Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (29 page)

Dad always wanted to sign up for the high-profile, controversial pickets, like one declaring the Sago miners going to hell, and he was happy to take vacation days to travel to them. He didn't want my mother or me to go to the same ones, however, because he thought we were inferior picketers. At least Shirley had the generosity and genuine pride to share the big ones with her children. She said they could represent our message just as well as she could. My father never made me feel that way. He seemed to prefer pointing out my shortcomings or not trusting me with responsibility at all.

Once, Shirley was away for almost a week and had her phone calls forwarded to our house. She frequently got calls from the press, outraged strangers, or people with a fascination about us. That entire week, Dad didn't allow me to answer the phone, thinking I wouldn't be able to handle myself in the event that a phone call came in from somebody wanting to mix it up.

Only he knew how to do that.

I was still permitted to answer some of the e-mails we received from people on the outside. Once in a while, they would even turn into more of a correspondence. Because we were a community determined to be visible and provocative, so many people out there knew exactly who we were. On pickets, we'd identify ourselves by name if anyone asked, and would even encourage people to contact us. People knew about the websites because we advertised them a lot, on the T-shirts we wore at every picket, on our church building. We directed any media person who approached us to our website. We'd get phone calls and e-mails from almost every picket, and every kid had a responsibility to answer certain ones. That was how we kept up with our "fan mail," a couple of e-mails a week for each person. I was in charge of corresponding with about seventy people. One of them was a guy about my age named Scott, who e-mailed the church for the first time in July 2007 and showed a lot of interest in our religion. I was the one assigned to respond to his query.

More than likely, the harmless correspondence between us would have gone unnoticed save for the timing. The summer of 2007 had seen a lot more stressors for the church than usual, which gave rise to a lot of paranoia and exacerbated already strained relationships. A lawsuit against the church was heating up, and a few people really seemed to be cracking under the tension.

The lawsuit was bigger in scope and more far-reaching in consequences than most of the suits filed against us. The pastor, the primary defendant named in the case, was convinced the media was out to get us. He thought hidden in the horde of people always seeking to interview or needle us might be an undercover spy, using a deceitful tactic to gain access to us through an unsuspecting insider who would take him in confidence.

The lawsuit causing all the fear had been filed a year earlier in the U.S.

District Court in Maryland. The pastor, Shirley, and Becky, as well as the church itself, were the defendants facing five felony charges, including defamation of character and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It had all come about after the picket of the military funeral of Matthew Snyder, a U.S. marine killed in Iraq in a noncombat accident. The church had the proper permits, stayed the required one thousand feet away from the Catholic church hosting the service, remained behind the police barriers, and carried its standard message by way of our signs, SEMPER FI, SEMPER FAGS and GOD HATES DEAD SOLDIERS, among others. We

had already picketed dozens of military funerals by this point, and nobody from our church accused Matthew Snyder of being homosexual, saying only that God punished our nation for its tolerance of homosexuality in the military. The pastor's position was no mystery; he'd say that "military funerals are pagan orgies of idolatrous blasphemy where they pray to the dunghill gods of Sodom and play taps to a fallen fool." The Snyder family wanted financial redress in the millions of dollars from the Phelpses and the church for their personal pain and injury. The case was scheduled to go before the court that October.

The pastor usually took on lawsuits with full confidence and cocky arrogance. Because so many of the Phelpses were lawyers, using them hardly cost the church a thing, and as lawyers, Phelps family members involved in any case before the court were entitled to payment from the state for services provided. We never picketed illegally, so we could not be denied or fined on legal grounds. As to our message, we had systematically won any case against us that had to do with freedom of expression. The rulings allowed us to speak our opinion, no matter how distasteful. We won monetary judgments in those cases, as well, so being sued was kind of a win-win.

If the pastor wasn't the defendant, he was the plaintiff. I had the feeling he loved suing people who came at us, anybody who tried to limit our First Amendment rights. I heard that he once had two hundred cases pending in federal court at one time. The pastor had a reputation for taking grievances to litigation, and they didn't have to be related to free speech and freedom of religion. Years before my family arrived in Topeka, he sued Sears in a class-action suit for $50 million when they couldn't locate a television set he had purchased on their layaway plan. Six years and many court appearances and adjournments later, he settled for a payment of $126. Lots of people who filed complaints against the church might find themselves served with a complaint of their own from Phelps Chartered.

As the lead attorney, Margie was taking on the brunt of the casework for the trial of
Snyder v. Phelps
. The matter was straightforward, but who was going to prevail--the Snyders, seeking tort compensation for the disruption of a private funeral, or the Westboro Baptist Church, exercising its rights so clearly protected under the Constitution--was never guaranteed. We thought what we said could not be considered slander because we were speaking

"rhetorical hyperbole," not "verifiable fact." However, in the court of public opinion, we were extremely unpopular. The lawsuit, which had festered for more than a year before the trial date, had Margie and the pastor convinced the media were out to get them. One way or another, the devil was always trying to ruin the church. In truth, we were all scared that we might lose our houses or the church, but no one was more up in arms than the pastor. He was so anxious about the lawsuit, his blood pressure was either way up or way down. He'd have Jael or me check it multiple times a day. He was seeing his doctors constantly for feelings of lightheadedness on his bicycle.

He would do repetitive things, and fast on blueberries and lettuce for forty days or ride his bike for hours at a stretch.

We would tell him that he was being crazy, but we couldn't get him to relax.

He started badgering Marge and keeping her awake all night, asking her why God was forsaking them. She got so anxious that she left him and went to live with Shirley for a month.

