by Libby Phelps
Making it back to the van, I was praised by everyone for taking the hit without letting go of my sign. No one asked if I was all right, or expressed any concern for me over what had just happened. At that moment, their true intentions showed through. The image of the church was truly what mattered above everything, and everyone, else.
IN ADDITION TO OUR PICKETS, THE CHURCH WAS BEGINNING to gain notoriety for parodies of pop songs. Much the way pickets allowed us to see the world, our sendups of Top 40 songs became an excuse to listen to a lot of popular music, which most of us would have done anyway.
Gramps had started the tradition with simple riffs on Christmas or old-timey songs, like “Grand Old Flag”—which became “Filthy Flag,” in his version—and “I’m Proud to Be an American,” which became “I’m Ashamed to Be an American”:
I’m ashamed to be an American, where the fags can freely roam
They spread their filth around this land, every pervert calls it home
So I’ll gladly stand up—with a picket sign —and proclaim God’s word today
Cuz there ain’t no doubt about this land—God hates the USA.
Music had always been a big part of my life; my dad played the piano every night, practicing for Sunday services, and Sara and I both sang in the school choir. In high school, we performed a duet of the Bette Midler song “The Rose,” and people showed up just to see it. Mostly because Sara is a really good singer, but I wasn’t so bad myself. I harmonized well with her. So when it came to performing song parodies for the church, we tended to be front and center.
Gran was good at music—she had a great singing voice, and had even sung at her own wedding. It became a friendly competition among all of us to see who could belt out a song the loudest and proudest; Shirl and Marge both thought themselves the best singers on the planet, but my aunt Abi had the most pitch-perfect voice. Sara and I were the reigning champs at harmonizing. In general, singing livened up a picket, which could get monotonous after an hour of standing with huge signs in our hands, getting yelled at (or worse) by people driving by.
At Christmas, the church’s spin on carols became our own version of a holiday tradition. We didn’t celebrate the actual holiday, because as Gramps said, it was a bastardized, pagan celebration of idolatry that had no actual basis in the Bible. But we put our stamp on the season with a hymnal of fire-and-brimstone carols. On Christmas Eve, we would picket churches having candlelight services; we’d stay out until midnight, singing songs like “Silent Night”:
Silent night, awful night
You have no peace
You’re full of fright
God’s righteous anger is close and near
His hate for this nation is painfully clear
Behold the wrath of the lamb
Behold the wrath of the lamb.
As the church became more well known after 9/11, and our mission expanded to excoriating America as a whole, church leaders decided we’d take mainstream pop idols and turn them upside down.
WHEN MICHAEL JACKSON DIED, WE CAME OUT WITH A VERSION of “We Are the World” called “God Hates the World.” When Shrek was popular, I suggested doing a take on “Holding Out for a Hero,” an ’80s song that regained popularity with its inclusion in the animated movie. My aunt Marge, whose quick wit made her a natural at writing pointed lyrics, quickly came up with “There Are No Heroes”—and the credit for thinking of it eventually went to Sara, much to my chagrin. Every time we watched a movie, we would be on alert for songs we could use to our advantage. It became a game of sorts. But more than that, it was a fun family activity.
Those song parodies were one of the things I missed the most when I left the church. I wish I could go back and sing with my cousins and aunts and uncles again, even if I didn’t always believe in the words I was singing. To be honest, I didn’t really think too hard about what they meant. I knew they echoed the message we were charged to bring to the world, and that was really all that mattered.
THE SEEDS OF DOUBT REALLY SPROUTED IN ME IN EARNEST AT seventeen, in 2000, on a road trip with my family. “What would we talk about if we didn’t talk about picketing?” Sara chirped in the car while we were en route to a picket, an overnight’s drive from Topeka. “Don’t even think that way,” my dad chided her, leaving the discussion at that.
The brief exchange came back to haunt me that night as I lay in my Motel 6 bed next to Sara. Why do our lives have to revolve around picketing? I wondered as I drifted off to sleep. Why do our “loving” family activities have to revolve around conflict and hate?
