Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Megan Phelps-Roper
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Megan Phelps-Roper.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
Arguing is fun when you think you have all the answers.
Growing up in Westboro, there was a culture of celebrating death and tragedy... a very calloused way of seeing other people's pain. After I left, it took me a while to be able to really empathize with what it must have been like for the loved ones of people whose funerals we protested.
Whatever state you find yourself in, you're supposed to be content there.
My first memories are of picketing ex-servicemen's funerals and telling their families they were going to burn in hell.
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.
All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And - given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for - forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me.
I remember feeling like we at WBC were a persecuted minority, triumphant in the face of evil people 'worshipping the dead' as we picketed funerals or rejoiced at the destruction of the Twin Towers.
In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil.
I know I want to do good for people. And I want to treat people well.
Twitter helped others to see me as a human being. And showed me their humanity, too.
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 would quote this passage from the book of Leviticus that, for them, shows that the definition of 'love thy neighbor' is to rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning. And if you don't do that, then you hate your neighbor in your heart.
We know that we've done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn't the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren't so, and regret that hurt.
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.
I don't feel confident at all in my beliefs about God. That's definitely scary. But I don't believe anymore that God hates almost all of mankind. I don't think that, if you do everything else in your life right and you happen to be gay, you're automatically going to hell. I don't believe anymore that WBC has a monopoly on truth.
I do send messages to my family; I send letters in the mail, and when I'm in town, I almost always leave something in the door of my house in Topeka.
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.
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.
Because of the dynamics on the picket line all my life, I had these expectations of people. It was all the things that I had learned about outsiders from the time I was tiny, that they were evil, that if they were being nice to me they were trying to seduce me away from the truth.
I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: 'Gays are worthy of death.'
I miss my family every single day.
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.
What's important to me is how the Lord looks at me, more than anything else.
Discussing and dissecting opposing viewpoints with others on Twitter opened up a whole new way of thinking for me.
You can't listen to the whole world tell you you're crazy, without wondering, 'Am I crazy?'
Our duty was to declare God's standards to the world: no adultery, no fornication, no gays, no idolatry.
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.
I think for some people who leave Westboro, losing that sense of specialness feels like you've lost something really valuable and important. I had the opposite experience. I was so grateful to know that I wasn't uniquely evil. I was just a human being who had had this set of experiences that were outside of my control.
In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012.
Showing your own righteousness by pointing out someone's unrighteousness, the race to the bottom, the transgressions getting smaller and smaller and smaller but still treated with the same level of intolerance and condemnation, all of that stuff, even as I say it I am talking about Twitter but I am thinking about Westboro.
You hear stories about Scientology, where people are prevented from leaving, and Westboro's not like that. If you decide that you don't want to be there, then they will help you leave. The shunning, cutting people off - they're doing that because they believe it is for our highest good.
I had never experienced the death of someone close to me until my grandfather passed away.
We know that we can't undo our whole lives.
There's so much power in seeing the possibility of change.
I no longer believe that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. And I don't believe in God as a figure in the sky listening to your prayers, things like that.
I had grown up seeing people in school where I felt like I needed to keep them at arm's length, or on the picket line, where there was a tonne of hostility and no time to build rapport with people.
We did lots of fun normal-kids stuff.
At Westboro, the depictions of hell are extremely vivid. The only thing that changes in hell, according to the church, is your capacity to feel pain. As the capacity to feel pain increases, so does the pain. It's absolutely terrifying. I believed God was going to curse me for having left this group of people.
I liked 'The Sun Also Rises.'
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.
My family thought - and thinks - very seriously about words. About language and what it means and how it shapes us and how it should shape us and change us.
Even though I was 27 when I left, I still was largely treated like a child, because I wasn't married. My parents, my mother specifically, knew where I was and what I was doing at all times.
I always joke about how I get excited to go to the grocery store without permission.
When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view.
If you look at who you were a year ago and aren't somewhat embarrassed, you're not growing as a person.
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.
If you can see these people... as human beings and capable of change, there is hope. We should be willing to reach out. Imagine what could happen if we kept reaching out to people like Westboro members?
The idea that people feel that they have to be sympathetic to me? It's a funny concept.
We played video games and read books, and we went to public school. And yeah, we went to amusement parks. We did all of those things, but we also - that was all sort of organized around this nationwide picketing campaign.
Assuming ill motives almost instantly cuts us off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do.
How could we claim to love our neighbour while at the same time praying for God to destroy them?
Some people cannot believe there is an alternative interpretation of the Bible aside from their own.
We believed it was a Good vs Evil situation: that the WBC was right and everybody else was wrong, so there was no questioning. It was a very public war we were waging against the 'sinners.'
It's important to see people as being on a journey.
Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise.
My life was forever changed by people who took the time and had the patience to learn my story and to share theirs with me. They forsook judgment and came to me with kindness and empathy and the impact of that decision was huge.
In the era of Donald Trump the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own.
I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it.
My husband and I eventually want to start a nonprofit and call it the Westboro Foundation. It was his idea, and I love it. I would love for Westboro to come to mean something besides 'God hates gays.'
I definitely regret hurting people.
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