Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

When people are in the thrall of poisonous ideology, it's really not all about deliberate ill will, or inherent hatred, or a lack of intelligence. It's about the unbelievable destructiveness and staying power of bad ideas and about finding ways to equip people with the tools they need to fight them.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

Empathy is not a betrayal of one's cause.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

Several people I had conversations with were hugely influential. People who found internal inconsistency in Westboro's ideology. It was the first thing that allowed me to recognize that Westboro was wrong.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

Westboro would quote this passage from the book of Leviticus that, for them, shows that the definition of 'love thy neighbor' is to rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning. And if you don't do that, then you hate your neighbor in your heart.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

In the era of Donald Trump the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

I went to my mother right before I was set to go protest my first soldier's funeral and asked my mother: 'I need to understand why we're doing this.'

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

My husband and I eventually want to start a nonprofit and call it the Westboro Foundation. It was his idea, and I love it. I would love for Westboro to come to mean something besides 'God hates gays.'

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

For my grandfather, there was no distinction. There was no tension between his support for civil rights for black people and his animus toward gay people because both of those positions were scripturally derived.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

My family thought - and thinks - very seriously about words. About language and what it means and how it shapes us and how it should shape us and change us.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

Assuming ill motives almost instantly cuts us off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: 'Gays are worthy of death.'

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

Twitter was an alternative community for me. A different kind of community. I knew I was making people angry. But it didn't matter, they weren't my community. But the longer I was on Twitter and the more I came to know these people, to like and respect them, the more I could see the empathy and grief and sorrow they were expressing.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And - given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for - forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

I think for some people who leave Westboro, losing that sense of specialness feels like you've lost something really valuable and important. I had the opposite experience. I was so grateful to know that I wasn't uniquely evil. I was just a human being who had had this set of experiences that were outside of my control.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

I do send messages to my family; I send letters in the mail, and when I'm in town, I almost always leave something in the door of my house in Topeka.

Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper

You hear stories about Scientology, where people are prevented from leaving, and Westboro's not like that. If you decide that you don't want to be there, then they will help you leave. The shunning, cutting people off - they're doing that because they believe it is for our highest good.