As I grew into my teenage years, the church became gradually even more condemning of the outside world—and strict and unforgiving with even its own members. My own parents began to treat us more harshly, which was not their traditional style.
But my doubts took root slowly. I was afraid to question what I had been raised to believe. I couldn’t even begin to picture what life would be like outside of the church. We were living the good life, I was told constantly. For a long time, I thought I was.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT MY CHILDHOOD WAS how much I got to travel, which was way more than most kids from Topeka did. In part—and increasingly as I got older—this was because we were picketing all over the country. But a little-known secret about the church was that we would tailor our pickets to places we wanted to visit anyway. Nobody really said it out loud, of course, but it was understood that when we traveled some distance to represent the church, we had also earned a little time off for recreation. My parents, Sara, Ben, and I were always happy to get in some sightseeing. If you look through my old photo albums, you’ll see page after page of my vacation photos, often pictures of us holding picket signs, which I’ve scrupulously augmented with cheery stickers and brightly colored markers adding commentary about silly things that happened at the time. To an outsider, I realize this might look really bizarre: A typical young girl’s album—complete with “i”s dotted with hearts—crossed with a decades-long chronicle of gay-bashing.
When I was in grade school, there had been a few wholesome family trips we could take without picketing at all that wouldn’t arouse condemnation from Shirl. One of them was our every-other-year pilgrimage to Branson, Missouri, the Christian-friendly town with lots of musicals and amusement parks, but no alcohol. We’d go on a road trip to Yellowstone National Park and then the next year to Branson, where we once saw an Osmond Brothers concert Sara and I loved so much we led a standing ovation at the end. Religion didn’t always have to be an overt part of those trips, at least not until the rules of the church began to get more stringent.
By the time I was in my teens, every trip had to have a church-affiliated reason for existence. We wanted to go to Hawaii, so we planned in a day of general picketing in Honolulu, in front of a couple of churches and on Punchbowl Street, chosen for its foot traffic. After those pickets—which I remember mainly for their laid-back feeling, as passersby seemed much less confrontational than on the mainland—we were free to go to the beach without fear of reprisal when we got back. Years later, my brother Ben honeymooned in Hawaii, where he and his new wife made sure to picket for a few scant minutes—and have photographic evidence of it to show around to the family afterward. When we went to Cocoa Beach in Florida we took a few signs, whipped them out on the beach, and snapped a couple of photos to prove we’d been doing right by the church edicts. For the trip to Puerto Rico—my last vacation with my family before I left the church—we packed shirts that said PRIESTSRAPEBOYS.COM, GODHATESFAGS.COM, and GODHATESAMERICA.COM, and pulled them out on the side of the road in front of a beautiful church and took a few pictures so we could say we picketed in Puerto Rico.
Shirl, of course, maintained a literally holier-than-thou attitude; her favorite saying about vacations was, “I would never travel anywhere I couldn’t picket.” She seemed totally incapable of having fun, and it was hard to imagine her traveling anywhere and being interested in anything other than harassing people on the street.
She was also nursing an unfounded paranoia about any of us going outside the country, afraid the government would persecute us and refuse to let us back in. My aunt Rachel once had the chance to go on vacation with her husband, Charles, to an island outside the US, and Shirl shut it down quickly. But while Shirl’s fears about international trips might have been unfounded, there was a danger closer to home that we hadn’t anticipated. People’s anger toward us was becoming more aggressive, with violence erupting in a way that it never had before.
One day when I was a teenager, as we picketed outside the Washburn Law School, a woman drove her pickup truck directly at us, swerving at the last minute. We scattered, running for safety. Later we sued, but she was found not guilty due to temporary insanity. Still, within the church, this was seen as a victory for us—maybe not legally, but the fact that we’d had that much of an impact on someone. It also marked the beginning of a darker turn for Westboro pickets, in which our physical safety began to be more of a concern—not that it ever stopped Gramps or Shirl from putting us all out there on the picket line.
