in my aunt’s manner that appeared so much more desirable to my eye than the hard lines and harsh tones my mother so often took. I aspired to many of my mother’s qualities—strength, diligence, zeal—but my aunt was a powerful introduction to the idea that these features did not require militancy to survive. That strength abides as fully in restraint as it does in aggression. That the tongue, that world of iniquity of which my mother had so strenuously warned me, could be used in altogether better ways.
By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.
* * *
Although the idea of taking a gentler approach resonated with me relatively young, many years would pass before it had opportunity to bloom. “Mildly” was not the way I had learned to speak to outsiders. There would be no mincing of words on the picket line, no euphemisms, no delicacy, no circumlocution. Westboro’s provocations would land us in litigation more than once—including, ultimately, a federal case that reached the United States Supreme Court and had the potential to bankrupt the church many times over—but not even this could convince us to change our ways. Even as the church became more radical and adopted ever-harsher prayers wishing death upon a growing list of enemies, I understood the refusal to recalibrate. One of the first verses I memorized was a command from God to the prophet Isaiah: Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. This had been the charge at my grandfather’s ordination at seventeen, and he quoted it ceaselessly—often in conjunction with another phrase he would bellow from the pulpit on Sunday mornings: “WE WERE NOT SENT HERE TO PARLEY!” Ours was a position of strength, our foundation Jesus Christ Himself. Compromise was betrayal. The thoughts of mere humans were irrelevant. In this battle, we would not be the ones to yield.
For all her sophistication and emotional intelligence, not even Margie was above conforming to our antagonism on the picket line and was often cruder than most. When I was nineteen, I stood with my aunt and my Gran on a street corner outside a Seattle hotel hosting an international gay and lesbian leadership conference. With her then-eighty-one-year-old mother standing a few feet away, my aunt waxed vulgar, applying the knowledge Gramps had imparted to us about “scat”—the consumption of feces for sexual pleasure—to an anecdote about an imaginary new drink at Starbucks. “Just go and get yourself a Fececcino!” she brayed, mocking the conference-goers in a tone of prissy faux-refinement. “Add a dollop of feces into your coffee, and then prance in here to discuss your leadership!” The stark contrast between the way Margie behaved on and off the picket line was jarring even to me, but I was of the mind that the obscene nature of my aunt’s words said nothing about her and everything about gays: that they were disgusting and abominable whether she kept quiet about their manifestly abhorrent sex acts or not. I supposed she felt the same.
Our antics at Westboro protests were vulnerable to criticism for any number of reasons, but their remarkable efficacy at garnering attention could never be gainsaid. This was by design, of course; a major piece of the attraction of our un-church-like methods was the thunderous voice it gave us on the streets and in the media. Both our picketing and the media coverage were finite and local in the very beginning, but my grandfather swiftly found ways to colonize the burgeoning power of the twenty-four-hour news cycle for his own purposes. Westboro members began traveling across the country, from gay pride marches in D.C. to the Castro district in San Francisco. Our vehement attacks on public and private figures nationwide were carried by fax machines, and later the Internet, to newsrooms across the country and around the world. Westboro’s relationship with the media became symbiotic almost instantly: they gave attention to our message, and we helped them sell newspapers and generate clicks.
In our estimation, Westboro’s chief objective by far was fidelity to the Scriptures. Apart from that, however, we gauged success primarily by the amount of media attention we received—a fact which garnered no shortage of accusations that we were feigning our faith for the sake of notoriety. People often took our constant employment of shock tactics as cynical and purely attention-seeking behavior, but this was a fundamental misunderstanding of our