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He would quote Jesus, who warned his disciples to expect the hatred of the world: If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.
Why you can't counter, yell, or reason with Christian nationalism - they mistake it for God's will or apporval.
In that respect, we were a law unto ourselves, and all bets were off as long as our words were justified by the Bible. Truth was an absolute defense against any and all claims made against us.
but we took this as just another in a long line of violent criminal attacks we faced for lawfully standing on public sidewalks to preach the standards of God. Persecution in the purest sense of the word.
We were not in charge of our lives, but God—and that God ruled via the parents and elders He had set over us. Our duty was singular: to obey them. Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. Their power over us was absolute, and we would do well to accept that without question or protest.
That is all too familiar: God first and elders having any bearing on you - that sounds so strange now.
For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.
A fav of c of C too minus the predestination.
I came to love the clarity and simplicity of this idea, how directly the Scriptures connected obedience to goodness.
Black and white thinking, binary thinking, is attractive.
The context made it abundantly clear to us that to love our neighbor was to rebuke him, to warn him away from the sins that would result in punishment from God. If we failed to do so, the blood of the wicked would be on our hands.
It was c of C reasoning for evangelism too. Though we didn't go to Westboro's extreme.
This was what God required of His elect. Whatever it cost us, we would pay.
Such a familiar mindset. Even shunning relatives, forsaking friendships with ungodly, anything for God.
Our parents described us as “walking picket signs.”
Ours said be the Bible some will never read.
The Ethiopian eunuch professed his belief before he was baptized, as infants cannot.
Same as c of C.
A candidate for baptism must speak with every member of the church, and may only be baptized if all members respond with silence when the question is posed: Can any forbid water?
Wow. NOT c of C.
I zealously pursued the Bible knowledge needed to “defend them against all comers,” as Gramps instructed.
Ours was 1 Peter 3:15 be ready always to give an answer
Don’t you see, children? Josh was here, but he was never of us. We have a promise right here—that if he were of us, he would have continued here with us.
We were planted on the sidewalk in front of the Kansas Expocentre, picketing my graduation ceremony before I headed inside to get my diploma—
!!!!
I trusted their judgment far more than my own.
So many times that was me.
He never appealed to his own authority.
Familiar to c of C.
austere sanctuary—
Yep. Same. No steeples or extravagance allowed.
church’s culture emphasizing the celebration and mockery of tragedy and death,
Thankfully unrelatable, c of C-wise.
And she—and I thought that’d be just fine. That it would probably work out okay. That’s all I thought. “I guess I was kinda scared. I mean, what was happening—I didn’t know if I wanted to or not. Well, it’s a funny feeling: you gotta make a decision, and you don’t feel like you’re prepared to make a decision. Well, I couldn’t think of any reason why not. “I had no idea.”
Marriage! What an endorsement !
My grandfather’s growing certainty in the righteousness of his every belief made him unwilling to yield to another perspective on any matter.
This is key, but I forgot the Westboro guy started his career being FOR civil rights, at the time of Brown v. Board.
I would listen as my mother recounted the stories of her father’s decades of civil rights work—
Unbelievable. They were persecuted for it, much like they are now for views opposing those they originally fought for. So the values got flipped on their head - so is it the suffering they value? It sure wasn't equality, concrete civil rights, or unchanging word of God (or else they wouldn't have "switched sides.")
In his view, racism was the great sin of society during that part of his life, and I imagine he quoted the same verses to steel himself in the face of that opposition as he did later, during our fight against LGBT rights:
This is just mind blowing. How is the dissonance in the grandparents alone, let alone family that finds out the history, not blowing Westboro up completely?
By the late 1980s, he had received the Omaha Mayor’s Special Recognition Award, an award from the Greater Kansas City Chapter of Blacks in Government, and another from the Bonner Springs chapter of the NAACP for his “undauntedness” and his “steely determination for justice during his tenure as a civil rights attorney.”
what. the. fuck. HOW did he make that hateful 180?
My grandfather spoke eloquently against the “de facto bondage” of blacks in South Africa, and of the moral outrage of the white supremacy espoused in the Dred Scott decision.
Again, what. the. fuck. The dissonance. Was he just addicted to the persecution or opposing the government? It seems to be something other than love, humanity, equality?
This was our legacy. In spite of all the vicious words spoken against us, there could be no question as to the twin evils of racial discrimination and white supremacy. There could be no question that my family had been on the noble side of that dispute. History had proved us right. That Topekans would hate us for it seemed like dispositive evidence of just how morally bankrupt our city truly was.
An addiction to opposing government, being proven right? That passage hints at the darker turn?
and one of my favorite things to do around this time was to argue Bible doctrines with strangers in the chat room
Ah, who didn't love that? I remember this stage, testing my Bible doctrine against the world.
He hadn’t stopped practicing law because he’d retired, my opponents said; he’d been disbarred.
Oops!
that he had flown into a rage when a court reporter failed to have a transcript ready for him in time; that he had sued her in a frivolous lawsuit demanding $22,000 in damages; and that he had abused her on the witness stand, badgering her for days on end.
So he was an asshole. Who was pro-civil rights once, then flipped the switch? How could you turn your values over on a dime?
It wasn’t just because that woman was ‘late with a transcript.’ It was a strategic move on her part, delaying that transcript. It was an essential piece of evidence in a case, and her deliberate refusal to produce it on time was to ensure that we missed the deadline to file.
Hm.
I thought engaging with people was important, that it was a perfect opportunity to “maintain and defend pure Gospel truth,” like my grandfather was always encouraging us to do.
That was so much me.
it was clear that he saw his civil rights work in the same way he saw our daily picketing—as a moral imperative.
