The WBC backed up his belief in corporal punishment for children, preaching that physical inflictions woke a person up to bring him into instruction. It was good to hurt, and good to spank until it hurt. I was of two minds about this. I wanted to rebel because I was so mad at my father for being so harsh, but I wanted him to love me, so I was struggling to be obedient. I would be angry because my father was strict, and I would be obedient because I didn’t want him to disown me. But on the other hand, I was still just fourteen years old, and I couldn’t deny that I liked boys.
During scuffles with Dad, my mother would focus on my role in them, accusing me of causing all the strife in the house. Sometimes, she’d hesitantly say something like, “Oh, Steve, stop. You don’t need to say that. The neighbors are going to hear.” But that was the extent of her advocacy.
“This is what she needs,” my father would respond. “I am supposed to be fighting a war. I have to get control of her!”
Even though my grandmother and my aunt Stacy lived in the neighborhood, I never saw or heard them trying to get my father to back off in any way. I knew Taylor overheard a lot of our fights, but at nine years old she probably thought it was too risky to defy Dad. She didn’t get visibly upset, and she pretended not to be bothered by the arguments. I really had no allies.
On one occasion, Dad got so angry with me that I called Child Protective Services to intervene. He’d been in a mood, coming at me yet again and spewing venom about my wayward morals and my evil soul. I was so scared this time, though, that I brought the cordless phone outside to the front lawn, dialed Information to get the agency’s phone number, and had the call forwarded automatically. It probably wasn’t the best idea. They asked me all these questions about my situation, which I wasn’t really prepared to answer standing on the sidewalk with my neighbors going about their business all around me and my father inside the house, steaming mad and likely to come out and catch me. I wasn’t even convinced I wanted Child Protective Services to get involved. I just needed my father to know I was serious about defending myself from his physical bullying, and I was reaching my breaking point.
When someone from the CPS office called our house to say a complaint had just been phoned in, my father realized what I had done. He was livid, and he insisted that I call the office back and tell them it was just a prank and that I didn’t realize the seriousness of my actions, then apologize for wasting their time and resources. I made the call with Dad listening in on a different phone. The whole thing was so lame. No one from CPS ever came to the house to speak to me or follow up in any way to be sure I was in fact okay. Unbelievably, my father had been able to shut the whole thing down. My punishment was already so severe, though, that there was little else he could do to me except make me feel guilty for having told on him, and brand me as a liar once again.
I don’t know if my mother knew about the call. If she did, she didn’t mention it to me. She and my father might not have agreed about how much physical punishment was too much, but they were in agreement about one thing: that my behavior was out of line. They both thought I was acting out, and if I did get punished, I deserved it. I wasn’t a wimp, so it wasn’t the physical pain that bothered me, but being controlled by my father pissed me off more than anything else. I soon came to realize that Dad’s new mission was to watch every move I made to make sure I wasn’t straying. I’d been punished so harshly at that point, I don’t think there was much disobedience left in me anyway, but as far as my father was concerned, I still wasn’t to be trusted.
Dad had grown tired of his Home Shopping Network job and had given it up to devote more time to the documentary. To bring in a little money, he was teaching religion part-time at a community college not far from our house. If he had to be in the classroom, he brought me with him. He made me sit in the back, but he could still see me at all times. I’d do my online homework on my laptop while he was in the front giving his lecture. My father was under the impression that this made me miserable, but I actually thought the arrangement was pretty awesome. He had really cute guy students in his class, eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds, and because I never left the house except with Dad, they looked that much cuter. Any flirting, though, was only in my imagination.
At home, my parents often got into heated arguments, which kind of scared me. I knew I was the reason for a lot of the tension in their marriage, even though I wasn’t always the topic of a given fight. My father’s female friends were definitely an issue. Women, mostly Dad’s students from the community college, would constantly call him or come up to him at school to tell him about their problems with their marriages and their personal lives, and my mother didn’t approve. The two of them would go into a room, slam the door, and yell at one another for ten or fifteen minutes. They never got physical, as far as I knew, but it was pretty intense. Finally, my father would emerge a little calmer in his demeanor, leaving my mother behind to come out whenever she had collected herself. She almost always backed down.
Even if his religious fervor had a very angry aspect to it, one thing about Dad’s new religion that I did like was his newfound self-restraint. He was still willing to get into arguments with Mom, but he didn’t rage and carry on forever anymore. He’d make his point, then stop haranguing. When he was lecturing me, at least he was coming from a humble place. More often than not, he was even calm. Eventually, his peaceful delivery started making me feel like he was the best person there was to educate me about God’s master plan for us. We were here for a reason, Dad said, but we had to adhere to the path of God. Dad was only trying to guide me along the right way. Slowly, his messages were beginning to have an impact on me, and I began to feel that I was really understanding faith. I took it to be proof that I was growing up.
