Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (15 page)

The first time I saw a weapon was during a picket in Kansas City, Missouri.

We were outside the Kemper Arena, where Cher, one of the world's most popular singers but, more important, a celebrity mother of a lesbian, was giving a sold-out performance on her Farewell Tour. Toward the end of the picket, a woman came up to us flashing a knife and threatening us. We were only a group of five: four church members in their midtwenties and sixteen-year-old me. James Hockenbarger, who worked as a prison guard back in Topeka, was able to talk her down while the rest of us headed to our car. In that instant, I realized that the weapon had been flashed because of our message, but I felt more power than fear.

Another time, we were at a regular weekly picket of a favorite target when a truck drove slowly by us, then circled the parking lot and came back. The driver flashed a gun, then started driving toward us fast, yelling out the window that we were Communists and Nazis. We were used to people yelling and driving fast, and our tactic was to ignore people to show them that they were not going to get a rise out of us. But when we saw he had a gun, it was a bit shocking, and someone made the executive decision to cut the picket short and pack up.

Over the years, we had Gatorade bottles thrown at us, BB guns shot at us, and people threaten us with guns and knives. A lot of people drove their cars recklessly toward us, heading first in our direction before swerving away. But still, none of those things scared me. I believed that God would protect us in all circumstances as long as we obeyed and held those signs.

Something did happen at a picket at Washburn University that caught me completely off guard and made me more fearful at these kinds of events. It was one of our typical pickets, where we had about thirty members spread out along the sidewalk for two or three city blocks. We were holding tall wooden signs bearing the usual messages: FAG ENABLER SCHOOL, YOU

ARE GOING TO HELL, and GOD HATES FAG ENABLERS. The signs

were directed mostly at the cars driving by, but there were also a few pedestrians walking along the sidewalk. I was situated in the middle of the picket near Rebekah, Jael, and Megan. Typically, the teenagers carried the largest number of signs or the really big ones.

On this particular day, Bill Hockenbarger, one of our oldest members at almost eighty and a member of the WBC since the 1950s, was standing near his wife on the far side of the picket. Suddenly, I heard fellow members shouting my name. I was the videographer that day, and they needed me.

"Lauren! Get down here and film!" they yelled. I couldn't see what was going on, so I handed off my sign and darted down the picket line with the camcorder. I heard the church members yelling, "Call the police! Get off of him! Cowards! God will punish you for this!" But I still didn't know the extent of the problem. All I could see were college kids, crouched over and pummeling someone on the ground.

Soon, the men ran down the picket line to the scene, scaring off the college kids. I finally saw Bill lying on the grass with his face covered in blood and one of his eyes swollen shut. I burst into tears. How dare someone beat up an old man! He was an elderly gentleman exercising his right to freedom of religion and freedom of speech. I knew we angered people, but that didn't mean they could physically assault someone for his beliefs. That was truly against the law and against any ethical standard. Denying one person's right to free speech was essentially denying that right to everybody who takes that freedom for granted. We saw and heard things all the time we objected to, but we never resorted to violence. I felt knots in my stomach that somebody had dared to mess with us on such a cowardly level and that they had then run away. But I knew God would have the final judgment on these bullies.

We were God's only people.

I was on the picket line because I wanted to please God. These people so upset at us were not Him and had no power over my soul. I didn't take anything they said to me personally. They said horrible things: "ugly bitch,"

"ugly virgin," "jealous whore," or "miserable lesbian." They were just validating what I had been taught: that prophets are often abused. As the pastor said, "If you're preaching the truth of God, people are going to hate you. Nobody has the right to think he's preaching the truth of God unless people hate him for it. All the prophets were treated that way."

