Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church

by Megan Phelps-Roper

“The key to memorization is attention; and the key to attention is interest.” His implication was that the only cause of a failure to memorize was a failure to care—

I couldn’t allow bitterness to steal the beauty in my family, or love to conceal the destructiveness in it.

the First Amendment, a quote from 1920s-era Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Doubt causes us to hold a strong position a bit more loosely, such that an acknowledgment of ignorance or error doesn’t crush our sense of self or leave us totally unmoored if our position proves untenable.

Certainty is the opposite: it hampers inquiry and hinders growth. It teaches us to ignore evidence that contradicts our ideas, and encourages us to defend our position at all costs, even as it reveals itself as indefensible.

Certainty sees compromise as weak, hypocritical, evil, suppressing empathy and allowing us to justify infl...

open discourse and dialectic is the most effective enabler of the evolution of individuals and societies.

That the answer to bad ideas is to publicly reason against them, to advocate for and propagate better ones.

And that it is dangerous to vest any central authority with broad powers to limit the bounds of acceptable discussion—because these powers lend themselves to authoritarian abuse, the creation of echo chambers, and...

In short, the principles underlying the freedom of speech recognize that all of us are susceptible to cognitive deficiencies and groupthink, and that an open marketpl...