Megan’s mother was the fifth of Phelps’s thirteen children. Her grandfather Fred Phelps established the church, in 1955. She had been taught the church’s vision of God’s truth since birth. It was easy for Phelps-Roper to write things on Twitter that made other people cringe. So every time we find something else to picket, or have some new video or picture we want to post (or just something that we see on the news and want to comment about)-87 people get first-hand, gospel commentary from Megan Marie.” On September 1st, her sister Bekah e-mailed church members to explain the utility of Twitter: “Now Megan has 87 followers and more are trickling in all the time. Ted’s in hell!”) and a description of a picket that the church held at an American Idol concert in Kansas City (“Totally awesome! Tons going in & taking pics-even tho others tried to block our signs”).
In August, 2009, Phelps-Roper, under the handle posted a celebratory tweet when Ted Kennedy died (“He defied God at every turn, teaching rebellion against His laws. “She had a well-sharpened tongue, so to speak,” Josh Phelps, one of Megan’s cousins and a former member of Westboro, told me. Moreover, Megan was known for her mastery of the Bible and for her ability to spread Westboro’s doctrine. Her posts could be easily monitored, since she worked at Phelps Chartered, the family law firm, beside her mother, Shirley, an attorney. Phelps-Roper, who is tall, with voluminous curly hair and pointed features, volunteered to tweet for the congregation. She opened an account but quickly lost interest-at the time, Twitter was still used mostly by early-adopting techies-until someone e-mailed Westboro’s Web site, in the summer of 2009, and asked if the church used the service. She learned about Twitter in 2008, after reading an article about an American graduate student in Egypt who had used it to notify his friends that he had been arrested while photographing riots. As a child, Phelps-Roper spent hours there, sparring with strangers. In 1994, the church launched a Web site, and early on it had a chat room where visitors could interact with members of Westboro. Westboro had long used the Internet to spread its message. Members held signs with slogans like “ God Hates Fags” and “ Thank God for Dead soldiers,” and the outrage that their efforts attracted had turned the small church, which had fewer than a hundred members, into a global symbol of hatred. To protest the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in America, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed the funerals of gay men who died of AIDS and of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She believed that all manner of other tragedies-war, natural disaster, mass shootings-were warnings from God to a doomed nation, and that it was her duty to spread the news of His righteous judgments. “You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought His wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse! #red.”Īs a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas, Phelps-Roper believed that AIDS was a curse sent by God.
“Thank God for AIDS!” she tweeted that morning. Megan Phelps-Roper, a twenty-three-year-old legal assistant, seized the opportunity. On December 1, 2009, to commemorate World AIDS Day, Twitter announced a promotion: if users employed the hashtag #red, their tweets would appear highlighted in red.