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.'

My first memories are of picketing ex-servicemen's funerals and telling their families they were going to burn in hell.

There's so much power in seeing the possibility of change.

It's important to see people as being on a journey.

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

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.

I had never experienced the death of someone close to me until my grandfather passed away.

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.

You hear stories about Scientology, where people are prevented from leaving, and Westboro's not like that. If you decide that you don't want to be there, then they will help you leave. The shunning, cutting people off - they're doing that because they believe it is for our highest good.

I do send messages to my family; I send letters in the mail, and when I'm in town, I almost always leave something in the door of my house in Topeka.

I think for some people who leave Westboro, losing that sense of specialness feels like you've lost something really valuable and important. I had the opposite experience. I was so grateful to know that I wasn't uniquely evil. I was just a human being who had had this set of experiences that were outside of my control.

In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012.

When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view.

My family thought - and thinks - very seriously about words. About language and what it means and how it shapes us and how it should shape us and change us.

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.

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.

My husband and I eventually want to start a nonprofit and call it the Westboro Foundation. It was his idea, and I love it. I would love for Westboro to come to mean something besides 'God hates gays.'

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.

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.'

Empathy is not a betrayal of one's cause.

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.'

Westboro would quote this passage from the book of Leviticus that, for them, shows that the definition of 'love thy neighbor' is to rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning. And if you don't do that, then you hate your neighbor in your heart.

Discussing and dissecting opposing viewpoints with others on Twitter opened up a whole new way of thinking for me.

For my grandfather, there was no distinction. There was no tension between his support for civil rights for black people and his animus toward gay people because both of those positions were scripturally derived.