I noted a similar accusation people made about our protesting, too, the insistence that the true heart of Westboro was an elaborate scheme to make money. We would provoke onlookers into assaulting us on the picket line, they proffered, and then we would sue both our attackers and the police for failing to protect us. Such a scenario never played out even a single time, but that never stopped people from believing it was true. It struck me that this desire to exchange a financial motive for an ideological one was a convenient evasion of a distressing truth: it was easier to dismiss our stated
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