I decided to “revise from scratch” the essay I wrote a long time ago about my experience “meeting” Fred Phelps. Everything about my feelings towards the Westboro Baptist Church is complicated. They are my biggest weakness, where the blackest hole in my heart lies. I wanted to take the original piece and make it a bit more complicated.
Love the Sinner
My heart races as we walk the sidewalk up Gage Boulevard. A crowd is gathered ahead, blocking the way to our destination, the courtyard of the Presbyterian Church. I can hear women singing a hymn. “Onward Christian soldiers! Marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before,” they screech, putting a sinister twist on a song I thought I knew. In their apparent anger, I realize they believe the war is literal.
We inch our way up the sidewalk, feigning bravery. I want to hide behind my parents, but I walk with them side by side. I have seen the vulgar signs from the window of our car in the past, but I had no idea know they were so big. The three letters, “F.A.G.,” appear over and over, in bold, neon colors. The women singing and holding signs have long, frizzy hair. They wear unremarkable sweatshirts and wool cardigans. Their faces are weathered by afternoons spent holding signs on street corners; spidery veins creep across their noses and cheeks from too many sunburns. Some of them sing with their brows furrowed and hands clenched in anger. Some of the singers seem filled with an ecstasy of righteousness. Some clearly want to show off their loud, bellicose voices. Some are only pulled into the scene as bloodthirsty spectators, eager for confrontation and drama. I can imagine any of these women using one of their enormous signs to smack someone on the head. I fight the urge to duck my head protectively as we walk past.
“Your priest wears a dress,” a man bellows as we cross his path on the sidewalk. He leans down into my sister’s face, adding, “Like a woman,” with a malicious twist to his voice. He grins in a sneer. I can almost imagine a forked tongue lashing out of his warped mouth for a split second. Gina, in her pink and white flouncy dress, cowers behind my Dad. Her peaches and cream skin and blond hair appear so innocent, standing in contrast to the ruddy, bloodshot face of Fred Phelps. He seems to know it, to revel in it. He stands up, with the assurance of a peacock. We keep moving, trying to put him behind us, but as a parting shot, he shouts, “Fag Church!” pointing at me and my family.
We walk on, heads held high, but I keep a cloud over my eyes as we make our way through the remaining gauntlet of noise and fury. The lyrics of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” fade as we walk. “We are not divided, all one body we – one in faith and spirit, one eternity,” they sing, without any apparent irony.
That was the day I decided that I was not a “Love the Sinner / Hate the Sin” Christian. That was not the vision of Jesus Christ that I had come to know in Bible study. Seeing it up close and personal like that exposed its ugliness and falseness. I wanted nothing to do with it.
But looking back on it today, I struggle with the confrontation and its aftermath more than ever. This was the confrontation that helped me to stop seeing LGBTQIA+ folks as the “other,” but in coming to that conclusion, I discovered a new “other”: the Phelps, and the anti-gay perspective they stand for. I’ll admit it: I struggle with my own hatred of the Phelps. I blamed them for making so many of my friends feel unsafe in my hometown. I blamed them for Josh moving away from me and Kansas. I blamed them for Chris’s hesitance to get married at St. David’s, because our open and affirming church was one of the Phelps’ favorite targets. I blamed them for fanning the flames of hatred that lead to the gruesome death of Matthew Shepherd and then adding insult to injury by picketing his funeral in triumph. I blamed them for putting Topeka, KS, a city I love, on the map as a place standing for heinous, brash hatred. I even blamed them when St. David’s burned down and the police determined it was arson. I knew it was them.
Sometimes, all of this blame is not in the past tense.
When I worked at USD 501 as the music librarian, I ran the instrument rental program, which allowed any student who qualified for free lunch to rent an instrument for $25 a year. I remember when the first application came through for a “Phelps-Roper” child. I can remember the loopy, good-natured handwriting on the application. I even remember that the child requested a ¼ size violin. This isn’t the threatening penmanship of an evil person, I thought as I studied that application, looking for signs of humanity in a person that I had spent many years hating.
There were many other double-barrel Phelps names that trickled through on the applications for free instruments. When I opened my inter-departmental mail every day, I was shocked on days when there weren’t applications from someone in the Phelps family. One of my colleagues urged me to limit the use of the instruments to one per family in order to exclude the Phelps from being over-represented in this service. I remember exactly what she said when she looked through my stack of applications. “They all can afford their own instruments. Half of them are successful lawyers. They ‘donate’ all their money to their Dad so that they can claim welfare and take advantage of social services that other people actually need.” This sort of response was not unique to my colleague; the Phelps family was not looked upon with much kindness by anyone in Topeka.
Knowing that they were lawyers made it difficult for me to follow through with denying those Phelps-Phelps kids instruments. Even more difficult for me was the thought of withholding an instrument from a child because of what their parents represent. We had enough instruments for those kids. And, in the end, I gave each of them an instrument; they qualified, and they paid their $25. But at the deepest and most honest place in my heart, I didn’t want to give them their instruments. When their Moms and Dads came to retrieve their violins and trumpets, it was only with great difficulty that I smiled and released my grip on the instrument case handles.
I want to be a person who loves others, warts and all. I want to be a person who forgives others unconditionally. I don’t think the love of God can be limited or contained. I don’t want hatred to touch my heart. But I’m human, and it does. When it comes to the Phelps, hatred touches my heart, with good reason. These are people who actively promote policies that hurt my friends. They threaten the safety of my friends. They pray for my friends to burn in hell. These are not the kind of human warts that are easily dismissed as character flaws and unfortunate mistakes. The Phelps family consciously chooses cruelty. When Jesus asked us to love our neighbors, he added no caveats, no “love your woke neighbor.” But how can I love them?
When a mom entered my office at USD 501 that day, I immediately recognized that poofy, frizzled hair, the watery eyes, as she said, “Knock, knock,” pantomiming knocking on the door. “Is this where I get the instruments?” It was one of them. My smile tightened and froze. My jaw tightened.
“This is the place!” I said as cheerily as I could manage.
“I am picking up three instruments,” she said as she placed the paperwork on my desk. “Two for my kids. One for my niece. My sister can’t get here before you close.” She said it like an accusation, but she managed a business-like smile.
I took the paperwork and looked it over, recognizing the applications that I spent so much time agonizing over. “Yes, I remember these. Did you bring the checks?”
“I have one from my sister here. Can I write a check for $50 since I have two kids?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let me go find the violins.” She needed two ¼ size violins and a viola. I found the instruments I had set aside for them in my instrument closet.
“I’d like to check them over before I take them,” she said curtly, handing me the check.
Even though I had hired skilled repairmen to carefully clean and tend to every instrument over the summer, I let her come into the instrument closet with me and examine her rentals. It gave me the opportunity to examine her a bit more closely: that wild frizzy gray hair, the ratty knit sweater, the crooked teeth, her miserly inventory of every scratch on the $25 rentals, her essential vulnerability. What was red-faced hatred on the street that day when I was young had changed to dreary, pale-faced dullness in the dark instrument closet.
I thought about what it must have been like growing up under the wing of that iron-fisted patriarch, how he must have distorted her mind. Did she even have a chance for something different? What about her children? Sure, there’s choice, as many young people in the Phelps clan have demonstrated by leaving, but turning your back on your family and culture takes courage that few people possess. In that instrument closet, what was once malevolence had become mundanely, heartbreakingly, disturbingly human.
I still didn’t like that woman. But I didn’t hate her anymore either. At least for that one moment, I didn’t hate her anymore.
Taking My Own Freshman Composition Class 