By that time, our picketing ministry was well established; we had even sent a group to Washington, DC, in January 1993 to picket the AIDS quilt, which had gotten us onto the national radar. Thanks to Shirl’s meticulous spreadsheets, we had groups organized to go out every day of the year in Topeka—no exceptions. And whether or not there was an out-of-town picket, we always made sure there was a group protesting in Topeka as well. One of our highest-profile local targets had recently become the Vintage restaurant, which would become one of the most notorious WBC protest sites in the church’s history. Gramps always liked to refer to a picket as “an unforgettable experience,” but this one took it to another level: the hospital.
The Vintage was one of the nicest restaurants in town, a place where local and visiting politicians would often have meetings over meals. When Gramps got wind of its manager, Sharon York, being appointed to a gay and lesbian council in town, the place immediately went on our weekly picket list. I was told the reason we were picketing was because the manager was a lesbian, but I still didn’t really know what that meant; I just assumed she was a bad person, that gay people were disgusting and a terrible influence and dangerous to be around kids. As an extra bonus, the Vintage was just down the street from a church Gramps didn’t like, which meant we could kill two birds with one stone and spread our picket out over a couple of blocks.
Unlike a lot of people we picketed, who basically resigned themselves to ignoring us as the pickets became a part of their everyday lives, this particular target didn’t take the protest lying down. For weeks, as we stood outside with our signs, Sharon York and the cooks would come outside for smoke breaks, giving us the finger and yelling at us to go home. Their anger just made Gramps’s resolve stronger. The pickets became larger; the Vintage staff got more riled up. The owner, Jerry Berger, began coming outside when we showed up, asking us to leave because our presence there was hurting business. Gramps and Shirl were unmoved and even a little amused by this.
When we didn’t back down, Berger decided to take matters into his own hands. It all came to a head one day that lives in infamy in our family’s history, a day the Phelpses still refer to as “the Vintage Massacre.”
On the evening of March 26, 1993, when our picket showed up around five thirty, Berger emerged from the restaurant’s front door with a small group of big, burly men. Much to Gramps’s initial glee, Berger had actually gone so far as to hire security to guard the Vintage against us. We all assumed they’d stay in front of the restaurant, but they quickly crossed the parking lot and began walking along the picket line. My uncle Chris was in charge of recording that day—we always tried to record, in case we needed to use anything in court later—and he got the video camera rolling right away. One of the big men smacked the camcorder out of his hand, and it smashed on the ground. Another pushed my uncle Tim, who pushed back; soon Tim was on the ground being kicked by two of the men. “Stop! You’ll kill him!” one of my aunts yelled at them. Soon it was a full-on melee, with the men in our group being pummeled by Berger’s thugs while Gran yelled at the WBC women to run, and dialed 911. Someone grabbed a camera out of my sister Sharon’s hand as she snapped pictures of the violence; she kicked at him and grabbed it back. The men didn’t hurt Gramps, though; Berger stood next to him while the violence went on, asking him how it felt to see people he loved being hurt. Finally, the police and ambulances arrived; several of my uncles, Ben, and Sharon went to the hospital. Ben and Tim were injured the most; they were taken away on stretchers with neck braces on. Years later Ben still complained of back and neck pain. Uncle Tim had gotten his head kicked in. He still has neck issues.
From then on, we’ve picketed at that location every day, and every March 26 is our memorial for the Vintage Massacre—including a huge picket at the Vintage. Sharon York was eventually fired from the restaurant because Jerry Berger said we’d made it impossible to keep her employed there. It was a hard-won victory for Westboro; we used the photo evidence from that night on our signs for years afterward to demonstrate how—just like Jesus—our family members had been cruelly beaten for their beliefs. VINTAGE THUGS BEAT KIDS, our signs read.
NEWS STORIES ABOUT THE DUSTUP HELPED RAISE THE PROFILE of our picketing ministry, already getting increasingly better known. We had attracted attention for our regular presence at Gage Park, around Topeka, and at the occasional out-of-state picket. Now, as we began to garner more media attention, we began to think more about how to play up to the cameras that showed up at our pickets. There weren’t many teenagers in America who spent slumber parties practicing how to talk to the media on the topic of God hating gay people and how America is doomed—but Megan and I did, even tape recording ourselves acting the parts of interviewer and interviewee.
