The pastor and the church hadn’t started picketing until 1991, only ten years before we had moved to Topeka. Before then, the pastor had spread his message through faxes. He’d mass-mail them out the same way he did now, elaborating on some story that interested him and faxing them by the thousands on the church’s letterhead. He’d write about current events, scripture quotes, new sign ideas, anything that came to mind as something relevant.
The WBC was extremely proud of its first picket ever, a May 1991 protest that took place in Gage Park in Topeka. It had started with Shirley. She said that she and some of her kids were in the park, a public space about a half mile from the church, when a homosexual who was also in the park tried to lure her son away from her. She was horrified. Gage Park, one of Topeka’s largest at 160 acres, with a zoo, a miniature fifteen-inch-gauge railroad, an outdoor theater, and a beautiful rose garden, was getting disgusting.
The pastor, who always had a flair for provocative language, put the battle cry into a flyer he passed out in the park after Shirley’s brush with danger: GAGE PARK—SODOMITE RAT’S NEST. Then he launched his Great Gage Park Decency Drive. For the first time, the WBC carried picket signs denouncing homosexuals. The Gage Park pickets became weekly events. By the time my family got to Topeka, the group was still picketing the park weekly.
The Gage Park pickets made the church visible, and the antihomosexual message attracted people who felt the same way. In fact, for quite a while, lots of Topekans outside the church supported the Decency Drive and joined in the pickets. They related to the pastor’s printed literature about the situation, which read “Can God-fearing Christian families picnic or play touch football there without fear of contracting AIDS? HELL NO!” The handout described lots of upsetting, sinful behavior: “open fag rectal intercourse in public restrooms, in the rose garden, in the rock garden, in the theatre, in the rainforest, in the swimming pool, on the softball fields, on the swing sets, or the train—it’s everywhere…” The language was so graphic that many couldn’t help but feel disgusted by the situation. Maybe the pastor was too hard-core for his sympathizers, though, because by the time I joined the church, nobody in the public joined our ranks anymore.
The early church pickets started getting local press, and the pastor loved it. He showed up regularly on the front pages of the city’s newspapers beaming his huge ear-to-ear smile. I saw lots of clippings from those days, with him wearing his white cowboy hat and holding an American flag upside down. So successful were the pickets that the church moved to local businesses next. The pastor chose the ones he thought deserved attention, like the ones that employed homosexuals. The Vintage Restaurant on SW Gage Boulevard was a famous target in our picket history. It was a popular dining spot in town, with lots of regulars from the political realm. Jonathan Phelps, Jael’s father, knew the then manager, and he knew her sexual orientation. He also knew that the owner of the restaurant was Jewish. The WBC thought God hated Jews almost as much as He hated homosexuals, and the pastor never hid his opinion that it had been the Jews who had killed Jesus. The church started picketing the restaurant nightly with signs about God hating fags and Jews, and continued to do so for three years.
Everybody in the church knew the date March 26, 1993. That was the day a riot broke out on the sidewalk outside the Vintage Restaurant. Eight WBC members were beaten bloody and briefly hospitalized. The pastor pointed to the riot as a defining moment of our torment and our endurance. He blamed the police for allowing the riot and conspiring with the sodomites. Once again, the church prevailed, showing the world that no one could trample on the saints, the Word of God, or His judgments. We all celebrated the martyrdom of God’s prophets every year on March 26, the day the membership stood up for God. The pastor used enlarged photos of the victims pasted to the picket signs at the anniversary protest outside the restaurant.
It was during the same month that the pastor took his pickets out of state for the first time. The first event was in Washington, D.C., a Gay Pride march similar to the one my father had videographed in 2000 for his documentary. The pastor got lots of national press there, and he began looking for big events outside of Topeka that could get the WBC in the news. He really was a master at getting himself into the spotlight; but it wasn’t about him, it was about serving God. For a church this small to be recognized around the nation was quite remarkable.