Dad would give me lessons that went beyond scripture; he wanted me to embrace his new Westboro community with the same love and acceptance he did. “They love everyone, and they want to help everyone,” he would repeatedly tell me. He said their zealousness came out of a fundamentally benevolent goal: to help the less enlightened people of the world to see. Even if I didn’t fully get why a message of love had to be delivered with such hateful language, I could see by the footage of the church members’ fervor that they were on a crusade that was spiritually driven.
I had been cut off from seeing my friends for more than two months when Dad told me about a picket in Jacksonville that he was going to be filming, and he invited me to go along as his assistant. He saw it as a chance to spend some time with the members and to introduce me to them for the first time. I was excited. The Jacksonville protest would be the first time I would actually get to meet Megan and my other pen pals from the church. The idea of getting away and traveling the 250 miles to Jacksonville was more than welcome. I also loved the idea that Dad and I were going to make the trip together, leaving my mother and Taylor at home.
Despite the video footage I’d seen, I had no idea what to expect. I was eager because the Phelps girls already felt like friends to me, and yet I was nervous about making a good impression on all these new people who were so important to my dad. Plus, I was curious about what had stirred such a strong spiritual reaction in him, ever since he had first come in direct contact with them back in Washington, D.C.
The way Dad had described it, the church was so connected to the truth that it was grander than anything he had ever experienced. I decided I wanted to be part of something that big, too, something that was definitely bigger than my life. I might not have understood the church’s picket signs or why certain current events spawned their protests, but I wanted to grow spiritually and join my father’s passion, especially since I would have his blessing.
During the four-hour drive, I found it hard not to succumb to Dad’s infectious enthusiasm. Things had settled down significantly at home now that Dad felt I was on board with his new religion. It was great to be on the road, just the two of us. When we finally arrived in Jacksonville, I was fired up. As I jumped out of the c
ar, I knew I looked like the epitome of a Florida teen, with bleached-blonde hair past my shoulders and extra mascara to show off my eyes. My father unpacked all of his film equipment, and we headed for Alltel Stadium, Jacksonville’s huge football stadium. The event the church was picketing was a Billy Graham revival, a four-day “crusade” event, which would no doubt draw huge crowds of evangelical Christians. The revival and the picket were scheduled on what turned out to be a beautiful fall weekend in November 2000.
I had heard on the radio that the crowd was the biggest ever for a Billy Graham gathering, with more than seventy thousand people in attendance this day alone. There was a rumor that this crusade would be his last public rally due to his declining health. The crusade was pitched for a younger crowd, with evangelical singers and rock bands on the slate. I’d never seen so many people around my age in one place.
By now I was familiar enough with the people in the WBC, especially Fred Phelps, that I was able to recognize them in person. As we made our way to the protest site, I had no problem spotting the six-foot-four pastor. Dressed in an oversize cowboy hat and a Kansas City Chiefs football jersey, he was hollering at Billy Graham’s most ardent devotees, “Billy Graham is in hell!” and “God hates false prophet Billy Graham and all of his parishioners!” He seemed to have no fear that seventy thousand Billy Graham followers outnumbered his handful of church members. He had a booming voice with a Southern drawl, but I didn’t feel the least bit afraid of him. Rather, I was fascinated by his self-confidence, his charisma, and the boldness of his opinions in the face of such huge opposition.
The church’s position—that Billy Graham was a false, lying prophet—was based on Graham’s style of ministry. He liked to preach to the masses, and the WBC believed evangelistic megachurches like his turned religion into something really lazy. The pastor thought it was wrong for people to think they could do anything, or nothing, and still go to heaven. A certain lifestyle and procedure were required to get to God’s kingdom, and simply attending a Billy Graham crusade once a year, clapping, singing, and praising the Lord, was not sufficient. The WBC also thought Billy Graham was a money whore. He was all about image and commercialism, not faith, and he would do or preach anything as long as he made money.
Pastor Phelps was holding up two signs. The first one proclaimed GOD HATES AMERICA—a direct jab at Billy Graham’s favorite blessing, “God Bless America.” The Westboro Baptist Church knew that God hated America because it was a fag-enabling country—so the pastor’s other sign read GOD HATES FAGS. Activist movements that supported and mainstreamed gay rights were one reason for our recent accelerated descent into hell. The other was the cheapening of our religious convictions, as evidenced by these kinds of megapreachers and false prophets.
As Pastor Phelps barked out his message, he’d take pauses to chuckle and smile approvingly at Shirley and her daughter, Megan, who were imitating his style and shouting the same message with enthusiasm equal to his own. Shirley, Dad’s friend and the fifth of the pastor’s thirteen children, was so engaged in picketing, she barely had time to come over to greet Dad and meet me.
When she did make her way to us, she introduced me to Megan. The first thing I noticed about Megan was how pretty and bubbly she was. I was completely drawn in by her enthusiasm, and we bonded immediately. She was as friendly as anybody I had ever met, and she made me feel like an insider from our first embrace. On top of that, she was mature and intelligent, and she seemed more interesting than my old friends, with a deep knowledge about events in the world and issues that were being debated in the news, such as phony pastors and homosexual rights. I could envision us being friends.
