purpose and the dynamics of the picket line. “Some say you’re just doing this for attention,” one television reporter accused Gramps during an interview I sat in on. My grandfather looked at her like she was uncommonly dense and said slowly, “Well, you’re doggone right. How can I preach to ’em if I don’t have their attention?”
Not only did we firmly believe in the truth and goodness of all our message and methods—including what others wrote off as “shock tactics”—we also recognized that we were living in a sound-bite generation with endless demands on its attention. “You’ve got to speak to people where they are!” my mother insisted. We had a message to preach, and we were going to use every tool in our arsenal to get the job done: sexually explicit signs and insults, parodies and pop culture references, sarcasm and sass. Margie was especially good at writing clever lyrics for our parodies of pop songs, which inspired me to try my hand at them, as well. When we published the recordings of my Lady Gaga parodies on Twitter—Russian roulette is what you’re playin’, silly clod / But every chamber’s loaded when you’re playin’ with your God—her devoted and active fan base whipped themselves into a frenzy, turning our songs into an international news story. No matter how fierce the hostility to our message became, we delivered it with a Cheshire grin: “You’re going to Hell. Have a nice day!” It was important that people understood that our protests were not done in service of any personal hatred, but of the truth of God.
Our belief in predestination prevented us from using conversion numbers as a measure of our success—fortuitous, considering how paltry they were—because whether a person had the faith to believe the truth of our doctrines was in God’s hands alone. In light of this, our goal was not to convert, but rather to preach to as many people as possible using all the means that God had put at our disposal. He would take care of the rest. And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. On the cusp of the twenty-first century, at the dawn of the Internet age, we saw ourselves as the recipients of a divine gift unlike any given to the faithful preachers of yore: a global communications system which we would swarm like a conquering army to spread the Word of God unchecked. Selah.
“You think the Internet was created by God for these pornographers?” Gramps snorted. “The heck you say. He created it for us. For our preaching.”
* * *
At first it was a trickle, but then they came in droves. Small-town papers and local TV news segments gave way to Michael Moore’s The Awful Truth and ABC’s 20/20—the former featuring an enormous pink motor home announcing BUGGERY ON BOARD! that Moore had dubbed the Sodomobile. CNN. Fox News. MSNBC. The BBC produced two hour-long documentaries about Westboro that identified us as “The Most Hated Family in America.” We were thrilled to see that our message was beginning to seep into the international conscience, our neon signs and provocative slogans becoming iconic and instantly recognizable. HBO’s award-winning television drama True Blood was a pop-culture phenomenon from its inception through its conclusion in 2014, and for seven seasons, “God Hates Fangs” flashed through its opening credits—a play on Westboro’s infamous rallying cry, “God Hates Fags.” As Westboro’s profile continued to rise, the Phelps-Roper home became a revolving door of journalists and documentary filmmakers from across the United States, the U.K., Australia, Japan, Italy, France, Germany, and more. A few weeks after my grandfather attacked the Swedish royal family following the sentencing of an anti-gay preacher there (“The King looks like an anal-copulator, and his grinning kids look slutty & gay!”), two journalists from Stockholm knocked on our kitchen door unannounced. “Hello!” I smiled at the two gentlemen unfazed. “Can I help you?”
Our campaign against Sweden only intensified when we discovered that the royal court was looking into possible legal action against us under their hate crimes law. With this sort of attention, how could we let go? We added GodHatesSweden to our growing list of Internet domains and attacked the country’s leader, Carl XVI Gustaf: “The popinjay King of Sweden—a moral titmouse in the plumage of a peacock, who lives lavishly with his kids on Sweden’s