On summer nights, we would do this during sleepovers at various relatives’ houses. All the aunts and uncles were happy to host a slumber party now and then, although Uncle Tim and Aunt Lee Ann’s house was a special favorite because of Tim’s willingness to play with us. Uncle Tim—tall, redheaded, and athletic—would dress all in black and stalk us in our conjoined backyards in a game we called “Ninja,” much to our delight. He would sing and dance to pop songs with us. Elton John was one of his favorite singers. I always wondered why it was collectively deemed OK for him to like a musician who was so obviously gay, but I never dared to say this out loud.
Later, lying side by side on the living-room rug after everyone had gone to bed, we liked to imagine in whispers what life would be like when we grew up. I would curl up in my gray sleeping bag, and Megan would make a bed out of her favorite Little Mermaid blanket. We figured we would live together, since we were never going to get married to anyone. So we meticulously planned out our dream house, complete with black and white checkered floors, that we would live in together while we waited for the apocalypse.
We also wrote practice scripts for getting asked out by boys; it happened occasionally, and we would tell them how disgusting and ugly we were, and that no one would ever find any part of us attractive. When one boy asked me to go to the movies with him, I originally planned to tell him I couldn’t because I had to help paint my brother’s house—which was the truth. I knew Megan and I could come up with a better response, though, and we painstakingly crafted the perfect comeback: “I’m sorry, but my cultural diversity and religious background have taught me that engaging in such behavior would be detrimental to my spiritual growth and eternal prospects. In other words, I don’t date.” (Yes, much smoother than the “painting my brother’s house” excuse.)
Boys were so forbidden to us that dating never even crossed my mind. It simply wasn’t part of who we were. “Avoid the appearance of evil” was the dictate from my family. If we were dating a boy, we were doing it out of lust, which was a sin; there could be no actual love or genuine feelings involved. Matthew 5:28: “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart.” Two young people who were dating actually hated each other, we were taught, because both of them wouldn’t tell the other the truth about what God required: to serve and obey Him. And to obey Him meant one man and one woman in marriage, nothing else, ever. Hand-holding, kissing, or anything else outside the marital bed was unthinkable. None of us ever talked about sex, even among ourselves, the older kids; no one ever mentioned wanting to date. The only sex education I’d ever gotten had come from a video they showed in my fifth grade class. You’d think I would have at least secretly been interested in the subject like seemingly everyone else in high school, but I really wasn’t. Kids would make sexual references that I never got; I simply knew they were perverted, as we always called it. I understood that my role was different, a higher purpose.
It was a known thing at school that the Phelps girls were not allowed to date or even talk to boys in any way outside of school-related topics. This, of course, was irresistible to some of them. One guy named Louis used to like to tease me. During a class, he’d say quietly, “Let’s go to the bathroom, Libby. I’ll meet you in the bathroom.” He’d reach out and touch my arm or my leg, which made me jump. I didn’t like that, and I didn’t think it was charming—I just thought it was inappropriate.
On volleyball game days, we sometimes had to wear dresses; I would wear a longer skirt than the other girls usually did, so I wouldn’t draw too much attention to myself. I was wearing this outfit one afternoon, walking down the hallway between classes, when someone tripped me. I fell, desperately trying to keep my skirt from flying up and scattering my books all over the hallway. I looked around as I got up, but I couldn’t see who’d done it—only that lots of kids were laughing about it. I heard Gramps’s voice in my head as I gathered up my books, dripping with humiliation: “God’ll get ’em for what they did to you.” This was his refrain whenever any of the kids would come home with a story about being bullied for being from Westboro. We were supposed to wear it as a badge of honor. I didn’t get it as bad as some, because I was pretty big for my age, but I still got it occasionally. At home, my mom would always try to push these incidents under the rug. “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal,” she’d say, trying to minimize the trauma.