Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (4 page)

We performed Lenny Kravitz's "American Woman." I played lead guitar and sang. We were the very last act of the evening, and everyone was clapping and dancing. It was the coolest thing.

I could always count on my father to be cheering me on. Just like in Kansas, he was my greatest supporter in my extracurriculars. He coached my weekend softball team and was front row and center at all my school games.

He had star status with my new girlfriends, a group of eight or ten really nice girls who'd accepted me by late fall. We all lived in the same neighborhood.

We played on the same teams, had sleepovers, and, on weekends when the weather was nice, went to the beach. Their fathers were all older than Dad.

They would tell me how cool my dad was and how they wished theirs were more like mine. I felt really lucky to have him.

I started the ninth grade at Lakewood Ranch High School. It was a brand-new campus located a couple of miles from my house. The school had amazing specialty clubs and teams, from horseback riding to scuba diving. I tried out for the dance team, a very elite group. Almost every girl at the school wanted to be a member, but it was highly selective. I spent hours after school practicing and memorizing the routines. When the JV tryout finally came, I nailed it. I was so proud when I learned I had made the team I couldn't wait for my parents to get home to tell them. The minute Dad walked in the door, I blurted it out.

"That's nice," he said flatly, "but you're not doing it."

I was speechless. "What are you talking about?" I finally asked.

He said being on the dance team was "too slutty." I was shocked. Mom had been on her high school dance team for four years, and the whole time they were dating, I reminded him.

Dad argued that they were dancers, not sex objects, back then. Mom was impressed and proud that I had made the team, so I held out hope that she would convince Dad it was innocent. But much to my disappointment, he wouldn't budge, and I had to give my spot to somebody else.

My father wasn't a hard driver when it came to grades, but I set a very high standard for myself and took my schoolwork seriously. My grades from junior high were good enough to meet the requirements for the honors classes in high school, and I filled my schedule with as many as I thought I could handle. At Lakewood, being an honor student was considered cool, and I wanted to be popular. Another route to popularity was playing a team sport, so since the dance team hadn't worked out, I tried out for the JV softball team and made the cut. Because I felt like a runt, this was a particular triumph for me. I started high school at only four foot eleven, and I was a year younger than my classmates, having skipped kindergarten. Under the best of circumstances, making the team was really hard, so when I saw my name on the list of players posted outside the gym door, I jumped for joy.

I played shortstop and second base, but being on a team was more than an athletic achievement. It also had social benefits. The football team would watch our team and vice versa, so we got to hang out with the guys during sanctioned activities. I was becoming self-conscious, so I did everything I could to make myself look more attractive. When I was thirteen, I started dyeing my mousy brown hair a golden blonde to fit in with my Florida girlfriends. I had a crazy overbite and had to wear braces. But I was okay with them, because all the cool kids had them.

During my freshman year, my father started talking more seriously about making a documentary. He liked working at the Home Shopping Network and was clearly doing well there, but wanted to do something more creative and on his own terms. He'd been thinking about a subject for the two years we'd been in Florida, and was looking for a controversial topic that hadn't yet received much exposure. The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, came to his mind. He already knew a fair amount about the church from our seven years in Kansas, and he'd seen some of its outrageous protest activities right on campus and at the Lawrence City Hall. The group was known nationally as well as locally, often getting press for picketing large-scale gay pride events. Dad had been superoffended by the group's stance against homosexuals, objecting not only in principle but also because he had friends in his film classes who were gay. My father thought the church's leader and pastor, Fred Phelps, and his followers were full of crap. He hoped an exposé of their bizarre subculture and extremist beliefs and tactics would get people talking and get his own name out there as a provocative filmmaker. Dad even had a title for his documentary:
Hatemongers
. Once it was completed, he planned to enter it into the major film festivals, like the prestigious Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. He had volunteered there in the summers when he was a film major at KU, helping to set up booths and pitching in wherever anyone needed him. He had made lots of great contacts with independent filmmakers, so he was sure
Hatemongers
would get a serious consideration and probably a screening.

On April 29, 2000, Dad traveled to Washington, D.C., where a number of gay pride organizations were holding the Mil ennium March in the nation's capital. My father knew the church would be there to protest the event, and he wanted to capture it on film. The largest gathering would be for the Equality Rocks concert at RFK Stadium, featuring Garth Brooks, George Michael, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang, and the Pet Shop Boys.

When Dad returned from D.C., he was really charged up about what he had learned. He was really mesmerized with the church, and no longer angry or highly critical when describing them. Instead, he was highly critical of the homosexuals who had been in the gay parade. Dad was certainly excited, but I didn't think much about it because he was always extremely animated whenever he had a new interest. He began explaining everything he had learned about the church to us, and telling us about its mission. He described the group as small, and comprised almost exclusively of members of the family of the pastor, Fred Phelps. Nine of his thirteen children and their children made up the majority of the congregation, which was about sixty or seventy people altogether. Above all else, the group wanted to warn sinners of God's anger, Dad said almost empathetically.

My father showed us the video he had taken of the protesters standing near the entrance to the stadium waving signs that said GOD HATES FAGS and MATT IN HELL. The "Matt" they were referring to was Matthew Shepard, who Dad said was an openly gay man who had been brutally tortured and murdered in 1998 by two men he had met in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming.

They had promised him a ride home, but instead took him to a remote area near Laramie, pistol-whipped him, and tied him to a fence, where they left him to die. I learned that Matt's death had inspired hate crime legislation across the nation. But the church thought he had deserved to die.