The pastor seemed paranoid about people, too. He stopped doing interviews and became an extreme homebody, rarely leaving the house out of fear somebody was going to assault him. If he wanted a Subway sandwich from the nearby shop, he sent someone else to pick it up. Shirley had to set up a mission whereby every day two people would go into his house to feed him, but then they would leave immediately. He began freaking out that Shirley was trying to seize control of the church. She was just writing e-mails and talking to people about ecclesiastical matters, as she'd always done, but now he took it personally, and wrote up material in response. Flyers appeared on all of our doors claiming that Shirley was undermining his authority, with support from Bible verses. Not only was his attack on Shirley highly unlike him, it was also the only mission that took him outside his house or fenced-in compound the entire summer.

When I listened to someone with as much authority as the pastor, I tried to justify to myself why something made sense, even when it didn't. Hearing his desperation was scary, and I was very scared for him. I thought he had lost the grace of God. If he had, then we all had. God would no longer send us on pickets to spread His Word, because He did not love us. All of us fasted and prayed that something so dire would not happen. We lay on the floor praying for God to grant us forgiveness and direction.

We also held a church meeting with the pastor to discuss his behavior. We followed up with him a couple of times, although nothing helped. He still acted oddly, but he did want to be proactive and keep thinking about the future of the congregation. "I am going to start another church in Texas," he told us. "I am so tired of all this." Then, he would come full circle and threaten to stop preaching altogether. It was such an emotional, traumatic time for me. He was the pastor, and I loved him as our leader, the one who was guiding us and leading us to salvation. Having to question if he was doing the right thing was really difficult for me. However, if we didn't deal with it, we wouldn't be going to heaven, either. I talked about it a lot with Jael, trying to find a positive way to handle it. "What do you think about thanking God that we are being sued?" I suggested.

Right in the middle of this chaos, a British journalist and documentarian by the name of Louis Theroux came to film us for three weeks, and Shirley welcomed him warmly into our midst. He was very funny and charming, with a great British accent. He went by the informal pronunciation of his first name, "Louie." Although we found him really ignorant of the Bible and religion in general, we real y liked him, so we didn't mind when he'd ask us loaded questions that he thought would make us slip up. He hoped his documentary, which he had already titled
The Most Hated Family in
America
, would reach an international audience.

Although Louis was staying at a hotel in Topeka, he and his crew practically lived with us during waking hours. Louis went to al the pickets and Bible studies and followed us around anywhere we went. He could go to Sunday sermons, interact with us on pickets, eat meals with us, and film anything he wanted. One afternoon, he even went on an outing with us at a local bowling alley. The only thing he couldn't do was shadow the pastor, although on a couple of occasions, he managed to ask him a few questions about scripture. The pastor was dismissive, and referred to Louis's questions as

"stupidity in spades."

Shirley and her children loved the whole concept of such grand media exposure, as though Louis's interest in the Phelpses meant that they were precious. Everyone became so caught up in Louis and the cameras that they started competing with one another for the fame the film would generate. It was like a Phelps family reality TV show. Libby was practically obsessed with Louis, and Megan treated him like he was her pet project, inviting him with her everywhere to give him interviews. Shirley and Megan even bought Louis and his crew expensive gifts at the end of their stay. I didn't understand it at all. I liked Louis being there, but my fellow church members' competition for male attention was, for lack of a better word, shocking.

The pastor, on the other hand, was extremely anxious about the whole thing.

He did not want to get exposed to the world during his moment of weakness.

His behavior appeared to be irrational, and his confidence shaken. He stayed away from Louis as much as he could.

We knew Louis was a journalist and respected that, even though we thought he intended to offer a more objective opinion about us, rather than the gonzo-style comic piece that he ended up creating. But we were fine with the result, in any case. He was going to hell either way, and sadly for him, he was now going to a hotter part. He was not nearly as insidious as the journalist Margie thought was out there in cyberspace. She went so far as to say the spy was from a Boston newspaper, and she fed the pastor's paranoia by telling him that she thought I could possibly be an unsuspecting part of a media trap set up by my new Internet friend Scott. She wanted to see every correspondence between us. Even though she never saw anything that supported her mole theory, she told me I could ruin the church by talking to imposters.

Everything started to spin out of control when Taylor started to notice that I was on my computer a lot. "Are you playing a game?" she'd ask. "Let me see." I'd tell her to go away, but she kept snooping and saw that I was on a chat site she'd never seen before.

"I'm telling Mom and Dad," she threatened.

"What is there to tell?" I replied, convinced that she was just bluffing. Taylor and I were pretty close, so I didn't think she would try to get me in trouble. I had never communicated socially online with anyone I didn't know before, and I thought I was going about it the right way.

Scott, who lived in Connecticut, had seen some of our song parody videos on the websites. Dad had been taking advantage of YouTube's huge following and had started putting some of the shorts on that website, probably hoping his controversial little numbers would go viral. Scott had seen my "Big Fibbin," a parody of Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'" written by Megan and rapped by five of us: Megan, Libby, Jael, Bekah, and me. Scott had liked it enough to get in touch with us. He said he appreciated our message, and wanted to know more.

At first, we only exchanged e-mails, but eventually we started talking in a chat room. He asked me lots of questions about the church, our religion, and our beliefs. He said he wanted to join the church one day, and asked me if I thought the pastor would let him come visit. These kinds of exchanges went on for several weeks until he started flirting with me, telling me I was beautiful and sexy. I started flirting back. I was lonely, it was fun for me, and I thought it safer to flirt with someone who was fifteen hundred miles away than doing it in person. I never thought I would actually meet Scott, and if I did, it would only be because he had come to Topeka to join the church. I thought the situation was really harmless.

Taylor figured out I was chatting with a guy online using YouTube channels and Yahoo Instant Messenger. I would hide my screen when she came around, and she told Mom and Dad. She had been baptized one year after I had, and she took her commitment to the church very seriously. Dad checked my computer when I wasn't around and found a cache of e-mails.