him. He’d try to hurt me when he hit me. He’d drag me off my bunk and slap me around, screaming ugly names at me and frothing at the mouth. It frightened me. But he remained adamant that according to the Word of God, corporal punishment was an act of love. “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” was written in Proverbs 13:24.
Banished : Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9781455518470) Page 4