Girl on a Wire

by Libby Phelps

  Later, Gramps would actually use his background in civil rights to shore up his conviction that gay people didn’t deserve equal rights. Since he believed that being gay was a choice—unlike race—he had no problem separating his anti-gay rhetoric from his past as a defender of victims of racial discrimination.

  Gramps stopped his civil rights work when he was disbarred in Kansas in 1979, after a case in which he sued a court clerk who failed to provide materials for his case and was accused of cross-examining her too abusively, or “witness badgering.” The court wrote at the time: “The seriousness of the present case coupled with his previous record leads this court to the conclusion that respondent has little regard for the ethics of his profession.” That was the official position, although our family always believed their conclusion may have been made because of his standing up for blacks in a time and place where it wasn’t entirely accepted. In 1989 he agreed to stop practicing federal law as well. From then on, he focused on the ministry, but insisted his children get law degrees so they could continue the family business. This turned out to be a key element of the church’s ongoing battle against those who would try to shut them down for protesting. Having a family full of lawyers who knew free-speech legal history backward and forward meant we were almost certain to win any legal action brought against us, as we would most memorably demonstrate in the Albert Snyder Supreme Court case in 2011, when my aunts Margie and Shirley mounted their own defense of the WBC and won.

  As far back as I can remember, our church has consisted of three families: the Phelpses, who make up the vast majority of members; the Hockenbarger family; and the Davis family. In the summer of 2001, the Drain family moved to Topeka to join the church; their daughter, Lauren, was kicked out of the church a few years after they arrived, while her father Steve would go on to a position of leadership, a bizarre and unexpected turn of events. Several new members have joined WBC via marriage since my departure, but my family has always been the foundation of the church.

  Although he’s Gramps’s firstborn, my father, Fred Jr., was never seen as a successor in terms of leading the church. Quieter, more mild-mannered, and less enamored of the spotlight, my dad has always been a devout member of the church but not a very verbal one. He avoids conflict whenever he can, and he doesn’t like being in the media, though he’ll consent to an interview if there’s no way around it. We are often ambushed by protestors with cameras while picketing, and my aunt Shirley firmly believes that any publicity is good publicity for us. Physically, my father doesn’t look that much like my grandfather, other than their taller-than-average height. You probably wouldn’t even guess they were related.

  At the age of seventeen, my father left the church to attend Kansas State University, in the town of Manhattan. Many of the kids in his generation did the same, leaving for college and coming back. This makes them different from my generation; we were discouraged from ever leaving Topeka, and if we wanted to get a higher education, we were instructed to get it at our local institution, Washburn University. My dad met my mom, a music major, in college.

  My mother, Betty, was from a very small Kansas town called Green, and she was a Methodist, which Gramps deemed acceptable (his approval being absolutely necessary for their getting married). They wed in 1974, and both attended law school at the insistence of my grandfather. Having followed in Gramps’s footsteps, my father did much of his early work on civil right cases and in local politics.

  My mom is a petite woman with long, brown (now graying) hair and brown eyes. My dad loved to tell us the story about how, when he first met her, the first thing he noticed was that “she had one big honker of a nose!” Some people think I look like her, but I don’t see the strong resemblance others exclaim over. She is a kind, sweet woman who is always very submissive to my father, as the church taught wives should be. She always went along with the prevailing views of the church and never spoke up even if she disagreed. I honestly wouldn’t have known if she differed from the church’s positions on anything, because she would never say if she did or not—and it wasn’t my place to ask. She is very proper and doesn’t curse; she is so against cursing that when someone nearly hit her while she was driving me and Sara home from a picket one day, she blurted “schnike-doo!” How she came up with that word in such a stressful situation is beyond me, but is one of my favorite memories of my mom and will always make me laugh. We were very close, in our way, though she was never physically affectionate with me. I don’t remember her ever kissing or hugging me until I got really sick when I was seventeen years old. (She did rub and tickle my back all the time; it was so relaxing. She did it even when she was tired—sometimes she would sigh if I asked her to, but she still did it. She was such a great mom.) I only learned later in life that this wasn’t the normal way of things.

  I am the youngest of four siblings. Like all the church members, my parents went by the Bible verse that says “Be fruitful and multiply,” so no one was allowed to use birth control. Our numbers were small in comparison to the other families; my cousin Megan is one of eleven. My brother, Ben, is the oldest, and the creator of the church’s infamous website www.godhatesfags.com. Eight years separate me from my brother. My oldest sister is Sharon; she left the church when I was about fifteen years old. My other sister is Sara. She’s three years older than me, and we were very close growing up. She left the church two years ago, but we hardly ever talk now—we reacted in different ways to leaving, and sadly it caused a rift between us that I’m working on changing. Up until I left, my family was my world. None of us had close friends outside of the church. It wasn’t encouraged, and we were basically told that the rest of the world hated us anyway. My cousins and sister were always my best friends—my only friends, really.