However, receiving so much attention had a downside. I heard a lot about one of the bigger criminal attacks against the church, a pipe bomb explosion outside Shirley’s house on August 20, 1995. Even more terrifying, her newborn baby, Gabriel, was asleep upstairs. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but Shirley’s fence and the van parked in her driveway were damaged. The pastor insisted the bombers were the children of Satan. It turned out the bombers had thought Shirley’s house was the pastor’s house, and they had been retaliating against the pastor for his antihomosexual picketing at Washburn University and the law school. The perpetrators turned out to be two local men in their early twenties, and were turned in to police by a friend of theirs. One of the men was convicted of a Class E arson felony and sentenced to sixteen days in jail, which he could serve on weekends. He was also ordered to pay $1,751 in restitution and do one hundred hours of community service. The pastor still became outraged at the leniency of the judgment every time he talked about it. He thought trying to silence the saints was despicable, but the cowards would get their due in the judgment of God. The church’s press release addressing the attack was prominently displayed on our website.
By 1995, the majority of the pickets were at the funerals of people who had died of AIDS. These were the ideal picket venues. The church could make its point that homosexual sinners died horrible, untimely deaths, and that God punished the dead and their loved ones with the judgment they deserved. Because these pickets seemed cruel to people who didn’t follow the Word of God, they really grabbed attention and provoked angry responses. The press took note, and the pickets began to put the church on the national map. Matthew Shepard’s funeral was where the whole world really began to know about the WBC, and the pastor couldn’t have been more delighted to be so vilified. That was the way God wanted it.
The church’s presence at the funeral made Michael Moore, the filmmaker, so angry that he began a countercrusade in favor of gay rights. He would occasionally show up at a picket with a busload of gay people, some of them dressed in drag as female cheerleaders. The bus, nicknamed the “Sodomobile,” was painted pink and decorated with slogans such as BUGGERS ON BOARD and SODOM IS FOR LOVERS. At one picket in Kansas City, the bus came screeching around the corner and stopped in front of the pastor, who was dressed in a blue suit, red tie, enormous wraparound mirrored sunglasses, and white cowboy hat. The group got off the bus and mixed with the picketers, including the pastor’s daughter Abigail and several children.
The pastor, waving an upside-down American flag on a long pole, watched in amusement as a busload of homosexuals danced to music blasting from the bus’s sound system. Some of the men were using the top of the bus for a stage, and others used the sidewalk to perform a choreographed number they had clearly rehearsed. It was like watching the ’70s pop group the Village People dance to their most famous song, “Y.M.C.A.” People from the bus were trying to intimidate the pastor by getting close and in his face when the pastor told them they had better not touch him. “You are heading to hell in a faggot handbasket,” he said with a friendly grin. “If you keep living like you are living, you are going to die and split hell wide open.”
Meanwhile, Michael Moore and a few others were badgering Abigail. When Moore asked her to sing “Amazing Grace” with them, she joked, “Who do you think I am? Karen Carpenter?” Moore and his group broke into a rendition of the famous Carpenters’ song “Sing,” and Abigail joined in, improvising some of the lyrics with “God Hates Fags.” The picketers took to the church truck pretty soon after that, so Michael Moore declared victory in making them retreat.
He was incorr
ect. The church never looked at it that way. If picketers retreated, they did so because their job was done. We never lost at any protest, regardless of the counterprotest. We were preaching only to who was right in front of us. In Moore’s case, the church knew he’d blast his video nationwide, thereby furthering its message. It was a win-win situation, as far as the pastor was concerned.
I never encountered Michael Moore, but from the first day we arrived in Topeka, Dad and I hit the ground picketing. Taylor was ten now, and she was really embracing the church’s message, too. She was so happy that Dad was including her. It took Mom a little longer to warm up to the idea of being out in public like that, but after a couple of months she also joined in. After her initial feelings of intimidation around Shirley, she’d succumbed to her star power, and I could see on her face how excited she was to be around Shirley. If they were on the same picket, and Mom got to walk with her, she would glow. People considered being around Shirley a privilege, because they themselves became godlier in her presence.
