I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old
when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time.
My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan.
I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity
surrounded by a few dozen relatives
with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet:
"Gays are worthy of death."
This was the beginning.
Our protest soon became a daily occurance and an international phenomenon,
and as a member of Westboro Baptist Church,
I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.
The end of my anti-gay picketing career,
and life as I knew it,
came 20 years later,
triggered in part by strangers on Twitter
who showed me the power of engaging the other.
In my home,
life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil.
The good was my church and its members,
and the evil was everyone else.
My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world,
and that reinforced our otherness on a daily basis.
"Make a difference between the unclean and the clean,"
the verse says.
And so we did,
from baseball games to military funerals,
we trecked across the country with neon protest signs in hand
to tell others exactly how unclean they were
and exactly why they were headed for damnation.
This was the focus of our whole lives.
This was the only way for me to do good in a world that sits in satan's lap.
And like the rest of my 10 siblings,
I believed what I was taught with all my heart,
and I pursued Westboro's agenda with a special sort of zeal.
In 2009, that zeal brought me to Twitter.
Initially, the people I encountered on the platform
were just as hostile as I expected.
They were the digital version of the screaming hoards
I'd been seeing at protests since I was a kid,
but in the midst of that digital brawl,
a strange pattern developed.
Someone would arrive at my profile with the usual rage and scorn,
I would respond with a custom mix of bible verses, pop culture references
and smiley faces,
they would be understandably confused and caught off-guard,
but then a conversation would ensue,
and it was civil --
full of genuine curiosity on both sides.
How had the other come to such outrageous conclusions about the world?
Sometimes the conversation even bled into real life.
People I'd sparred with on Twitter would come out to the picket line to see me
when I protested in their city.
A man named David was one such person.
He ran a blog called "Jewlicious,"
and after several months of heated but friendly arguments online,
he came out to see me at a picket in New Orleans.
He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem,
where he lives,
and I brought him Kosher chocolate,
and held a "God hates Jews" sign.
(Laughter)
There was no confusion about our positions,
but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred.
We'd started to see each other as human beings,
and it changed the way we spoke to one another.
It took time,
but eventually these conversations planted seeds of doubt in me.
My friends on Twitter took the time to understand Westboro's doctrines,
and in doing so,
they were able to find inconsistencies I'd missed my entire life.
Why did we advocate the death penalty for gays
when Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?"
How could we claim to love our neighbor
while at the same time praying for god to destroy them?
The truth is that the care shown to me by these strangers on the Internet
was itself a contradiction.
It was growing evidence
that people on the other side were not the demons I'd been led to believe.
These realizations were life-altering.
Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth
but flawed human beings,
I couldn't pretend otherwise.
I couldn't justify our actions --
especially our cruel practice of protesting funerals,
and celebrating human tragedy.
These shifts in my perspective
contributed to a larger erosion of my trust in my church,
and eventually it made it impossible for me to stay.
In spite of overwhelming grief and terror,
I left Westboro in 2012.
In those days just after I left,
the instinct to hide was almost paralyzing.
I wanted to hide from the judgement of my family,
who I knew would never speak to me again --
people whose thoughts and opinions had meant everything to me.
And I wanted to hide from the world I'd rejected for so long.
People who had no reason at all to give me a second chance
after a lifetime of antagonism,
and yet,
unbelievably,
they did.
The world had access to my past because it was all over the Internet --
thousands of tweets and hundreds of interviews,
everything from local TV news to the Howard Stern show --
but so many embraced me with open arms anyway.
I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused,
but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it.
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 giving my history,
it was more than I could've hoped for --
forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt.
It still amazes me.
I spent my first year away from home adrift with my younger sister,
who had chosen to leave with me.
We walked into an abyss,
but we were shocked to find the light and a way forward
in the same communities we'd targeted for so long.
David,
my "Jewlicious" friend from Twitter,
invited us to spend time among a Jewish community in Los Angeles.
We slept on couches in the home of a Hasidic Rabbi, his wife
and their four kids.
The same rabbi that I'd protested three years earlier
with a sign that said,
"Your Rabbi is a whore."
(Laughter)
We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism and life
while we washed dishes in their Kosher kitchen,
and chopped vegetables for dinner.
They treated us like family.
They held nothing against us.
And again I was astonished.