Lauren Drain

We kept our signs, shirts, and caps hidden from view so that we wouldn't be harassed as we made our way through thousands of heavily armed security and military agents to our assigned protest site. Finally, almost in position, some of us started announcing our message. "God Hates You!" I declared, as we pushed forward. The high we got from picketing took over. "You are going to hell! You are all fag enablers!" we hollered over one another. "We are the only true patriots," I added. "If you people were really patriotic and religious, you would be standing with us holding signs." I told them that God mocked their calamities, and good Christians were supposed to warn nations against sin. "Thank God for September 11!" I yelled, the strongest insult to the sinners and the one most certain to get a rise out of the people within earshot.

The Washington crowd that day reacted strongly to us, which reinforced our sense of success. The more enraged they became, the more we felt we were making our message known. If they had thought we were just a bunch of crazies, they would have simply ignored us, but their heated interest in us obviously meant that our words were making an impact. We were delivering the message of the Holy Ghost, making us superior and perhaps even omniscient. In a sea of heathens, we were the messengers.

The next year, my father moved away from religion, saying that it tended to go to extremes. He said the preacher's theory that some people lived on the earth forever was a perfect example. Instead of the faithful Bible student he'd been, he embraced his hippie rocker side and became the coolest dad in the world. He never missed a single one of my peewee softball games, and he was always on the sidelines cheering me on. Everybody liked him. He was so sociable and still in his twenties then; he was like a big kid. All of my friends adored him, too. Dad filled the void left by the preacher's departure with a lot of wilder friends. He even started his own band called Boneyard. There always seemed to be a ton of people in the house drinking, smoking, and playing instruments in the basement. My mother had a few acquaintances from work, but they weren't really the kind of friends that came into their social life; those came from Dad. Mom would chat with them, but she really wasn't into the same kind of scene that Dad was. For one, she didn't like drinking. She might have a wine cooler here and there, but that was it. While Dad was playing rock and roll in the basement, Mom preferred being with Taylor and me in the backyard, watching us play on the trampoline, or making us treats in the kitchen. The one thing my parents liked to do together was play softball.

During my freshman year, my father started talking more seriously about making a documentary. He liked working at the Home Shopping Network and was clearly doing well there, but wanted to do something more creative and on his own terms. He'd been thinking about a subject for the two years we'd been in Florida, and was looking for a controversial topic that hadn't yet received much exposure. The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, came to his mind.

A year earlier, before my first-ever school dance, Dad sat me down for "the talk." He told me the responsibilities that went along with being social at my age, and said that if I was thinking about sex, he wanted me to come to him and my mother so that they could get me on birth control. Dad also said I should go to them if I was thinking about experimenting with drugs, because buying them from a stranger was extremely risky, and he didn't want me to end up dead. He had been appropriately protective, but not overly so, and above all he'd been very open and honest. But now, when I went to talk to my father about a particular boy at school named Will, I was shocked at his reaction. He said he had changed his mind about a lot of things and he didn't want me to date at all. Ever since Dad had come back from Topeka, he had become superstrict. There was no dating in the WBC, and he said I, too, needed to stay away from bad influences. My father thought Will was bad news, even though he was in my grade and from the neighborhood. I considered him to be cool because he had piercings and rode motocross bikes, but Dad said those things reminded him of himself as a teenager, and that he would never let someone with such a wild side date his daughter.

Will had been very snide, so my father had head-butted him and broken his nose. I couldn't believe that he had taken it this far and actually attacked him. "You ruined everything," I blurted out, which enraged him even more. Now, he began kicking and slapping at me, backing me into a corner. I was absolutely terrified. Mom and Taylor were home, but neither of them was coming to my rescue. "You think you can disobey me, you little bitch?" "Daddy, please stop," I begged. "We weren't doing anything." I ran down the hall to my room and climbed up into my top bunk, with Dad following on my heels. Seemingly possessed by his rage, he pulled me to the edge of the bed and let me fall to the ground. His face was red and his temples were bulging as he hulked over me, practically spitting in my face. My father was a big, tall guy, and I was fourteen and weighed less than a hundred pounds. He unleashed a verbal attack on me for what felt like hours while I cowered on the floor, trying to protect my face from the spit spewing from his mouth. When his tirade was over, he stormed down the hall and out of the house, slamming the door behind him. When I went to school the next day, I saw Will in the hallway. Several kids were crowded around him, asking him what had happened to his nose. I was mortified, and after making eye contact with him, I continued walking to my next class. A couple of days later, I saw him again at the community pool. He was way across on the far side, but when he saw me, he packed up his stuff and left. Will's parents filed an assault charge against my father the day after the attack, and when my father got the notice, he filed a counterclaim against Will. I didn't attend the hearing, but apparently the judge took into consideration the lewd love notes Dad presented in court and ultimately dismissed the charges. My father even managed to get a restraining order against Will, preventing him from coming within twenty feet of me when we were in school and one hundred yards of me outside the school setting until I turned eighteen.

People called us haters because the word hate was so prevalent in our protests. The rejoinders we heard most often from people trying to refute our message were: "God loves everybody" and "God is a loving, tolerant God." But as the pastor told us, these were perhaps the biggest lies of all. In truth, it was God who hated, not us. The pastor was God's mouthpiece on earth, and we were only the messengers. Most of our detractors thought that we went around spewing the same handful of lines from scripture and hiding behind a distortion and perversion of the Baptist faith. This couldn't be less accurate. The pastor might have called himself an "old school" or "primitive" Baptist, but the theology he preached was fundamental Calvinism.

Very rarely did we encounter people who could challenge us on the specifics of the Bible, but when we did, we treated them respectfully. We all carried electronic Bibles, palm-size e-readers of the traditional King James translation, which we'd take out in order to very gently show them the verses that supported each of the points they chose to contend.

He was always very graphic, telling us that homosexuals were the type of people who would eat each other's feces, have sex with each other's feces, take "golden showers," and drink each other's semen.

We were not forbidden to watch TV shows. In fact, when it came to the media, my parents probably did less censoring than more conventional parents, who were often afraid of the language and content in the network shows. My girlfriends and I enjoyed watching South Park on Comedy Central. We loved the show's crudeness and its parodies of other religions, especially the episode that lampooned Scientology. I thought that the fact that we were teens who were out in the world and not tempted by evil proved to everyone that we were truly God's example.

I was starting to freak out when my cell phone rang. It was my mother, wanting me to pick up my brother from day care. I told her I couldn't. When she asked why, I was forced to explain where I was so she could come pick me up. Her interrogation began the moment I opened her car door. She asked me if I had been visiting a boyfriend. She demanded to know how I met him, did I have sex with him, was there a chance I had gotten pregnant, why did I do it, did I want to go to hell, did I hate God, was I a whore, and would I rather be a whore or a Christian? She upset me so much I cried, but even worse, she told my father. He was furious. "I feel like I should hit you," he growled. "But it won't do any good. I will humiliate you enough to be memorable." He proceeded to tell everyone in the church about my transgression.

One time, I saw my father in the St. Francis cafeteria and realized that my mother was in the hospital as a patient. I figured it was probably something related to her recurring back problems. My father would never have come to my workplace unless there was a medical reason. I did a double take when I saw him. He looked me straight in the eye, then turned around and walked away. He wasn't even courteous enough to acknowledge me. I was a nurse, a person, and his daughter. He looked at me with an expression that let me know that I was not even human in his eyes. It was the scariest feeling I ever had. I suddenly thought that I had no importance, that I was nothing but a ghost. I was not a source of comfort to him whatsoever. That I was his daughter and a Christian--none of that mattered. There was no way I could have gone to see my mother in her hospital room.