The pastor was always reading the paper to see who or what we would picket next. But once he made his choice, Shirley took over the organization of the details. She would post the out-of-town picket schedule on the church’s shared network, and in turn we would put our names under the ones that interested us. My new friends encouraged me to choose the same ones in hopes that we would be together. Once Shirley’s decision was made, it was final, and she’d blast a church e-mail with the names of those who had been chosen. When I saw my name on a picket schedule, I felt I was like Elijah or Moses spreading the Word of God. There was status to being a picketer, also. It meant God was sending you somewhere and the angels were watching you. The minimum age and the number of picketers varied. For out-of-town pickets, she’d usually limit the number to five to keep the expenses down, and the minimum age was sixteen. In local pickets, though, we could have all eighty members, and kids as young as five were allowed to participate. It may sound small, but eighty people spread out along the sidewalk, each holding as many as four signs, looked impressive.
The protests usually were no more than an hour in length, and everybody was expected to be on his best behavior for the entire duration. There were plenty of rules about where to stand, how to hold your sign, and how to react to the people who insulted us. The young people especially had to make sure they were always holding their signs correctly. We had to turn them for the oncoming traffic, which meant adjusting where we were facing when the traffic lights changed color. If we were not paying attention, or if we were blocking foot traffic, we would be scolded by an elder.
Because so many of the church members were lawyers, by default we always had one or two with us on a picket to handle the permits and interface with the police. Shirley was diligent in ensuring that we were in possession of all the necessary permits, so that we could never be denied access to an event on some legal grounds. She also knew how to pick prime locations.
The biggest job belonged to the videographer, who had to make sure the camera was with us and fully charged in order to document the protests as well as any reaction from the crowd. Any physical assault or particularly ugly verbal tirade against us would also earn a place in our video collection on godhatesfags.com to show the world our martyrdom. Every moment 360 degrees around the picket line had to be recorded in case anyone, from the onlookers to the police, violated our right to free speech or caused us harm, because we would need the video evidence to win in court. If the videographer missed a shot, there would be an outcry from the other members of “Oh, my God! How could you miss something that important?” I dreaded the assignment for this reason.
Everybody else had a role at the picket, too. There was the sign bag holder, who made sure all the right signs for an out-of-town event were properly packaged. The sign bags were huge, literally the size of the signs. They were probably portfolio cases originally made for artist’s paintings and drawings, and had zippers on both ends and handles at the top. We used signs without stakes or sticks on our out-of-town pickets, so that nobody could accuse us of using the picket sticks to hit or intimidate someone. We’d hold up as many signs as we could handle, giving the appearance that the number of people on the picket line was a lot greater than it really was.
Another job was that of the music book carrier. Oftentimes, we needed to defuse violence directed toward us, so we would sing loudly, like a church choir. We knew most of the songs by heart, but the music book carrier would still pass out sheet music for us to hold. One of the jobs I really tried to avoid was the “map-quester.” The person with that responsibility always seemed to get reamed out. If you told the driver the wrong direction, or indicated the wrong place to turn, you were in serious trouble and everybody would start yelling at you. I was thankful when the church finally got GPS systems installed in the vans.
Watching the kids was my favorite job. I liked keeping them out of harm’s way. Out-of-town pickets were generally not as predictable as local ones, so whoever was watching the kids had to keep them sheltered. Even if we spread them out, we’d try to have a couple of adults with anyone under ten. Of course, a lot of the pickets were restricted to members over eighteen, with the safety of the kids in mind. The pastor liked to get the out-of-town communities stirred up beforehand, so posting our upcoming pickets online to let residents know we were coming there was effective in making this happen. Our detractors might then blast threatening e-mails to the church office, and if there were enough threats, Shirley would pull the kids from the picket altogether.
