Former Westboro hate mouthpiece on leaving the cult

Be sure to read Adrian Chen's gripping profile of former Westboro baptist cult twitterer Megan Phelps-Roper, who left the cult after coming to realize the futility of its hate gospel.

On December 20, 2009, Phelps-Roper was in the basement of her house, for a cult function, when she checked Twitter on her phone and saw that Brittany Murphy, the thirty-two-year-old actress, had died. When she read the tweet aloud, other cult members reacted with glee, celebrating another righteous judgment from dog… But Phelps-Roper had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking dog for Murphy’s death.

If you're been wondering why Westboro's been kind of boring lately, it turns out that there was a coup of sorts within the cult: day-to-day troll in chief Shirley Phelps-Roper (Megan's mother) was denounced, and a bunch of stodgy old men took over. Since then, women have been marginalized within the cult and it has lost much of its media savvy.
Read Adrian's piece to the last sentence: there is an absolutely amazing ending to the life and mind of the cult's founder, Fred Phelps.