  My closest companion among the cousins was Megan, who was three years younger than me and a truly intelligent, curious person. She was an independent thinker but tended to keep those thoughts to herself (or share them with only me); she had a way of avoiding speaking out against the opinion of any group she was in, a trait that served her well in the church. With her tightly curled brown hair and blue-green eyes, she always got a lot of attention from boys, like most of the Phelps girls did. This was something she and I would strategize about—going so far as to write scripts for ourselves as to how we’d respond to pickup lines from guys. She could make anyone feel comfortable around her, even journalists who were clearly trying to rile her up into a caricature of a crazy fundamentalist. My other closest friends among the cousins were Josh, Megan’s older brother; Jacob, who was the son of our aunt Margie; and Jael, daughter of our uncle Jon.

  THE EXTENDED PHELPS CLAN WAS CLOSE-KNIT AND, AT TIMES, terrifying to me, especially my aunt Shirley. From the time I was little, Shirley—or Shirl, as we called her—was Gramps’s right-hand woman, with a seemingly endless capacity for managing several tasks at once and keeping her many children in line at the same time. She was in charge of who went to which picket, who answered media inquiries, and whom was assigned which chores. With her long, salt-and-pepper hair, crooked teeth, and beaklike nose, she always reminded me a bit of a penguin—or a wicked witch, which she would come to represent to me as I got older. Among all of us, she was the one who seemed to take the most genuine pleasure in seeing other people hurt by our pickets. When someone would get upset while talking to one of us on the picket line, she’d say something like, “See how mad the person is getting over there? Isn’t that great? Their heart is getting harder as we speak.” We never got along very well. She always thought I wasn’t doing enough to be helpful, and when Shirl thought we weren’t doing enough, there would be an outburst. When she was really mad, she had a stare that would pierce right through us. Fear of her disapproval would regularly make my stomach hurt, sometimes until I threw up. I still get chills when I think about getting on Shirl’s bad side.

  Shirl’s redheaded brother, Tim, was the cool uncle in the family. When we were little and had sleepovers, he would dress up as a n
inja and show up to play hide and seek with us, which thrilled us every time. He was a forceful personality, always front and center helping Gramps lead church services. But as I got older, he and his wife, Lee Ann, got in trouble with Shirl and the other elders for being, as they called it, bad with money. Debt was a shameful thing to have in our family, and Tim got called before the members to account for his bad decision-making. My aunt Marge, also a redhead, was one of the quickest wits in the church. She is a good writer, and did a lot of the lyrics for our pop song parodies. A sharp lawyer, she handled most of the arguments during the Supreme Court case. She was protective of the girls, and seemed to be in our corner more than many of the grownups. I recall watching a movie when I was little where there was a naked woman in it. Her reaction was, “Boys, you close your eyes. You can’t watch this. But the girls can.” When I was seventeen, she took me on a special aunt-niece cruise to the Bahamas.

  Nice trips were pretty regular occurrences in my life; I was in many respects a very well-cared-for kid. I was surrounded by people who were smart, hardworking, and interested in my well-being, and who could be incredibly kind when they wanted to be. My family lived in a three-story house in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Topeka, a half mile from the WBC compound, which shares its backyard with a majority of my family members. The fact that we lived in a family compound—and were not encouraged to be friendly with anyone other than our immediate family members—didn’t really worry me. After all, I was the one who was going to heaven for all of eternity, and what were earthly friends compared to that?

  The shared backyard of our block had everything a kid could want: an in-ground swimming pool where I would play with my cousins and race my dad; a track around the pool as well as around a big, sprawling lawn where we would play badminton and flag football; and playground toys for the younger kids. On the other side of the church there was a basketball court and a volleyball court.

  Gramps and Gran lived in the biggest house on the block, the one that was also home to the church itself. One side of the brown and white house, the one that looked out onto the road, sported a huge banner proclaiming GODHATESAMERICA.COM. A marquee outside also bore a church message, usually something along the same lines, though frequently we would discover it had been doctored with spray-paint from vandals. A black wrought iron fence connected to a taller brown lattice fence surrounded the property. The fences stayed locked and were equipped with video surveillance most of the time, as Gramps had become increasingly paranoid in his later years.

  At Gramps and Gran’s house, the cousins and I mostly spent time in the spacious, cork-floored kitchen helping Gran cook or clean, or listening to Gramps practicing his sermons. He would always work on his sermon all week long, and if you stopped by the house while he was doing it, he would sit you down at the table and practice on you. You were in for it then, because his sermons would take an hour or longer. Gran would generally either be sitting next to him, cleaning the house, or watching retro shows on the TV Land channel on the small television in her room.

  Gramps would sleep upstairs in the master bedroom, but for as long as I can remember, he and Gran hadn’t shared a bed. She suffered from terrible kyphosis, a spinal condition that creates a hump on the back and makes it nearly impossible to lie down straight. So for the most part, she slept on a blue La-Z-Boy recliner in front of a brick fireplace in a small room downstairs, next to the kitchen. If the door to her room was opened, we could see directly through the kitchen into the sanctuary.