I didn’t feel that any of the Phelps girls were judging me harshly. Dad had told me on the trip up that they all were ordinary folks with a reasonable message. “These people are going out on their dime and time to protest something they think is important. They don’t want people to be lied to.” He said they were making it their life’s work to spread God’s truth: either obey or pay in hell.
When my father and I first mingled with the group, I only wanted to observe the picket or assist my dad with his filming. His still-unfinished documentary was no longer an exposé of the church’s fanaticism, now that he had become totally indoctrinated. I was allowed to put the microphone on Fred Phelps, which was quite thrilling for me since he was a recognizable celebrity. Although I started out as mostly a bystander, over the course of the day, I began to feel a little more self-assured and got into the swing of things. I yelled along with everyone else, imitating Megan word for word when I wasn’t exactly sure what I was expected to say. I held up a sign that read BILLY IN HELL; it had a photograph of Billy Graham’s head with a pink, upside-down triangle on it. People were constantly streaming by and yelling biblical quotes back at us, things like “God hates those who hate” or “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Some of them stood in circles praying for us. I thought it was ironic that people would tell us not to judge them and then immediately judge us in return. My pet peeve had always been hypocrisy, especially in religion.
On the drive home, I told Dad how much fun the day had been. I hadn’t seen anything wrong with what the church was trying to say. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about their message and why they were saying it. Dad explained to me they were just trying to help people understand God’s message. I could tell he was pleased that I had taken such a liking to his people and their cause. I was glad that my father was appreciating me, not thinking that I was worthless and useless. He said he would be sure to include me in the next picket event.
Megan and I wrote letters back and forth until the next protest we attended, which was in Manhattan two months later. Our whole family made the trip to New York. I had never been there before, and like many teens, I was excited to be going to an MTV event. The church was staging a demonstration outside the MTV offices on West Fifty-Fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, protesting the broadcasting of Anatomy of a Hate Crime, a made-for-TV docudrama about Matthew Shepard.
Shepard’s death was the perfect hot-button issue to demonstrate the church’s position against homosexuality. The brutality against Shepard had become so well known that he had become the poster child for antihomophobia groups around the nation and the world. However, for the WBC, he was the paradigm of God’s hell on earth for fags, and in fact his funeral in Casper, Wyoming, on October 17, 1998, a little more than two years earlier, had put the Westboro Baptist Church on the map. Before the funeral, most of the nation knew nothing about the church. Its antigay protests took place in the Topeka area and made only the regional newspapers and local evening news shows. But because so many camera crews were covering the funeral, Pastor Phelps got the attention of the national and international media like never before. The news footage showed the pastor holding two provocative signs: NO TEARS FOR QUEERS and FAG MATT IN HELL.
The pamphlet the pastor had printed for distribution read “It is too late to rescue Matthew Shepard from the life of sin and shame into which he was lured by the perverted, depraved, and decadent American society into which he was born. All who say, ‘It’s okay to be gay,’ have the blood of Matthew Shepard on their hands.” The WBC was on to something—the bigger and sadder the story, the better the opportunity to spread the Word of God, that the world was doomed because of tolerance for homosexuality. Because the passersby reacted so violently toward the picketers, the pastor felt that the church did have something important to say—otherwise, the audience wouldn’t be that angry.
After Matt’s funeral, the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the WBC a hate group. The pastor disagreed that we fit the definition, because the hatred was from God, not a personal dislike or an advocacy of violence toward others. However, he seemed to revel in the new tag, because he considered hate to be one of God’s greatest attributes. He still organized a picket at the SPLC’s headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama. The vocal and colorful pastor soon became almost as well-known as Matthew Shepard himself.
>
New York was extremely cold the January day of the MTV picket, but at least the deep freeze of the previous three weeks was over. Everybody in the city—except us—seemed so happy that it was forty degrees outside instead of zero, but temperature being relative, it was still really cold to me.
Although Mom had made the trip, she didn’t want to picket, so she took Taylor shopping while I headed over with Dad. My father was filming again, still getting more raw footage for his documentary, even though he told me he wished he could just be picketing. Megan, Shirley, and a man from the congregation I hadn’t seen before were at the picket site, very happy to see us and ready to start. Shirley distributed the signs. I proudly held a couple of GOD HATES FAGS placards whose flip side proclaimed FAGS ARE BEASTS. Shirley and Megan had MATT IN HELL and NO TEARS FOR QUEERS/FAG DIES, GOD LAUGHS combinations. Every once in a while, Dad would put down his camera and hold up a sign like NO FAGS IN HEAVEN from our pile of spares.
Just as in Jacksonville, we weren’t there long before we started to provoke angry opposition. People walking by screamed at us that we, not Matt Shepard, were going to hell. Everybody seemed to think that Matt had been killed because of his sexual orientation. But the church didn’t see it that way. Its standpoint was that people didn’t get beaten up just because they were gay and that Matthew’s murder was not a hate crime; rather, it was exactly what God had in mind for homosexual sinners. I now agreed with what the church members were saying and understood their logic. I thought that the people who were getting all upset with us were just ignorant.
Banished : Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9781455518470) Page 5