Megan Phelps-Roper

“There are aspects of Westboro that are, of course, more extreme in the way that certain religious practices manifest. But the idea that the Bible is the infallible word of God, that it's unquestionable - this is common.”

“The idea that people feel that they have to be sympathetic to me? It's a funny concept.”

“My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world. That reinforced our 'otherness' on a daily basis.”

“For my grandfather, there was no distinction. There was no tension between his support for civil rights for black people and his animus toward gay people because both of those positions were scripturally derived.”

“I wanted to do everything right. I wanted to be good, and I wanted to be obedient, and I wanted to be the object of my parents' pride. I wanted to go to Heaven.”

“Twitter was an alternative community for me. A different kind of community. I knew I was making people angry. But it didn't matter, they weren't my community. But the longer I was on Twitter and the more I came to know these people, to like and respect them, the more I could see the empathy and grief and sorrow they were expressing.”

“I was born and raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, an infamous congregation started by my grandfather, and consisting almost entirely of my extended family.”

“Whenever people would speculate about the death of my grandfather it was always this very retributive thing. That they were going to picket his funeral after all the things that he had done to so many other people. That vindictiveness is obviously completely understandable. It would make perfect sense.”

“You know, I had grown up standing on public sidewalks, saying things that people, you know, were very provoked by and were upset by. And - but standing outside that first soldier's funeral, it was eerily quiet.”

“I got on Twitter in 2009.”

“We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.”

“In 2014, as a Christmas gift, I wrote an essay for my husband, about our story. Writing that showed me there was value in interrogating my experiences while they were fresh - especially because I was terrified of forgetting.”

“It really bugs me that Twitter gets such a bad rep.”

“If organizations like Westboro were universally bad, they wouldn't exist. There had to be some draw, and at Westboro, there was a lot of draw. The church was almost entirely made up of my extended family, and everyone in the church felt like family.”

“Westboro's fire and brimstone message was the air I breathed all my life. But after joining Twitter at the age of 23, I encountered people who challenged my beliefs and unearthed contradictions my blind faith had missed.”

“I feel like I was transformed by the kindness of people who had every reason to show me cruelty and the transformative power of their decision to treat me like a human being, that was so huge, that anytime somebody wants me to talk about that I feel like I absolutely want to do that.”

“It's important to see people as being on a journey.”

“My friends on Twitter didn't abandon their beliefs or their principles - only their scorn. They channeled their infinitely justifiable offense and came to me with pointed questions tempered with kindness and humor. They approached me as a human being, and that was more transformative than two full decades of outrage, disdain, and violence.”

“I liked 'The Sun Also Rises.'”

“There's a rich history at Westboro of parodying pop culture. The thing about pop culture is that it gives us a shared language. We were constantly trying to co-opt things that were popular to deliver our own message.”