hotel and rental car reservations, driving directions, and all of the biographical information published about the soldier in the media. The travelers would need to know just what sort of sinfulness the deceased had been up to in the event that anyone were to ask why we were picketing this soldier specifically. If Mom wasn’t sure, she tended to go with the catchall: “You mean it isn’t enough that he was fighting for a nation that has institutionalized sin and made God their number one enemy?”
The outpouring of fury and grief at these protests startled me in the beginning. We stood near the church in Omaha and lifted up our new signs—THANK GOD FOR IEDS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS—but the scene was devoid of our usual protest antics. We did not sing parodies. We did not dance atop the American flag. We did not call across the narrow street to the soldiers standing just outside the church’s entrance. They watched us with bitter contempt, and I couldn’t recall seeing anything quite like it in all my years on the picket line. The family arrived in a limousine, stepped out, turned. Though there were police officers stationed between us and them, the close quarters felt like a tinderbox. Both sides afraid to speak, both sides afraid to make any quick movements lest the precarious peace erupt into all-out war.
It was only a matter of time before it did.
As a result of our new campaign and the attention and hostility it generated, violence against Westboro spiked again—including arson this time, the most aggressive act perpetrated against the church. Investigators never found whoever was responsible for setting the church garage on fire in the wee hours one August morning, but the fire department arrived to put out the flames within minutes—tipped off by a woman in a nearby drive-through. An electrician arrived the next morning to get the power running again, but as he surveyed the damage, he seemed disturbed. When my mother asked why, he pointed to the narrow space—just four feet—between the charred edge of the damage and the electrical wiring. “If that fire had lasted any longer, the whole block would have gone up.” I’d been shaken watching the blaze and billowing smoke in my pajamas at 1 A.M., but my feelings turned to outrage and defiance with the electrician’s words. Anyone who thought they could scare us out of serving the Lord didn’t know Westboro or God.
Although the arsonists had failed in their attempt to destroy the church with fire, a team of attorneys were determined to use the courts to do the same. Less than a year after our first military funeral protest, a twenty-year-old Marine was killed in a Humvee accident in Iraq. His name appeared on the DoD website, instantly becoming grist for the Westboro funeral mill. The query seeking picketers went forth, the plane tickets were purchased, and the news releases were faxed to media outlets all over the state of Maryland. My grandfather had a way of distilling a message down to its essence, and thus he did in the news release announcing our protest at the funeral of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder: “They turned America over to fags; they’re coming home in body bags.”
Late on the evening that my mother returned from that funeral picket in Maryland, we sat at our adjacent desks in the still house. My siblings had gone off to their rooms to settle into bed, and Mom and I were winding down, as well. I got up and walked a few paces to stand behind her chair, put my hands on her shoulders, and squeezed gently. She was exhausted. Her head slumped forward while I worked on her neck and shoulders, and after a moment, she spoke softly. She had wept in the car on the way to the funeral, she told me. As she drove, one of her travel mates had read aloud the news stories published about the young soldier. “The father called his son ‘the love of my life.’” My mother’s voice took on that quality of desperate urgency again, of lamentation. “I am a mother. I have eleven children. I get that.” She shook her head. “It is just so sorrowful what these people have done to their children. Does he not understand that his sins have brought the wrath of God down upon his head? Upon his son’s head? Somebody has to tell them!”