Shirley was the memo queen. She would send out the memo detailing everybody’s role, what time to be at the driveway, what to bring, and what to wear. If you were late or you didn’t bring the sign bag or the video camera, you got chewed out. She was also the person who reminded us about crucial picketing protocol, such as never fighting back no matter how low some other people’s behavior might become.
Megan was Shirley’s right-hand person, and among other things, she was always the keeper of the receipts. For anything we spent money on—gas, food, lodging, rental cars—we gave her the receipt so that she could record it and we could write off the expenses on our taxes. Because we were a religious institution, our expenses were fully tax-deductible. Megan also helped us prepare songs and chants for pickets. There were always new ones to learn and practice. We had lots of parodies of patriotic songs, where we had replaced the traditional lyrics of America’s favorite tunes with our own lyrics, written mostly by my father. Instead of “God Bless America,” we sang “God Hates America.” In “America the Beautiful,” we substituted “O beautiful for spacious skies” with “O wicked land of sodomites.” He actually wrote a couple of songs, too, including one about the Catholic Church that described priests raping little boys. We held rehearsals in the evenings after Bible study. There were some amazing voices among the members. Besides my father, Shirley, Margie, Abigail, and Sara, Libby’s older sister, were wonderful a cappella singers.
Songs and picket signs were critical to delivering our message the best way possible. The signs, especially, were works of love. The pastor was the only person allowed to make them or decide what they were going to say. He would come up with the slogan and then put the message on the signboard by hand. He was particular about every curve in the lettering, cutting out the letters from construction paper with a utility knife and then attaching them to the poster. It was a long, labor-intensive process. Making even a single sign would take all day. The pastor soon recognized how creative Dad was and allowed him to have a small role on the sign-making team. He had seen his documentary, so he knew that he was creative in the film arena. The movie actually captured the pastor saying, “You are going to make them real mad at you, Steve.” The pastor thought Dad’s depiction of the church was pretty true and accurate, and the members were all pleased with it as well.
When the pastor saw that Dad was able to render signs on a computer instead of using paper and pencil, he asked Dad to show him what he
could do. His system was much more efficient—he was able to create four brand-new signs in a day, as opposed to the pastor’s one-a-day system. The beauty of the method was that if a current event occurred that necessitated a new sign, my dad was able to print several of them in a matter of hours.
The pastor was getting older, so he seemed open and agreeable to having my father assist with the task. Dad knew how to use Photoshop, so he could design the signs exactly to the pastor’s liking. He and the pastor would then score and fold the prints and paste them onto the signs. Dad’s role on the sign team became a source of great pride for my family. Sometimes, he’d let Taylor and me help create them. He’d print the various elements, and we’d all piece them together. Then we would wrap each one with packing material in a certain way so they wouldn’t get ruined in the rain or snow.
It seemed to me like my father was always trying to impress the other church members. Dad had thrown himself completely into helping out with church pickets and propaganda. Flattered that they liked his creativity, he took on more and more of the artistic projects. At the pickets, he was loud, boisterous, and condescending, but also quick-witted, drawing the attention of both the media and people on the street. My mother was typically quiet and kept to herself, happy to let my father be the star, but even she began actively participating in meetings. She was still trying to be on her best behavior, of course, so she didn’t dare step out of line and try to assert her opinion.
Pickets and protests were our chance to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world, which was our constant driving force. When we staged protests, we were proving that we were right and righteous, and everyone else was wrong and clueless. It was still a little confusing to me, because I didn’t always feel right, but it was also a powerful feeling to be one of God’s chosen ones. There was a sense of gratification in telling all of these sinners what they were doing wrong. I struggled with the contradiction of being humble, as the Bible teaches, with the ongoing pressure to separate and elevate ourselves from the masses. The church’s teachings didn’t always make sense, but I learned quickly that questioning our beliefs would not win me any friends within the church, so in the beginning, I did my best to keep my doubts private.
Banished : Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (9781455518470) Page 10