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 intentions than to acknowledge that people who were otherwise bright and well-intentioned could believe and behave as we did as members of Westboro.
The few times I gave him occasion to be dissatisfied with me—as when I failed to play a hymn at the correct tempo the single time I was accompanist at our Sunday church service—he berated me without pity, his harsh temper provoked at the slightest displeasure.
Definite red flag. Her mother said the harassing the transcriptionist was because of his advocacy for black people,which was believable. But this supports the abusive tendency.
Columbia, Missouri, my uncle Tim was the youngest to compete. He’d turned seven just a few weeks before the race. It took him seven hours to finish. Runner’s World thought it was a great story and published it in their November 1970 issue, which hung proudly on the wall of the church office next to the Time profile.
Weird how they always managed to get spots in major publications even ahead if the picketing. Could be a plan? Could be some just seek attention more - and find it, good or ill.
“And if it were true, d’you think it’d be right to keep beatin’ a guy up for old sins?” Of course it wasn’t. We believed in repentance and forgiveness.
Such an interesting and selective concept. Guys like Phelps, Trump, Fallwell or any big preacher or elder get unlimited chances, benefit of the doubt, the utmost in Christian grace. Those below them get one or fewer. Those deemed not on their team, like Democrats, get nothing. It's not about Christian repentence.
uncomfortable parallel: between my grandfather’s physical brutality on the one hand, and the way our church responded to the suffering of outsiders on the other. Our joy at their demise. Our delight at their destruction. I took my leave of this line of thought and accepted the shield of my mother’s instruction, because I needed to believe that our ministry had not been influenced by the pathologies of a human being.
Gramps had surrendered his law license in the spring of 1989, the end of his decades of successful and acclaimed civil rights work. At nearly sixty years old, he was suddenly and unwillingly facing an enormous vacuum in his life—and just a few months later, the biking incident at Gage Park
Is that the entire answer for the 180?
Dottie also asserted that her father’s removal from the federal court was justified,
We have the answer.
I was beginning to see that our first loyalty was not to the truth but to the church.
As long as I stayed and did what I was told—as long as I believed—everything would turn out okay.
I thought that many, many times.
“You sure do talk a lot,” said most of them. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, though it didn’t often occur to me to try.
A huge difference between us.
I was animated by a set of twin desires that I now understand will never be satisfied: the need to understand, and to be understood.
Seems like this is a human thing, not just her. I have this too and know it's not just me. But maybe the emphasis is on the suppression - which is a familiar thing to me with regard to the church and being a woman there. There is the need to be seen as a faithful member so as not to be disfellowshipped. Being woman involves extra suppression since they are to be silent, per Timothy.
Many years would pass before I felt the least bit unsettled by the striking correlation between her view of her father and her view of God.
She saw her grandfather and God as the same.
I've also compared religion to an abusive relationship.
I was in the habit of suppressing thoughts that conflicted with the Bible as my family understood it, and by the time I was twenty, that tendency was nearly as second nature as breathing. My feelings were irrelevant. I would sacrifice them on the altar of submission to the church,
This is so embarrassingly familiar. It was the backbone of life.
but how could we have sincerely held such deeply incompatible views for so many years? It should have been inconceivable in a group of Westboro’s size and intelligence.
THE question of the century! How can Christian nationalists hold those incompatible beliefs.
When the kerfuffle reached Smith, who was best known for his films Clerks and Dogma, he launched what would become a years-long Twitter campaign to #SaveMegan, in which he regularly encouraged his millions of followers to inundate me with messages persuading me of the errors of Westboro’s ways.
These affairs were calamitous and fearsome to behold, their devastating consequences seared into my young psyche like a white-hot brand.
Yep. Premarital sex was that for us. My cousin and here and there in churches. Always scandalous and I had that extreme fear of pregnancy outside marriage. The sex part I thought was none of anyone's business, but I couldn't hide a pregnancy and was terrified of that happening.
adults soberly and dispassionately discussed the fate of this woman, whether she should be stripped of church membership in order to keep the church pure and to drive out the evil inside her.
Disfellowshipping. Familiar. To produce godly sorrow. But was never enacted without the three step process with 2-3 verses they thought addressed kicking someone out. They always talked about how no one preached fire and brimstone and consequences anymore - there's too much about God loving everyone. That utterance always deeply saddened me.
defy God and marry an unbeliever. Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.
Ugh. This thing was a huge part of my high school and 20s. But I did it anyway and they didn't disfellowship. They made their disapproval known though.
I biked straight home feeling sick and shaky and tortured with guilt. I cried as I rode, overcome with shame and panic that God would curse me for what I’d done. I had let my whole family down. My parents. The church. Myself. I was no longer unsullied. It wasn’t just my actions that were so exceedingly sinful; it was the indefensible thoughts that had led me to them. But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. According to Jesus, the fact that I’d had those feelings in the first place made me guilty of adultery.
This sounded like the beginning of a possible assault...
But in the way it sounded consensual, I HATE religion for begrudging people love, affection, connection and contact. Feeling guilt tor a hug?? I remember feeling guilt only because of religion for things like that and it is enraging. Plus drilling into us that women are weak and susceptible and feelings are bad and we shouldn't trust ourselves. Normal feelings are sins. It's sadistic and cruel. How dare they.
Plus, why shouldn't we pin this on men only since it talks about looking on a woman specifically. Purity culture should be theirs, not ours. If i was as selective and literal as they sometimes are, it would've been great to see the reaction to the failure of logic. I know it wouldn't have made a difference. They have an echo of the same dogmatism as Westboro. But it would be great to see.
