Quotes from Megan Phelps-Roper

Generally, people don't change their minds about fundamentally deeply held beliefs; it doesn't happen in an instant - it's a process.

Some people cannot believe there is an alternative interpretation of the Bible aside from their own.

We read the whole Bible, cover to cover, over and over again... It wasn't that we read selective parts of the Bible. It was that we interpreted it in this very selective way.

I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it.

Growing up in Westboro, there was a culture of celebrating death and tragedy... a very calloused way of seeing other people's pain. After I left, it took me a while to be able to really empathize with what it must have been like for the loved ones of people whose funerals we protested.

I feel like I was transformed by the kindness of people who had every reason to show me cruelty and the transformative power of their decision to treat me like a human being, that was so huge, that anytime somebody wants me to talk about that I feel like I absolutely want to do that.

I miss my family every single day.

We believed it was a Good vs Evil situation: that the WBC was right and everybody else was wrong, so there was no questioning. It was a very public war we were waging against the 'sinners.'

I no longer believe that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. And I don't believe in God as a figure in the sky listening to your prayers, things like that.

In the era of Donald Trump the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own.

The very first soldier's funeral protest that I went to was in Omaha, Neb.

I went to my mother right before I was set to go protest my first soldier's funeral and asked my mother: 'I need to understand why we're doing this.'

All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And - given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for - forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me.

If you look at who you were a year ago and aren't somewhat embarrassed, you're not growing as a person.

Twitter was an alternative community for me. A different kind of community. I knew I was making people angry. But it didn't matter, they weren't my community. But the longer I was on Twitter and the more I came to know these people, to like and respect them, the more I could see the empathy and grief and sorrow they were expressing.

Westboro's fire and brimstone message was the air I breathed all my life. But after joining Twitter at the age of 23, I encountered people who challenged my beliefs and unearthed contradictions my blind faith had missed.

I don't believe any more that WBC has a monopoly on truth.

I don't feel confident at all in my beliefs about God. That's definitely scary. But I don't believe anymore that God hates almost all of mankind. I don't think that, if you do everything else in your life right and you happen to be gay, you're automatically going to hell. I don't believe anymore that WBC has a monopoly on truth.

What's important to me is how the Lord looks at me, more than anything else.

Assuming ill motives almost instantly cuts us off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do.

I remember feeling like we at WBC were a persecuted minority, triumphant in the face of evil people 'worshipping the dead' as we picketed funerals or rejoiced at the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Showing your own righteousness by pointing out someone's unrighteousness, the race to the bottom, the transgressions getting smaller and smaller and smaller but still treated with the same level of intolerance and condemnation, all of that stuff, even as I say it I am talking about Twitter but I am thinking about Westboro.

Even though I was 27 when I left, I still was largely treated like a child, because I wasn't married. My parents, my mother specifically, knew where I was and what I was doing at all times.

We know that we can't undo our whole lives.