Activist

Showing your own righteousness by pointing out someone's unrighteousness, the race to the bottom, the transgressions getting smaller and smaller and smaller but still treated with the same level of intolerance and condemnation, all of that stuff, even as I say it I am talking about Twitter but I am thinking about Westboro.

Our duty was to declare God's standards to the world: no adultery, no fornication, no gays, no idolatry.

We held signs that said 'Thank God For Dead Soldiers,' 'Thank God For IEDs.'

My life was forever changed by people who took the time and had the patience to learn my story and to share theirs with me. They forsook judgment and came to me with kindness and empathy and the impact of that decision was huge.

I try to focus on using my energy to change things, but there are times when I feel so bad.

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.

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

As a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.

The pickets were just a fact of life. And the fact that people hated us from the time I was tiny, the fact that we were hated, I was taught, was a cause for great rejoicing.

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.

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

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

There's a learned helplessness for a lot of people who are leaving Westboro because you're not allowed to have any kind of independence when you are there so a lot of people don't have practical life skills.

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.'

In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil.

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.

When I got on Twitter, that was the first time I was able to have lasting relationships with outsiders. And even though they were limited to those 140 characters, it was the duration of the friendships and the rapport we were able to develop.

I always joke about how I get excited to go to the grocery store without permission.

We know that we've done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn't the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren't so, and regret that hurt.

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.