Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church (26 page)

Jael and I talked in detail about whether we were going to attend the graduation, picket it, or both. We finally decided we were going to picket in our caps and gowns and then attend the ceremony to get our diplomas. We would be the first ones in the WBC to picket our own graduation. Everybody before us had waited inside with their classmates while the rest of us were picketing outside. It was such a hoot, Jael and me wearing our caps and gowns and yelling "Fag Chargers" and "God hates Topeka West." Most of the people coming by to get inside, where the graduation was being held, just ignored us. But a few classmates commented. "Oh Lauren, why do you always have to picket?" one guy said.

When it was time for the ceremony, Jael and I ran inside and took our seats in the auditorium. The rest of our group put away their signs before joining the audience. As my name was called and I crossed the stage, Dad, Mom, Taylor, Shirley, Megan, Bekah, and the rest of our crowd rang cowbells and yelled "Yay, LAUREN DRAIN." Jael's entrance got the same whooping enthusiasm. Everybody seemed proud of us, and we were very satisfied with our accomplishments.

Jael and I had both been accepted into the nursing program at Washburn University, and we registered for the exact same classes and labs.

Washburn University was a highly acclaimed public university in Topeka, with two programs particularly favored by the Phelps family--nursing and law. Almost everybody from our church went there. We were discouraged from going to colleges farther away because the pastor thought we might be led astray if we went to some unknown "evil" campus. Some people were allowed to go to Kansas State in Manhattan, Kansas--about sixty miles from Topeka--or Kansas University's satellite campus in Kansas City, if they could present a good argument as to why they needed to go that far. Libby went to KU in Kansas City for a degree in physical therapy, although the pastor had discouraged it. He thought going away was selfish and foolish, and it was better to stay close to your family. He also worried that if your faith wasn't strong enough, you might get torn away by another religion. You would be putting yourself at risk, and you could literally be pulling yourself away from God.

Even though I chose to stay local for school, college life was definitely interesting. Everyone on campus knew who we were--we were the ones picketing our own school. We stood out because of our long hair, ponytails, braids, and lack of makeup, although we dressed like everybody else on campus, in jeans, yoga pants, exercise clothes, Nike running shoes, and anything else comfortable. There had probably been one Phelps or another at Washburn almost every year for the past four decades. Almost every one of the pastor's children were alumni. Some of the next generation were there or had just graduated when Jael and I enrolled. The church had been holding protest signs along the sidewalks of the campus since the early days of picketing, condemning the university's tolerance of homosexuality.

We were the group most actively trying to change the world. There didn't seem to be many others who cared. Jael was one of the more vocal and politically oriented Phelpses on campus. She had designs on public office.

She frequently wrote letters to the editor of the college newspaper. Many of the pastor's grandchildren had been active letter writers to the city newspaper since they were sixteen or seventeen years old. By the time I was sixteen, I had been to multiple city council meetings and had spoken to our mayor and our state representatives. I had been to a presidential inauguration. I had picketed revivals of Billy Graham and Joel Osteen, two of the most popular evangelical preachers in the country. My fellow students didn't have the kind of commitment and political experience that Jael and I did.

Washburn had a fantastic study-abroad program. I thought it was something that I might want to do if my parents would ever allow it and I could fit it into my nursing curriculum. I really wanted to go abroad to study Spanish. I explored the requirements, but when I ran it by Dad, I learned that church members were not allowed to leave the country, even to picket. The pastor said our website created great controversy, and as it was accessible around the world because of the Internet, studying abroad could cause us danger.

Freedom of speech wasn't protected outside the United States, and going to a different country was the same as picketing that country, he said. In America, we could say what we wanted. In other places, however, expressing our points of view could get us in serious trouble. The devil somewhere wanted to shut us down, and he put us at risk for being arrested, injured, or killed.

The first week of classes, Jael and I were given the assignment to pick a current event and discuss it in front of our sociology class. We were psyched to go first, which made the other students in the class really angry. They didn't like our views, and they hated that we were showing off. They had nothing to say, and we were so passionate, especially when we had an audience. We knew what we thought, and we were always ready to go first.

That was our life: knowing current events, telling people what we thought, and raising issues and concerns. We didn't have to do a lot of research because we knew what was going on already. Some kids went so far as to switch out of our classes, finding us really annoying.

I loved being provocative in class. One assignment from my freshman English professor was to write a position paper on any subject of our choosing. I picked imprecatory prayer, which is prayer for bad things to befall people or a nation. They were pretty intense and seemed to always stir controversy. My paper was well-written. I used passages in the Bible to back up my position. Sure enough, my teacher questioned my paper. "Do you really think this is what that means?" he asked me. First off, I told him the Westboro Baptist Church didn't invent imprecatory prayer. Second, I told him that many things were open for interpretation. I broke the passages down for him, confidently giving him a quick study in the Bible. I quoted from Psalm 109, where some disagreeable things were wished upon a sinner, like that his days be few, his children be fatherless, and his wife be a widow. There were parts of the Bible that were not happy, but I couldn't do anything about that, I told him. Those were the words of God. My professor wasn't convinced and returned my paper with a lot of red marks, pointing out what he thought were erroneous interpretations, but he still gave me an A in the end.

Jael and I were very focused in our worldview. For example, we felt passionately that the war in Iraq was not supposed to happen in the first place. There were inconsistencies with how it started, and they were continuing to pile up. Our country was killing our soldiers. We wanted to raise awareness of the issue that our military men and women were dying in vain, leaving their wives without husbands and children without fathers or mothers. No matter if I held a sign about it or not, people were dying every day. I didn't want to sit at home doing nothing. This was a pressing issue people needed to be concerned about. Not only was I bothered by the deaths, I was concerned about the families who were grieving at home while their loved ones were going straight to hell. The soldiers were dying, dying for a bad cause, and dying defending a nation that enabled sin. I thought by picketing the funerals of dead soldiers I was doing a good service, on my own dime, on my time. I believed I was helping others to see these issues, and maybe even prevent them from fighting for a bad cause.

