Phelps children raised on faith

TOPEKA, Kan. (Map, News) - Two boys play “Halo” on Xbox 360 and build Lego spaceships in the den of a peach-colored house in a quiet neighborhood of Topeka.

In the next room, dozens of signs reading, “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags” lean against the wall, waiting for the Phelps family’s next military funeral protest.

In the living room, Shirley Phelps-Roper, one of 13 children of the Rev. Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, sits on a green couch, a King James Bible resting on her lap.

She has just led most of her 11 children in a Scripture reading and enthusiastically agrees to an interview. She’s appeared five times on Fox News, done radio interviews with stations from around the world and recently appeared on a BBC documentary about the Phelps that dubbed them “America’s most-hated family.”

“This tiny little church plunked down in the middle of the country has got the whole nation in an uproar,” says Phelps-Roper, 50.

“It’s amazing. Who could write that scenario?”

A federal jury in Baltimore recently decided the church must pay nearly $11 million to Albert Snyder because Westboro members protested the Westminster funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who died in Iraq. The jury found the church members inflicted emotional distress and invaded the privacy of the father in a decision that raised Westboro’s profile.

“Now the nation is talking; it hasn’t slowed down at all,” Phelps-Roper says.

“Every day, all manner of people – professors, law schools, lawyers, editorials, newspapers all over the country – are all talking about what this means for the First Amendment.”

The fundamentalist fringe group revamped its Web site, posted new movies explaining its inflammatory protest signs and created music videos with lyrics exhorting its anti-gay message, which are then picked up on YouTube.

“Every one of these is a vehicle,” says Phelps-Roper, who runs the day-to-day operations of the church on behalf of her 78-year-old father.

“We ask, ‘What can we do to get their attention?’ ‘What can we do to make this nation understand that if you are going to go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, you will suffer their fate?’”

But preaching hate on the sidewalks of America – the church has organized about 33,000 protests since 1991 – often attracts the ire of the public and sometimes, the handcuffs of police.

While picketing a military funeral in Nebraska this summer, Phelps-Roper was arrested and charged with desecration of an American flag and child abuse after her 10-year-old son, Jonah, stood on a flag. Jonah, and brothers Noah, 8, and Gabriel, 12, and sisters Megan, 21, and Grace, 14, watched as police cuffed their mother and placed her in the back seat of a cruiser.

Several days later, Jonah cried and said, “If the police just would have told us not to step on the flag, we wouldn’t have.”

Phelps-Roper is still fighting the charges and believes the incident was a police set-up organized to discourage the family from protesting.

“If the cops are so concerned for the children’s welfare, they wouldn’t have taken their mother and left them there,” she says as the sound of her boys playing echoes in the other room.

“I’m sure that experience has kind of made Jonah grow up.”

Her children have traveled to almost all the states for protests, some since they were in strollers, to spread their belief that soldiers die in Iraq as God’s punishment for America’s acceptance of gays.

At protests, angry observers yell, threaten violence and in 1993, struck some of the church members. Someone targeted the church with a homemade bomb in 1995, and after the recent trial in Baltimore concluded, someone left firecrackers and spray-painted the church in red, writing, “God hates the Phelps.” The phone rings off the hook, mostly from people who call family members crazy.

Coming from such an infamous family has made the children, who all attend or graduated from public schools, a target of classmates and teachers, Phelps-Roper says.

One teacher called home to find out why Sam Phelps-Roper, her oldest, didn’t want to participate in the school’s Christmas party. The family refuses to celebrate holidays as a display of its disgust for America.

The church’s children aren’t allowed to date, a stance that doesn’t seem to bother Megan Phelps-Roper, a senior at nearby Washburn University.

“I wouldn’t want to date anyone I go to school with anyway. They are self-centered and ignorant of the Bible,” says Megan, who wears Airwalk moon boots and a sparkly scarf.

Class discussions at her college sometimes turn to religion, but Megan says her ability to quote the Bible usually helps fend off would-be bullies. She considers her cousins and other church members her friends. She and her siblings don’t typically invite classmates over to the house, save for the occasional school project.

Not everyone has been content enough to stay Westboro members. More than 30 members, both those related and not related to the Phelps family, have left the church in the past two years.

Some of those who left in the “exodus,” Phelps-Roper says, were asked to leave because they broke church rules.

Today, about 70 people, most related to the family, regularly attend the weekly Sunday services.

Church members have left because as the apocalypse draws near, Phelps-Roper says, God separates the wheat from the chaff, borrowing from a parable in the Bible.

Topeka residents are accustomed to seeing Westboro’s protests, particularly in Gage Park, where Fred Phelps claims he first mounted the pickets two decades ago because two gay men allegedly approached his then-6-year-old grandson, Josh.

At a local coffee shop, a flier advertising a counter-protest group hangs on a bulletin board, reading: “Hey Liberals of Kansas! Tired of seeing our streets littered with hateful picket signs? Then do something about it!”

Sitting nearby, Topeka native Lonny Honeycutt shares his single complaint about the clan.

“The only thing they do wrong is have little kids involved,” he says.

“How is that right?”

But Phelps-Roper vows to press on with her children at her side, saying God will protect them.

Asked if the protests, flights across the country and confrontations with almost everyone she encounters ever grow so intense that she wants to walk away, tears swell in her eyes.

“There are so many lying, false prophets,” she says.

“It’s so sad. Sometimes, that’s what’s so hard. Albert Snyder says he feels bad for my children. But my children are alive and well and serving God.”

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com

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