A Quote by Megan Phelps-Roper
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.
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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.
There have been times when I've felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making 'The Most Hated Family in America' about the Westboro Baptist Church, and being on the way to a funeral of a U.S. soldier with the Phelps family; they were going to picket the funeral.
The Westboro Baptist Church is no more a church than Church's Fried Chicken is a church.
We are not the Westboro Baptist Church. We are a church that embraces the tenants of historic Christianity - there's nothing hateful about our members at all.
Several people I had conversations with were hugely influential. People who found internal inconsistency in Westboro's ideology. It was the first thing that allowed me to recognize that Westboro was wrong.
There are fear mongers who talk about Islam as somehow it is an incubator of hate... remember Christians, like the Westboro Baptist Church, are just as capable of promoting intolerance.
A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself - but gave up.
Turning against the church I also had to turn against a lot of the teachings of people in my family who were very much of the church and caught in it, and every time I turned to find where resides the good in the church, all I saw was the demonic, the Lucifer of the journey.
As a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.
Growing up, my dad was a pastor, and much like The First Family or people in front of the public eye, we were highly scrutinized as a family within the church and looked at as - well, I guess you would call an example of what that family image should be.
My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember.
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.'
You draw the best things from your parents and family. You're going to pick up some of the bad things as well - there's a temper that runs through my dad's side of the family that I'm not especially keen on picking up a giant block of.
Before the church responded, a lot of people would ask us, 'Are you afraid of what the church would say?' And Trey and I were like, 'They're going to be cool.' And they were like, 'No, they're not. There are going to be protests.' And we were like, 'Nope, they're going to be cool.' We weren't that surprised by the church's response. We had faith in them.
Some of the stuff I'm writing is almost like hymns, some of my first singing and choral experiences were in church, the Church of Christ in Hicksville.
You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.
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