Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (8 page)

But this wasn't the only issue. She still had lingering questions about the church and some of their platforms, especially their view on the "chosen ones." Mom also didn't agree with the hard-line nature of their messages.

Even though she objected to the homosexual lifestyle, too, she found the church's judgment overly harsh.

But Dad seemed to be full of answers for her. I overheard him tell her he was pawning my baseball card collection to help pay for the move. I had a signed Babe Ruth card in there that was very valuable. Dad had wanted me to save it for my adulthood so that I would have something to fall back on in case of an emergency. He never even mentioned it to me before he pawned it and the rest of my collection. I knew he had no intention of buying it back, but I didn't jump in and try to stop him. I was tired of fighting with him, and I knew that when he made up his mind about something, that was it.

Mom eventually did whatever my father said, so the argument about moving didn't last long. He'd been like this for so long that it was almost comical that she thought she had a vote. She would never entertain the idea of separating from him and splitting up our family. When he explained to her that this move was in my best interest, and would get me away from the heathen boys and bad influences all around me in Florida, Mom became much more amenable to the idea. She wasn't as tight with her family as when we'd first moved back to Florida two years earlier. My father had slowly been isolating her from them after he hadn't been able to convince them that his commitment to the church was serious.

She started letting her family know that a move back to Kansas was imminent. They knew that it had to do with the church, but they were also aware that if Dad had something in his head, my mother was going to go along with it. Uncle Mark was the only one who challenged them at all.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked my father. Dad tried to explain his theological reasons but quickly got angry and left.

In July 2001, Dad announced that the house in Topeka was ready for us. We packed up virtually everything we owned. We packed Mom and Dad's queen-size bed, Taylor's and my bunk bed, the kitchen table and chairs, and our living room couch. Mom packed the linens and the dishes, and Dad packed up his camera, editing equipment, and all of our Bibles. The only things we didn't pack were my photos and keepsakes, which Dad

confiscated, saying he'd return them later. But he never did. It was as if he was trying to erase our memories of life before the church. He also confiscated any of my movies, books, and music that he deemed

inappropriate. Our two-year-old calico cat, Jesse, had to be given away, because Dad said too many people in the church had cat allergies, but luckily our adored pug, Buddy, was going with us. Everything happened so fast. In less than a week, we rented a small trailer from Budget Rent A Car to hitch to the back of our Toyota Camry and filled it to capacity. We loaded anything that didn't fit into the back of Dad's Ford F-150 quad cab. Dad, with Taylor in the backseat keeping him company, was the lead car of the caravan.

The trip to Topeka was almost fifteen hundred miles, twenty-four hours on the road. Dad decided to break it up into two days, with a one-night layover in a motel outside of Nashville. There, Dad smoked his last cigarette ever.

Since his early teens, he had been a smoker, and I had been begging him for the last ten years to stop. He would strike deals with me--if I got straight As in school, he would quit. Over and over, I got the As and he still didn't quit, although he kept making me the same promises. But that evening in Nashville, he stopped cold turkey, knowing that smoking was not allowed in the church. This was his first test of will, and he was going to prove he could do it. He was such a sycophant. As gratified as I was that he had finally given up his disgusting habit, I still felt disappointed that he hadn't been able to do it for me, but rather for Shirley, someone he barely knew.

I was the primary driver of the Camry, the second car in the caravan. Mom rode with me, since she didn't really like long-distance driving. We filled the hours chatting, listening to Bible tapes, and discussing religion. The highway took us across Florida, through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri before we finally reached Topeka.

We had been to Topeka quite a few times when we had lived in Lawrence, which was only thirty minutes east of there on I-70. For a city of only about 125,000 people, there were certainly a lot of places of worship, a church on seemingly every corner. The mainstream Christian religions, especially Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, and Presbyterian, were very well represented, but there were a lot of Pentecostal and Eastern religious communities, too.