Closer to home, though, things were more peaceful. The neighbors on our block who weren't in the church never harassed us, usually preferring to ignore us. They knew that our right to free speech was protected under the First Amendment. Plus, when we weren't picketing, we didn't seek any attention at all. Once, our signboard in front of the church was defaced with

"God Hates the Phelps" in permanent paint and a couple of times people put bullet holes in it, but none of this scared me. If God wanted something to happen to any of us, then it was His will. The pastor installed security cameras and left it at that. Anyone could find us. The address of the church, as well as the addresses of the families in the congregation, was available on the Internet or in the Topeka phone directory. People strongly opposed to us even posted compiled lists of our names, addresses, and phone numbers on their own websites in order to facilitate pranks and harassment by our detractors.

But we weren't trying to hide behind high, thick compound walls or establish an isolated settlement in the desert. God was on our side. He protected us, and that was all the protection we needed. We were God's gifts on earth, His messengers and His angels.

But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and
misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people, till
there was no remedy.

--2 Chronicles 36:16

In August 2001, I entered Topeka West High School filled with optimism.

The school was just past the enormous Mount Hope Cemetery, about two miles from my house. In the month since our family had arrived, I had become close enough to my three best friends that we had affectionate nicknames for each other. I was called La, Jael was Jay, Megan was Meg, and Rebekah was Bekah. At Topeka West, Jael and I were going into eleventh grade, Megan was going into tenth, and Bekah was going to be a freshman. The school had about eleven hundred students in the four grades, so Jael and I were with almost three hundred other juniors.

Having friends gave me confidence as I returned to public school for the first time in ten months, but the transition was still challenging. Everybody knew who the Phelps girls were, since they even picketed the high school.

Therefore, not only was I a curiosity as the "new girl from Florida," but I was also associated with the WBC, which came with its own negative presumptions and prejudices about me.

As much as I put my trust in God to help me navigate the first few days of school, I put equal trust in my friends. The four of us never took the bus, choosing instead to have Megan drive us in one of the Phelps-Ropers' cars.

We were exclusive and inseparable, from our studying to cross-country running to weekend amusements. My first week at Topeka West, I ran into one of my old elementary school friends from Lawrence in the hall. I was really happy to see her until Megan let me know I shouldn't associate with her anymore, saying, "She's a whore." I avoided her, and eventually she got the hint.

It didn't take me long to adopt the same mind-set as my new clique, that anyone who was not from our church was confused and had been brought up wrong. The Phelps girls had the advantage of being born and raised in the church, however, so they hadn't been putting themselves ahead of God all those years during which I hadn't even known about His fire. I hid my fear that I would be rejected by them since my upbringing had been flawed. I was joining a righteous club of His elite, and with that came the panic that I could be cast out at any time. I was so outnumbered by blood relatives of the pastor's--including Libby, whose doubts about me were no secret--that despite their reassurances, I'd still sometimes feel paralyzed by a sense of overwhelming inadequacy. I'd think I was like the wicked, with no purpose and not serving a good, truthful, or obedient life. I had no specific reason to feel this way, but I'd just feel doomed. I made it my mission to work on improving myself so much that I'd never fall out of their favor.

The Phelps girls had similar characteristics--clear, fair skin; wide, toothy smiles; and high, chiseled cheekbones. Megan was beautiful, with gorgeous, dark, curly hair that fell right past her shoulders. No one would have guessed that she wasn't allowed to cut it, since you couldn't tell how long it was unless it was wet. At five-nine, she was three inches taller than me. She was one of the prettier girls in our foursome, a spitting image of Shirley as a young woman, with piercing blue eyes and a slender face. She had an outgoing personality and thrived on being in the spotlight, the perfect character assets for her in her role as the junior spokesperson for the WBC.

Bekah was also tall, slender, and athletic. She was pretty in a plain way, but not as dazzling as Megan. Her straight blonde hair was down to her waist, but she had a lot of split ends that just kept splitting, keeping it from getting exceptionally long. Bekah was more sheepish than Megan and didn't carry herself as confidently, either, seemingly resigned to being her sister's runner-up.