  Ever since I was born, Sundays meant church in that sanctuary; for many years we had two services, one in the morning and one in the evening. Later, when the picketing started, there wasn’t enough time for that, so we narrowed it down to one service that started at noon. There was never any separate Sunday school for the kids. Gramps thought that since there was no way to tell when a child might start understanding, he might as well start teaching the fundamentals of our religion as soon as possible. So I was brought to church services from the time I was a baby, and quickly learned not to fidget. That could earn you a slap, as I’d once seen demonstrated on my cousin Zach.

  Every Sunday morning, we would file into the low-ceilinged chapel with its twenty-odd rows of pews, pulpit, organ and piano, and baptismal area. Everyone had their assigned seat there on the red-upholstered pews. For years, I sat toward the back with my parents, and then eventually I moved up to sit next to my sister Sara in the second row on the left side. Originally I moved up to replace my aunt Lizz, temporarily, but then we liked sitting there, so we kept it that way.

  All the women have to wear headscarves in church to show humility before God. We would fold a scarf into a triangle and tie it over our heads. It looked oddly incongruous with the modern casual clothes we all wore—nobody really got dressed up for church, unless it was a special occasion—but this was a longtime rule and we never questioned it.

  A typical church service went something like this: First, my uncle Tim would go up to the front and open the big brown book (or other WBC hymnal). Then he led us in song. Usually we’d sing something like “Ten Thousand Angels,” or “How Great Thou Art,” or “Faith Is the Victory,” or “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” My father played the piano for the church services. He practiced every day on the piano at our house, especially on Saturday nights before the Sunday service. He was really good, and I loved falling asleep with his music being the last thing I heard.

  Then Tim would say, “Now let us pray.” Everyone put their head down and we’d stay silent for just a couple of minutes as either he or someone he asked gave the prayer.

  After that, Gramps would come up to the pulpit for the sermon, the primary focus of the service, and the part of the service that would be recorded for the Internet. For most of my life he stood at the lectern, but in later years, as he got weaker, he would sit. No matter where he was, though, his sermons were always bombastic and angry. When standing, he would often pound the pulpit, telling us to “Wake up!” Usually he meant it as a metaphor, although every so often we might be daydreaming—and then we’d be scared that Gramps had seen our minds wandering. He seemed to see everything. But mostly he was talking to the world, not just us. In recent years, every sermon was recorded and put on our website, where anyone could watch or listen to it.

  The sermons were long, and often repetitive, but Gramps was tireless as he delivered them. His topics were usually variations on the theme of damnation (of others) and salvation (of us).

  Sometimes, they focused on our immediate neighbors: “Topeka, Kansas, the only place in the universe with the zip code of 666, which the Bible declares to be the mark of the beast, may be the most evil place on earth; where Satan’s seat is; where the synagogue of Satan is; where Ichabod is the mascot of the local university, meaning the glory of the Lord has departed; and which is the acknowledged world capital of that organized system of witchcraft and idolatry known as modern psychiatry. Topeka comes from the word Topage, or Tophet, which means hell.”

  More often, they would be delivered to the nation at large: “God has duped Bush into a bloody war in Iraq. They turned America over to fags; they’re coming home in body bags. God himself duped Bush into a no-win war by putting a lying spirit in the mouths of all his trusted advisors—to punish America.”

  Now and then they ranged into genuinely incomprehensible territory, as in one sermon where his refrain of “You’re gonna eat your babies!” went viral on YouTube as an example of how deranged Fred Phelps really could be. His rant was about how desperate people were in many corners of the globe, and that the reason was humanity’s godless behavior. But “eat your babies” … I could never really explain it whenever anyone asked me about that, nor the phrase “Bitch Burger” that went along with it. It sure grabbed people’s attention on placards, though.

  Another favorite topic with Gramps was predestination—the idea that it had already been decided, when you were born, whether you were bound for heaven or hell. Since you could never k
now, you were supposed to behave as if you were bound for heaven—and hope for the best. But Gramps had it on good authority, he said, that his congregation was destined for glory, much like Noah and his family. When the Rapture came, he would tell us, the group who would be saved would be very small, only a remnant of society. In one sermon, he specified eight as the number of people who got on Noah’s Ark—which struck abject fear into the hearts of his congregation. In our Bible study later that week, my aunt Marge broke down crying. “All I know is, when the Lord comes and if there’s only eight people who go,” she sobbed, “I want to be one of those eight people.” None of us really knew how to comfort her, either. We all hoped to be one of those eight people, too, and there were a lot more than eight of us in the church.

  There was a never-ending supply of subject matter for Gramps to preach about, since there were always world events that confirmed his belief that mankind was doomed. And Gramps was sharp; he was a good debater. He knew the Bible cover to cover and he could out-argue anyone. Often his sermons would remind you that he’d been a practicing lawyer—he could sound like he was making an extended closing argument in the case of WBC versus The Rest of Civilization.