me screamed no. Enemy territory. Betraying my family. Making myself vulnerable to people I had hurt, and who had hurt me. Who had every reason to hate me. How could I possibly?
I closed my eyes and the line went silent again.
“Megan?” David asked.
“Let me talk to Grace.”
* * *
Three weeks later, my sister and I found ourselves in Los Angeles at the Museum of Tolerance, a modern, multilevel complex whose purpose was to encourage visitors to challenge their prejudices and assumptions. I couldn’t help feeling a bit wounded by David’s suggestion that we visit—wasn’t I already doing so much to challenge my prejudices?—but I recognized in my resistance more of Westboro’s teachings: our derision of the whole concept of “tolerance.” Ideas that contradicted our own were inherently morally bankrupt. Why, in the name of God, should we tolerate them?
Standing just outside the entrance to the first exhibit with David and Grace, I listened as the docent expounded on the museum and its history. She was a stately woman, midsixties, I guessed, with silver hair cropped short. The purpose of this museum wasn’t just to tell the stories of human rights atrocities, she explained, but to remind us to act when we saw things going awry. To encourage us to be more than passive bystanders. I had a sinking feeling listening to her descriptions of the exhibits. There was going to be something about Westboro in here.
Sure enough, immediately after passing through the entrance, I spotted a photo on the wall. “Hey, look,” I said to David. “There’s Bekah and Gran.” It was a photo of my sister and grandmother protesting during the trial of one of Matthew Shepard’s killers. Bekah had always been tiny as a girl, and in the photo she looked much younger than her twelve years.
David laughed and mocked me. “‘There’s Gran!’ Well, this is why we’re here…” The three of us spoke for a few minutes about the impact that Westboro had had on the world, the number of people who had been jarred by our message. Their message, I reminded myself. I had to stop saying we and our and us.
As the three of us spoke, another docent led a group of young people in matching hunter-green sweat suits over to the photo of Bekah and Gran, a security guard trailing behind them. The guide told the story of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was brutally murdered by two young men he met at a small-town bar, and the protests and counterprotests at his funeral. We listened from a few paces back, and then David said quietly, “That’s their grandmother.”
I felt panicky.
“Excuse me?” the woman said.
“They grew up in that church that protests gays. They left a few months ago.”
Fifteen confused faces stared over at Grace and me. “You hated gay people?” one girl asked.
“I didn’t hate them…” I trailed off. “I thought that God hated them. I thought that the Bible said so. I thought it was my duty to God to tell people that.”
The questions came one after another—about Westboro’s doctrines and beliefs, about what it had been like growing up there, about our family, and then finally about why we had left. What had made us change.
I pointed at David. “He helped.”
David held up his hands as if in self-defense. “I was just trying to get her to see how misguided her ideas were—how hurtful she was being to other people.”
When the kids finally fell silent, the docent stood wide-eyed for a moment, and then thanked us for sharing our experiences. “I’m sure it must have been so painful to leave your family, but this is an example for us, too. We all need to stand up. Our families might not be like yours, but when we see people being hateful or bullying others, we need to speak up.”
Back in the lobby at the end of our tour, David and Grace and I stood reflecting as groups of young students milled about.
“See?” he said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It made me anxious,” I said. “And ashamed. It’s so hard to frame the words to admit that what I so passionately believed for so long was wrong and destructive in many ways. And I can’t help but feel like I’m betraying my family every time I open my mouth about any of it … But it could have been a lot worse. They were very kind.”
I had a brief moment of hope, thinking that maybe the Jewlicious Festival that weekend