![]() ![]() ![]() But having read Megan Phelps-Roper’s scrupulous, anguished account of ‘loving and leaving’ the church, I’m not so sure I was right. At any rate, I wouldn’t have considered the inner workings of the Westboro Baptists worth learning about in those days. The church’s tiny size, seldom above eighty members (most of them closely related), would have confirmed its political and cultural insignificance. The combination of homophobia and anti-military sentiment was puzzling, but once you learned the group’s rationale – that American soldiers were being killed as divine punishment for America’s growing acceptance of homosexuality – you would probably have dismissed them as just another sideshow in the American political carnival, nastier than some, but of no greater interest. B eyond a few tabloid stories, the Westboro Baptist Church didn’t really hit the news until 2005, when its members started picketing funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq War, with signs declaring GOD HATES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS, THANK GOD FOR IED’S and THANK GOD FOR AIDS. ![]()
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