Kansas's oldest continuous Baha'i community was in Topeka, right up the road from the Christian Calvary Motorcycle Ministry's house of worship. Of course, the one that interested us was the Westboro Baptist Church, with a membership of less than a hundred people.

When we pulled up in front of our new house, it was even smaller than I had been prepared for. It was painted a light green color and partially hidden by a great big shade tree. I could hardly see it, though, because of the thirty or so church members standing in front of it waiting to greet us. Everybody was superaccommodating, bending over backward to lend a hand. They were the most welcoming, organized bunch of people I had ever met. They started helping us unload the trailer and the truck, and they had everything inside and unpacked in less than two hours. They had already stocked the refrigerator and the pantry with all kinds of dry goods and supplies. Our new house was only five hundred square feet; by all appearances, only one person should have been living there. It had two small bedrooms, each one big enough for a bed that could be placed only in a certain direction. The tiny walk-through kitchen was connected to a dining room so cramped that it could barely fit our small table and four chairs. One small bathroom was going to have to serve all four of us.

The church, at 3701 SW 12th Street, was the centerpiece of the block. It was a big and very pretty building, typical of church architecture in the Midwest, with a kind of a faux-Tudor look of wood beams in the white plaster siding.

Way up on one side of the oversize roof was a banner prominently advertising the WBC's website, godhatesfags.com. An American flag hung on the flagpole in front of the church, but it was purposefully displayed upside down out of disrespect for a sinful, fag-enabling America.

There were two entrances to the church, which was surrounded by a six-foot-tall, black wrought-iron security fence with spindles. Only visitors used the formal main entrance in the front, which was accessible from the street via a paved walkway. During Sunday services, two church members usually stood guard there to monitor the gate. There were times when members of the media who hadn't secured permission, or other suspicious people, had tried to get in, maybe even vandals, and the guards kept that from happening. Outsiders were welcome to attend Sunday services, but they had to have prior approval from Shirley. Church members entered through an entrance around the back, which actually took us through the pastor's kitchen into the sanctuary. Half the building was the church, and the other half was the pastor's residence. Above the kitchen was the master bedroom for the pastor and his wife, Marge. An inside kitchen door led to the sanctuary.

The sanctuary was large and simple. The walls were covered with fake wood paneling, the kind installed from four-by-eight-foot prefab sheets.

Lighting came from ceiling panels, and standard wal -to-wal carpeting covered the floor. There were two rows of twenty or so five-person pews for the congregation. The pastor delivered his sermons from the unadorned pulpit in the front of the room, with a map of the Holy Land pinned to the wall behind him and a poster elaborating the five points of Calvinism on a stand next to him. There were no pious statues or crucifixes on display anywhere, strictly following the policy against idolatry. Around the room, signs with messages such as Fags Are Worthy of Death and You're Going to Hell were displayed on easels. A few ceiling-to-floor drapes kept extra folding chairs or poster-size props out of sight. Above the sanctuary was the pastor's office and library, where many of the adult Bible study classes took place.

Back in the 1950s, Fred Phelps and his wife had bought a house there, and then had started buying up every house on the 3700 block of SW 12th Street for their children when they came up for sale. The street had slowly become the Phelps family compound. All of the members except Bill and Mary Hockenbarger lived on or near the block. Our house was technically across the street, but most people could walk from their houses to the church without having to use the street. The compound was set up so that all the backyards of our various houses adjoined the church property, creating a communal park, a gathering place for everybody of any age. Kids were always out there running around, while the teenagers hung out and kept an eye on them. The church had all the facilities of a park just for our use. There was a full-size basketball court, a 200-meter running track that bordered the inside edges of all the yards, a volleyball area, and a great big swimming pool surrounded by patios with outdoor furniture and picnic tables. We played football on a grassy knoll. A couple of trampolines, a big jungle gym with swings for kids of all ages, a few slides, and monkey bars had been installed for the kids. The churchyard and the ten private yards backing up to it were immaculate, always mowed and manicured.

