This was not the sort of spirit we displayed at funeral pickets. After Omaha, they had gotten progressively more antagonistic, and we now exultantly sang parodies of military anthems in those tense, close quarters: “Then it’s IEDs / Your army’s on its knees / Count off the body parts all gone, two! three!” I had begun to feel hesitant in those circumstances. Family and friends of the fallen were passing by a hundred feet away, and it was impossible not to see their heaviness. Breaching that grief-stricken silence so that we could bellow our defiance made me feel—unwillingly, involuntarily—like a terrible person. I would talk myself out of it, buttressing our position with Bible verses to justify the behavior—but my mother’s tears gave me permission to feel the empathy I’d been afraid to acknowledge. I was relieved to know that it wasn’t wrong to do so.
Less than three months later, my mother got a phone call from a reporter. Our whole family was returning from another funeral picket in Illinois, and we were on the final stretch of the seven-hour drive home. “Lawsuit?” my mother asked. The reporter wanted to know if we had a response to the civil lawsuit that was being filed against us for protesting the funeral of a Marine in Maryland—the allegations were defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It was after hours on Friday evening, but the woman had seen a copy of the complaint that would be filed in federal court come Monday morning. My mother first pressed for details, and then answered with characteristic brazenness: we had the protection of the First Amendment and the foundation of Jesus Christ. No one was going to stop us.
As soon as my mother disconnected the call, the cogs of the Westboro war machine kicked into high gear. She phoned Margie and Gramps, and a plan was hatched. If those men were going to file a lawsuit on Monday, we were going to respond with a press conference on Tuesday. After the case was filed, I emailed and faxed out the press release Margie had drafted to national media outlets: “So long as the families, military, media, veterans groups, and community-at-large, use funerals or memorial services of dead soldiers as platforms for political patriotic pep rallies, we will continue to picket those pep rallies. If they put the flags down and go home, we’ll go home. Not before then.”
The trick was that our press conference would be at Arlington National Cemetery, where Mom, Margie, and I would simultaneously protest another soldier’s funeral. This was not a move I would have thought to make, but all three of them—my grandfather, my aunt, and my mother—had an uncanny knack for finding ways to heighten the drama for the cameras. Addressing journalists was always a bit nerve-racking, but I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about it much with my mom and Margie on the scene.
* * *
Before the lawsuit had even been filed, its effect on the church was far-reaching, momentous, instantaneous.
My parents, siblings, and I filed out of the van that Friday evening, into the house, and down to the church. There would be a meeting to strategize about our response. Gramps sat near the pulpit, wary and weary, and we took our pews near the front. True to his extreme nature, my grandfather began hyperbolizing about worst-case scenarios, appearing to grow more sick with fear and paranoia by the minute. Did the court have jurisdiction to force us to stand trial in Maryland? What if they won? Wouldn’t other families begin to sue us in other courts and jurisdictions? What if they made us litigate these funeral pickets all over the country? What if they bankrupted us all? What were we going to do about all this? Most of us waited in silence as my parents, Margie, and the rest of my aunt- and uncle-attorneys weighed in on these questions. They tried to answer him calmly and reasonably, to assuage his rising panic, but the longer the meeting went on, the more they began to mirror his dread.
My grandfather fixed his stare on a nearby wall for a moment, and then spoke matter-of-factly into the strained silence. “The Lord could just kill them, you know.”
And thus we began to pray for the Lord to kill the father of the Marine and his accomplices.
Someone googled the names of the lawyers who were filing the complaint—former JAG officers—and for the first time in all my