We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.
We know that we can't undo our whole lives.
You can't listen to the whole world tell you you're crazy, without wondering, 'Am I crazy?'
Whatever state you find yourself in, you're supposed to be content there.
What's important to me is how the Lord looks at me, more than anything else.
The idea that people feel that they have to be sympathetic to me? It's a funny concept.
I was born and raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, an infamous congregation started by my grandfather, and consisting almost entirely of my extended family.
Westboro's fire and brimstone message was the air I breathed all my life. But after joining Twitter at the age of 23, I encountered people who challenged my beliefs and unearthed contradictions my blind faith had missed.
Discussing and dissecting opposing viewpoints with others on Twitter opened up a whole new way of thinking for me.
Twitter helped others to see me as a human being. And showed me their humanity, too.
I know I want to do good for people. And I want to treat people well.
I don't feel confident at all in my beliefs about God. That's definitely scary. But I don't believe anymore that God hates almost all of mankind. I don't think that, if you do everything else in your life right and you happen to be gay, you're automatically going to hell. I don't believe anymore that WBC has a monopoly on truth.
I definitely regret hurting people.
I liked 'The Sun Also Rises.'
We played video games and read books, and we went to public school. And yeah, we went to amusement parks. We did all of those things, but we also - that was all sort of organized around this nationwide picketing campaign.
How could we claim to love our neighbour while at the same time praying for God to destroy them?
Whenever people would speculate about the death of my grandfather it was always this very retributive thing. That they were going to picket his funeral after all the things that he had done to so many other people. That vindictiveness is obviously completely understandable. It would make perfect sense.
I always joke about how I get excited to go to the grocery store without permission.
I had grown up seeing people in school where I felt like I needed to keep them at arm's length, or on the picket line, where there was a tonne of hostility and no time to build rapport with people.
Even though I was 27 when I left, I still was largely treated like a child, because I wasn't married. My parents, my mother specifically, knew where I was and what I was doing at all times.