My father was thrilled by his footage. I really liked when he was happy like this, because he tended to be moody when he wasn't fully immersed in something new. He wanted to take the project to the next level by speaking directly with church members, so he contacted their office in Kansas, where he reached the pastor's daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper. My father was pleasantly surprised when she invited him to come up to Topeka to interview its members, including Fred. "We're always willing to talk to anyone," she told him warmly. She assumed my father was another nosy documentarian whose work would be shown in some college classroom, which was fine with her. If my father's project went into a wider release, that would be even better. Exposure was the objective. The WBC wasn't like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or the Jehovah's Witnesses, who denied outsiders access to their inner circle and excommunicated anyone who exposed their secrets. In fact, the WBC thought that being open to media exposure would help them spread their message even further.

That June, Dad packed up his camera and equipment and headed to Kansas to conduct interviews for his documentary, still tentatively titled
Hatemongers
. When he invited my fifteen-year-old cousin, Brennen, to assist him on his film instead of me, I was disappointed. School was out for the summer, so I was free and eager to travel with him. It's possible that my father wanted to protect me from the group's hard-line ideology, but whatever the reason, I felt rejected and overlooked. My dad and Brennen were in Topeka for exactly one month, although to me it felt a lot longer. He called home a few times a week, always sounding pleased with his progress.

When he returned home a couple of weeks before school started, his attitude was completely different. He seemed really sad and cried about the littlest things. Though he'd had his ups and downs, I'd never seen him this moody and depressed before. He would spend hours looking at the footage and listening to the interviews from Kansas, then he would start criticizing himself for what seemed to be moral reasons. One afternoon, I watched the movie
Requiem for a Dream
with him. The movie was about four addicts whose lives were spiraling out of control, and at the time I had no idea how inappropriate it was for someone my age. I wasn't seriously watching it, though. I tended to be really hyper and easily distracted, so I was going in and out of the room to make myself snacks and only paying partial attention.

As it was ending, I saw my father on the couch crying, so I started focusing on the movie, trying to figure out what had triggered such extreme sadness in him. I knew the film had a lot of depressing and even scary scenes, but I hadn't noticed which one had set Dad off. We'd watched plenty of sad movies together in the past, but I had never seen him cry.

"What's wrong, Dad?" I asked gently.

"I've done a lot of bad things in my life. I have got to fix my life," he sobbed.

I wished I knew what in the film had cut him so hard.

I knew my father had a reputation. I had heard some things from my mother's family over the years. I'd seen the scar on his nose from a barroom brawl that happened before I was born. More than once, he had told me the story of how he had gotten it. He said he had been in a fight when he was a teenager and had been pistol-whipped. Some members of my mother's family feared that my father may have been involved in more than marijuana in his past. But I never saw him use any drugs. Even though I knew that Dad was more than willing to get into people's faces and take a righteous stand, he was always tender and affectionate and never neglected his family. Still, seeing him bawling about the movie was really weird. Perhaps most oddly, he had never acted repentant before.

In the following weeks, Dad set to work editing his film. He showed Mom, Taylor, and me some footage of the group's protests, and I noticed that for the first time he didn't use his typical mocking tone when talking about them.

The church members in the video each were carrying huge, poster-size signs with messages I found hateful. Mom was freaked out, too. "I don't understand this sign," she challenged him, pointing to one that read MATT

IS IN HELL AND YOU'RE GOING TO HELL.

My mother's faith had taught her to believe that Judgment Day was when God decided who gained entry into His kingdom, and that no mortal would have knowledge of who was in hell or who was going there. According to Luke, there had been a thief on a cross next to Jesus being put to death at the same time. The thief had spent his lifetime stealing, and he knew he was going to hell. Jesus told him that forgiveness was available to everyone, no matter how a person had lived on Earth, and he would join him in Paradise.

Dad tried to explain to Mom the Westboro Baptist Church's position on the afterlife, which was based on unconditional election. God had selected who was going to be saved, and because his decision was foreordained, no amount of repentance would change His mind. I found it really odd that my father was serious, and actually sounding a little preachy himself, but Mom let him speak without interruption. She watched the videos and let him elaborate on the group's beliefs to us. My father was definitely acting like he was buying into their ideology, and I overheard my mother telling him that she didn't want him becoming caught up in another weird religion, like the one the missionary in Kansas had spouted. Dad explained how the church related current events to prophecies in the Bible, and he showed her examples and passages he was reading. This was the first thing that interested me about his newfound passion. For the first time, I saw the Bible in a contemporary context. Dad didn't seem to be overbearing or extreme in his commitment, which was a relief to Mom and me. We didn't talk about it, but I could tell that my mother was hesitant to get involved in this marginal religion.

Dad bought each of us a King James Bible--the translation used by the WBC--and we began reading the Bible as a family around the dining room table every Sunday. Mom, Taylor, and I were expected to have our heads covered during the sessions, a gesture of the female gender's subservience to God. In the WBC, women, girls, and even female infants had their heads covered during any church sermon. We would go around the table, and each of us would read a chapter from whatever book Dad had selected. I enjoyed learning the scripture stories--now that I was older, they intrigued me. They seemed profound and meaningful, nothing like the boring textbooks I was reading at school. My favorite stories came from Paul and Exodus. They read like mysteries or thrillers, and I eagerly awaited the next installment.

Mom tolerated religion returning to our home for the sake of Dad's spiritual life, but she wasn't nearly ready to embrace the WBC. She remained skeptical for quite a while, very worried about how her family would react to the church's well-known vitriolic fanaticism. Dad wasn't passive with her relatives about his religious positions, either. Mom's sister Stacy and her husband, Mark, who lived just four miles from us, weren't particularly devout, which was perhaps why my father would feel the need to go over to their house and talk religion. During one of our weekly visits to their house, Dad once again turned the conversation into a religious discussion. When nobody seemed to care what he thought, he just flipped out. He was a loud person in general, and seemed to think that the more he screamed, the more likely he was to be heard. "I can't talk to you. You are not even on my level!"