I thought our nation was going south. I had great knowledge of the world around me, and I took great pride in that. Most people my age didn't know what was going on and didn't care. Even in class, most kids didn't know about current events. They'd talk about an issue on a superficial level, and that was it. I was getting saturated with news every day. Among the church kids my age, we were in constant competition to know the most about what was going on in the world.

It was too hard to watch the news and not do anything to help. And of course, it was a daily obligation to check the news. For me, it was a big deal. I was obsessed with it. Everyone in the church had to share a strong opinion about it one way or another. We had an arrogance about our viewpoint.

The Phelps kids loved to dominate. They had grown up and watched their parents be a certain way. Their parents had loved the spotlight, and the girls my age wanted to be the center of attention, too. Shirley's kids especially aspired to it. They were very vocal in their classrooms and to their teachers.

Most of the time, the other students in the classes would get really annoyed.

"There go the Phelpses again, saying stuff," they'd mumble. They hated the church because they knew us only from our protests. They automatically hated our side, and I automatically disagreed with them.

A lot of our professors liked the controversy we brought, though. We had one professor who loved that there were going to be four of us from the church in one class. It was in the humanities department, a social economics class with an emphasis on how humans interacted with one another. He was so eager to have us that he began e-mailing us before the class even started, telling us what an interesting semester it was going to be. There was a hot topic in Topeka politics at the time. An openly gay woman, Tiffany Muller, was running for city council, and her candidacy was going to be debated in the classroom. The professor was actually anxious to disprove our opinion about homosexuality, knowing that we debated on an intellectual level. Each class ended up turning into a theological discussion. If anyone was going to bring up our religion, then we were going to defend it. Sometimes, other professors would get annoyed because we would dominate the discussion.

But then another student would mention it, and it would be game on.

If issues involving homosexuality were brought up in class, we were all over it. The topic might be: Should homosexuals be allowed to be teachers, pastors, or priests? Should they be allowed to adopt children? Divorce, remarriage, and abortion issues raised equal wrath.

A number of our professors were under the impression that we were just mouthpieces for the opinions of our parents and the pastor, rather than freethinking, highly intelligent individuals. They thought they were going to challenge us to see if we really knew what we were talking about, versus saying things because we had to. Everybody found out pretty quickly that we were very educated, well-spoken, informed, and committed to our convictions. Of course, we were obligated to stay on top of the news.

In high school, we hadn't had much theological discourse. The curriculum was so tight and structured around state requirements and state testing that there hadn't been much room for social debate. College was different.

Professors there had the freedom to raise and debate religious issues, which excited both them and us. We would tell Shirley and everybody else at the church how we had stood up to them. Shirley loved it and gave us tremendous support for it. She liked to hear the details and listened enthusiastically as Megan and Bekah described a debate that we had all participated in. She was impressed by our courage to express our convictions. I loved her approval and felt so proud. I wished I could go home and tell my parents about my day and win the same kind of approval, since in my mind I'd earned it.

But unlike Shirley, my parents made sure not to overload me with compliments. They were more suspicious about anything I did. "Well, you know, you shouldn't really bring up some of those things in class," my father would say, making sure Shirley knew that he was keeping my problem with vanity in check. Only when he got verification that the other girls were bringing up the same kinds of issues in class, that we were doing it together, did he finally concede that he approved. Only as long as it was okay with Shirley, and I wasn't upstaging the Phelps girls, then it was okay with him.

Some people on campus or in our classes would spontaneously

counterprotest us and say really mean things to us. Jael, Megan, Bekah, and I were still attractive girls, despite how plain we had to keep our appearances. Guys would tease us to try to get a rise out of us, but it ended up being kind of a flirtatious teasing. Girls would usually just plain hate us.

So many people hated us. The homosexual students and their supporters were the most aggressive, often saying really mean things right to our faces.

Other communities, such as devout Christians, would say nothing at all or be nice to us. They didn't like us, but being Christians, they weren't outright mean.

Now that I was in college, I was hoping to start regaining my personal freedoms. I was still under twenty-four-hour watch as punishment for my behavior at Brian's house a year earlier. At least I had Jael as my primary guardian, although in no way did she go lightly on me on account of being my best friend. One time before school, I brushed on a tiny bit of mascara that I thought was barely visible, and Jael instructed me to remove it. She wasn't scolding me. In fact, I thought she was even trying to protect me. She could have reported me to an elder, but she never did. I loved Jael like a sister. We were so inseparable neither of us had to speak to know what the other was thinking. We shared feelings with each other with complete trust. I couldn't imagine a day when we wouldn't be friends. She knew all the pressures I was feeling at home, and her empathy and lightheartedness made bad days bearable.

My parents were still all over me. When I was home, I had to explain every move I made, from how long I would be on a jog to what my motive was for wearing certain clothes. I was allowed to jog alone as long as I was willing to answer my mother's cell phone calls every couple of miles along my route.

I jogged as often as I could, because it released a lot of my feelings of paranoia and anxiety.

Faith Marie, the newest Drain, eased some of the intense focus on me. My baby sister was born almost three years after Boaz, and she was the cutest baby girl I had ever seen. She looked like a mini-me, with her blonde hair and blue eyes. Boaz adored having a baby sister, and he took enormous pride when I gave him the responsibility of helping me change her diapers or spoon-feed her.