time was to ensure that we missed the deadline to file. There are all kinds of ways for people to screw you over in the courts with technicalities like that, and that’s exactly what she was doin’.” My mother explained that it wasn’t just our word against the court’s, either. Monroe Friedman, one of the nation’s leading experts in legal ethics, had written a dissertation in support of my grandfather, summarized in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in 1983:
In a long dissertation filed in federal court in support of Phelps, Monroe Friedman, law professor and former dean of Hofstra University Law School, said, “It was as clear to me as could be that the kind of conduct that Fred Phelps was accused of is commonplace among the bar, that it is proper conduct, and that it would never be subjected to a disciplinary attack unless there was some other motive.”
Friedman said the motive is the nature of Phelps’ clientele.
“It has become professionally dangerous for a lawyer to be involved in representing poor people and in representing unpopular clients and unpopular cases,” he said.
Still, my mother wasn’t finished. She pointed out that perhaps the clearest indicator of all that her father’s disbarment had been a sham was the fact that the federal court had refused to disbar him. “Normally, if you’ve got some ethics violation and the state court disbars you for it, the federal court just rubber-stamps it, and kicks you out of their courts, too. They wouldn’t do that to Gramps. They said he hadn’t done anything worthy of disbarment, and he kept practicing in the federal courts for another ten years.”
My mother didn’t ask where I’d discovered the accusations I’d presented to her, likely assuming they’d come from our daily pickets—eight years in and still going strong. I didn’t volunteer their source, either. I was afraid she’d tell me not to waste time arguing with Topeka’s riffraff on the Internet, and I didn’t want to stop. I thought engaging with people was important, that it was a perfect opportunity to “maintain and defend pure Gospel truth,” like my grandfather was always encouraging us to do. He preached extensively about the believer’s duty to be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers. “Convince means confute!” he would say. “It means to overwhelm them with sound arguments, logic, and evidence, to prove the folly of their position.” I knew I would need to practice if I wanted to join Gramps in declaring with the Apostle Paul, I am set for the defence of the gospel.
* * *
Hunched over the keys of the living room computer, I continued to pore over the message boards whenever I had a spare moment. The accusations kept coming. One impugned my grandfather’s motives in battling racism, saying his goals were not moral but financial, that he only represented blacks because he could make money off of them: exploitation of the black cause masquerading as noble sacrifice. “I made a lot of money,” my grandfather told the Capital Journal, “I have to admit that.” I couldn’t accept this view. I’d heard Gramps preach against racism with the same venom he employed against gays, and it was clear that he saw his civil rights work in the same way he saw our daily picketing—as a moral imperative. I noted a similar accusation people made about our protesting, too, the insistence that the true heart of Westboro was an elaborate scheme to make money. We would provoke onlookers into assaulting us on the picket line, they proffered, and then we would sue both our attackers and the police for failing to protect us. Such a scenario never played out even a single time, but that never stopped people from believing it was true. It struck me that this desire to exchange a financial motive for an ideological one was a convenient evasion of a distressing truth: it was easier to dismiss our stated intentions than to acknowledge that people who were otherwise bright and well-intentioned could believe and behave as we did as members of Westboro.
I didn’t want to bring too many of these Internet accusations to my mother, so I reasoned with myself about whether the money my grandfather had earned devalued his civil rights work. Didn’t my grandparents have thirteen children to support? Was it wrong for him to try to make a good living for them? And hadn’t he represented many people who couldn’t pay him at all? If he hadn’t made