Through the years I’ve collected quotations, witty sayings, and well-turned phrases that have caught my eye. While attending a recent lecture I was reminded of a quote I’d saved. It was something Gerry Spence said, the trial lawyer from Wyoming, the one who liked to wear a buckskin jacket with fringes topped off with a big hat: “What if we have been born in a cage like the polar bear at the San Diego Zoo, and having known nothing else, we accept the cage as freedom?” Let me tell you why that’s significant here.
The lecture was given by a young lady named Megan Phelps-Roper at the recent South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. She is the granddaughter of Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. His congregation made news some years back by standing on the street where they derided and insulted families who had come to the funerals of fallen soldiers. They also directed their rage and wrath at others deemed sinful by Phelps. At these events the young Megan would stand, already at the age of 5, holding a sign inscribed with some rude abusive phrase she couldn’t yet read.
As she matured, she realized the world couldn’t be viewed in black and white terms like her grandfather preached, but that Bible interpretations varied and could even be in error. Social media such as facebook and twitter let her engage in conversations with more enlightened people. It was an Orthodox Jew from Jerusalem who pointed out inaccuracies in her understanding of Old Testament translations. She finally did some independent thinking, left her family’s church and has written of her experiences in a new book “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.”
She and a sister ended up in Deadwood and took residence at a bed and breakfast for a month with the intention of doing a lot of reading which they’d previously been denied access to. Here’s where the Gerry Spence quote came alive for me. Since the girls’ mother had been in complete control of their lives, basically robbing them of their free will to make decisions, they didn’t know how to break completely free of her influence. They asked the owner of the bed and breakfast if it would be all right for them to walk downtown to look around. Imagine, Megan was 20 years old at the time and she asked permission to leave the house; the owner of the establishment wasn’t much older than she.
The sisters walked through snow and in wonderment along Deadwood’s long main street filled with casinos and finally entered one where they approached the bar to order hot chocolates. Megan found it liberating to enter the world she’d been forbidden to go before. Now she feels more Christian than ever after realizing how awful her church treated others who did not fit their mold. She has since married a young man from the area and given birth to a daughter who had just celebrated her first birthday.
Megan Phelps-Roper probably related to the recent news item of Ellen DeGeneris and George W. Bush sitting side-by-side at a football game. As she said, “During the game they showed a shot of George and me laughing together and so, people were upset. They thought why is a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president?” The President and DeGeneris did not let their differences keep them from enjoying each other’s company.
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