you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. “In fact,” Gramps would roar during his Sunday sermons, “I’d be supremely afraid if the people of this evil city were on our side!” Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.
Musical combat became an important front in the battle for Gage Park, and this was one that I relished: I was too small to physically defend the church against our opponents, but by God I was gonna make myself heard. While they were chanting things like Two, four, six, eight, Phelps is always spreading hate, we would sing hymns or this new song Gramps had written, upbeat and so catchy. It was a parody of Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again,” and because the first and final lines had the same melody, we could sing it in a loop without end. The end of one verse was the beginning of the next.
Get back in the closet again!
Back where a sin is a sin
Where the filthy faggots dwell
While they’re on their way to Hell
Get back in the closet again!
As time wore on, the counterprotesters’ will to battle us on the streets dissipated along with their numbers. We began to find ourselves alone on the sidewalks. Still, Gramps didn’t take victory for granted. Rain or shine, Westboro members stood vigil along Gage Boulevard every day without fail. We soon wore a path into the lawn, one of the first marks our picketing made on the city of Topeka—this place where the grass suddenly shifted from green and lush to trampled and dead.
My grandfather’s fervor was contagious, and I was proud to stand on the front lines with the church even if I didn’t always understand the message. Yet the decline in direct opposition rendered pickets something of a slog for my young self, and boredom became my new enemy. On days when the counters were fewer and less violent, I’d scan the ground beneath my feet for anything interesting as I walked. Once, there was a small brown mass beside the circle, flies buzzing all around it, and I spent nearly the whole picket trying to figure out what it was. A dead squirrel, I finally realized, making out its once-fluffy tail, now flattened and matted with blood. I was glad the picket was almost over—had it been an hour? Two?—and I reported to Dad, who kicked it away so I wouldn’t have to watch the carcass decay. We’d be coming back.
From the time we first brought our signs to Gage Park, my mom was my most important interlocutor. She spent a lot of time answering questions from my siblings and me, trying to explain what was going on out there: why we were picketing, why everyone was so angry, what it all meant. She had my older brothers, Sam and Josh, memorizing the last fifteen verses of Romans chapter 1—a task I was spared because of my age, but I still managed to get a lot of it down: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly. The only part of my mother’s explanation that really got through to me in the beginning, though, was the overarching theme of it all: that our lives were part of a never-ending struggle of the good guys against the bad. The quarrel of the covenant. This was the eternal conflict between the righteous and the wicked, and we would not back down.
* * *
As it turned out, the vast majority of the righteous had grown up at Westboro and were members of the Phelps family. My father, Brent Roper, was one of the few who didn’t fit this profile: He had grown up Episcopalian. He’d been best friends with my mom’s youngest brother in high school, and as he came to know my mother’s family, he found himself compelled by them. A Tom Petty–loving skateboard stuntman, he ended up converting and joining Westboro when he was just sixteen. It was a big decision. Though the church’s anti-gay protesting was still more than a decade off, its pastor was already a controversial figure: armed with a law