RSS feed of a man living in a tiny town in eastern South Dakota.
The first tweet he sent me must have been crude, because my response included a warning to “get your head outta the gutter.” His message was lost to me almost instantly, though, one among a deluge. With the advice and consent of my mother, I had become Westboro’s voice on Twitter eighteen months earlier, and had found great success at getting attention for our message. For years, my proximity to my mother had thrust me into the logistical work that powered Westboro’s picketing engine. Combined with my boundless energy and enthusiasm for our beliefs, that proximity had also given me a high-profile public voice that others of my peers lacked. Reporters would come to interview my mother as our de facto spokesperson, and then turn to me with questions about the perspective of the Phelps grandchildren—the first Westboro generation to have grown up on the picket line. I believed our doctrines to be the very definition of goodness and righteousness—not tedious or burdensome—and I loved them with all the fervor my mother had been modeling since I was a child. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. Though I was always afraid I wasn’t sufficiently articulate to speak for the church, I never let that stop me from stepping up to the plate—and the more I spoke, the more I learned how to speak. I was ever eager to fulfill my duty both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers with sound doctrine, and that trend had continued into the social media age.
Thanks to our rising profile after the oral arguments, I was now receiving sometimes hundreds of tweets a day and posting dozens more of my own. Although we protested at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, I’d come to love the platform dearly: a place for me to spread our message in a way that didn’t require the distorting lens of a journalist who just couldn’t seem to get it, no matter how much effort I spent trying to explain. I discovered I was far more effective at pleading our cause directly to the people on Twitter, absent the influence of Bible-ignorant hacks who wielded professional cameras and microphones. After two decades on the picket line, I was twenty-five years old and a skilled defender of Westboro and its many controversial doctrines. This random guy was just an anonymous face in the crowd asking the same questions I’d answered hundreds of thousands of times before. “‘God hates fags’ not ‘I hate fags,’” I clarified for him. “We love them more than anyone.”
MEGAN AMRAM (meganamram): cool name
MEGAN PHELPS-ROPER (meganphelps): Thanks! Sometimes your parents give you a cool name, sometimes you go to fiery eternal torment for hating God & teaching sin. =(
Less than two weeks after the Anonymous attack, the Supreme Court published its opinion in Snyder v. Phelps, and the media circus surrounding the church ramped up a hundredfold. God had worked in the hearts of the justices, and we had prevailed against our adversaries. Had the Snyder lawsuit succeeded, we knew that the much-vaunted American right to freedom of speech would have become little more than window dressing: if one person can label another’s opinions on public issues “offensive” and then sue the speaker for millions of dollars in damages, what protection does the First Amendment offer? By that logic, a member of the KKK could sue a black protester for protesting a Klan meeting while promoting the “offensive” belief that racism is a societal evil. The Snyder lawsuit had to fail, because, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority:
Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.
Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have