When people are in the thrall of poisonous ideology, it's really not all about deliberate ill will, or inherent hatred, or a lack of intelligence. It's about the unbelievable destructiveness and staying power of bad ideas and about finding ways to equip people with the tools they need to fight them.

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.

Several people I had conversations with were hugely influential. People who found internal inconsistency in Westboro's ideology. It was the first thing that allowed me to recognize that Westboro was wrong.

Because of the dynamics on the picket line all my life, I had these expectations of people. It was all the things that I had learned about outsiders from the time I was tiny, that they were evil, that if they were being nice to me they were trying to seduce me away from the truth.

Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise.

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

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

There's a rich history at Westboro of parodying pop culture. The thing about pop culture is that it gives us a shared language. We were constantly trying to co-opt things that were popular to deliver our own message.

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