I soon found out the kids and teens did all the landscaping and garden work.

In two hours, we could mow, blow, and bag the entire communal property and all the yards. No one complained. Kids were expected to help; it was part of the discipline the church instilled. The sense of community was really impressive. When someone needed something, everybody was always there at a minute's notice. Each night of our first week in Topeka, someone either brought us a meal or invited us over for dinner.

After that period of isolation in Florida, being with so many people my own age was a huge blessing and a welcome relief. Megan, just as bubbly as she had been the first two times I had met her, gave me the warmest welcome, and her sister and teenage cousins were almost as effusive.

Shirley had told Megan about all of Dad's complaints and worries about me and my behavior, so she knew we had moved there in part to save me.

Before we relocated, she had sent me a letter that said she was optimistic about my potential, even though she knew I was currently on the wrong path.

One thing that surprised me was how modern and methodical the people in the congregation were. I had never seen a group of teenagers so keen on being current and informed. The Phelps girls knew the facts about everything going on in the news, so they always had something interesting to talk about. Next to the sanctuary, the church had an entire library of filing cabinets with neatly archived information about every organization the WBC

had ever picketed. In each individual folder, marked with the time, date, and place of the picket, the pastor put the picket memo, the picket flyer, the reason for our picketing, and all the media we generated from the picket--the news articles, the video, and the e-mails we had received.

Another thing that surprised me was how tech-savvy everybody in the church was. The pastor liked to say the Internet had been invented so that the church could spread God's message. He also said that computers could be used for good purposes, although he believed most people used the Internet for bad and wasteful reasons. Ben Phelps, the pastor's oldest grandchild, and Sam Phelps, Shirley's oldest child, ran the church's many websites. Godhatesfags.com was the primary site, but because hackers were constantly trying to shut it down, there were plenty of others, too--

godhatestheworld.com, godhatesthemedia.com, americaisdoomed.com, and priestsrapeboys.com--to name a few. If there was a new technology, the church had it first. The office was equipped with computers and fax machines, which were programmed to blast out the church's messages twenty-four hours a day. That way, even when members were sleeping they were doing a kind of picketing, spreading the Word of God.

The kids were superinvolved in the church community, and the church scheduled all of our activities--babysitting, day care, working in the church office, helping the elder members with chores, renovating property, picketing, and organizing church-only social events. Anything we were capable of we were expected to do, and nobody did the tasks begrudgingly.

On the contrary, we loved feeling important. Everyone had a job. Some kids found addresses of organizations for the pastor's faxes, and others sent them out. Shirley often assigned the young people to e-mail duty in the church office. Anyone who was at least fourteen could answer the e-mails that came in from all over the country, as long as Shirley thought he or she had enough knowledge. We were supposed to use scripture to support whatever answer we were sending. If our answer wasn't up to par, someone else would forward a corrected response. Even little kids could empty the wastebaskets or perform other housekeeping duties. The operations always seemed to run smoothly with very few glitches.

If I didn't know something or was uncertain of a protocol, I could go to any of the church members for guidance. If I wanted an elder, I usually chose Shirley, but otherwise I would talk to Megan. She had assumed a leadership role among the girls my age and often led us at the picket line. She was considered the shining star of my generation.

Taylor had a harder time finding a cohort. She was at least four years younger than my group, and two years older than the next group down, which included Shirley's daughter Grace, so she was kind of caught in the middle. Being a bit of a tomboy, she didn't seem to mind hanging out with the five boys in her grade. I liked when she spent time with us, but I could tell that not everyone agreed. Shirley's niece Libby, in particular, seemed annoyed. As oldest in the group and the ringleader, she was a little spoiled and liked to be indulged. When she didn't want Taylor around, she didn't hide it. She loved being the center of attention, so when Taylor was with us, my sister took my focus away from her. I didn't think she particularly liked me, either, but I did my best to change her opinion of me by being especially nice and attentive when I was with her.