Jael, the tallest in our group, had dark brown hair that she liked to wear in a tight braid. She was a warm person with a great sense of humor, and the two of us hit it off the moment we met. Like me, she had a bit of a paranoid side.

We both understood predestination--that we were either hell-bound or we weren't--but we had in the back of our minds that we could fall from grace at any instant. Jael was particularly worried about timing. She was convinced that God was returning any day now. If you're not careful, He will come when you are in a bad spot, she'd say. That freaked me out. I'd say to myself,
If the
Lord comes tonight, I am doomed and going to hell forever.
It was not that I had done anything in particular that was bad. I just didn't think I was worthy of the glorious kingdom of heaven yet, whether I was elected or not.

My friends and I dressed like all the other teenagers at school. We shopped at the malls and wore clothes that were in style. Megan dressed more provocatively than the rest of us. Our mothers looked down on wearing anything revealing, tight, short, or low-cut, but in my opinion, Megan's standards were questionable. Shirley never seemed aware that Megan's clothes would have been unacceptable on another WBC girl. Megan would wear something kind of risqué and then would complain about the attention she got from boys, because she knew male attention was against the rules.

All of us were as fashionable as the rest of the girls in our high school.

Really, the only thing that distinguished us from the general population was the length of our hair.

I was surprised that the environment at school wasn't as tense as I thought it would be. One reason was because our classmates had become somewhat desensitized to us. They'd have their chance to berate us when we took them on in our heated, biweekly school pickets, but otherwise they basically ignored us. Two lunch periods a week, the Phelps girls and I would go to Megan's car, get our signs, and start our twenty-minute protest outside the school building. Everybody knew one another, so sometimes it was really odd. One minute, I'd be in math class sharing calculus problems with the kids in the class, and the next minute I'd be picketing with Megan, Bekah, and Jael, and our classmates would be flipping us off, cursing and yelling that God didn't hate America, that God loved America. They'd call us whores and throw their lunch trash at us. I thought it was hilarious. They didn't realize God was on our side. Afterward, we'd put our signs back in the car and head to our next class. The three days we weren't picketing the high school, we went off campus for lunch. We never ate in the cafeteria, preferring to get fries and chicken nuggets at Burger King or Wendy's rather than sit with everyone else.

The other reason there wasn't much tension at school was that we were such capable students. The pastor's grandchildren and I were all very academically inclined and always at the very top of the class. With well-rounded insights into lots of different subjects, we could not be accused of being brainwashed or being bumbling idiots. If anything, we were just the opposite.

I spent a lot of time on my homework, because getting good grades was a high priority. My dad would look over the papers and homework that Taylor and I had completed, making suggestions and corrections where he thought they were needed. Unlike the experience of many American teenagers, our culture actually embraced bragging about our accomplishments and our grades. We thrived on knowing the headlines in the news and talking about them in a way that was above everyone else in class, demonstrating how savvy and worldly we were. On the rare occasion that one of us did get a bad grade on an assignment, Shirley would come to the school and speak to the teacher about it, getting in his or her face.

From the time any Phelps kid entered kindergarten, she made sure every teacher they had knew who she was. When she complained, she used very litigious language. If she thought a child had been graded unfairly, she'd send e-mails, using the term "religious discrimination" to threaten lawsuits.

Copies would go to every principal, superintendent, and school board member in the district. If we missed school for a picket and a teacher objected to our absence, Shirley would write a letter claiming religious discrimination on that occasion, too, and we would be officially excused. No teachers wanted to deal with her, although the ones in the elementary schools seemed more intimidated than the secondary school teachers. By then, most of them knew not to grade us lower because of our beliefs, because we were really good students in our own right.

The pastor also had a lot invested in our intelligence. He encouraged us to maintain large vocabularies and use advanced words in order to sound erudite. This way, when we were defending our views, people would look at us and say, "What is that word?" We were proud to be well-spoken in both biblical and secular matters. There was no way our detractors could say,