Booktv. Org. Joining us now on book tv is megan roper, shes the author of this book, unfollow, a memoir of loving and leaving, the west borough Baptist Church, where did you grow up and how . I grew up in kansas at west borough Baptist Church, started by my grandfather and, you know, at west borrow we had the normal life in some place, i went to public schools, made cookies with my parents, all wonderful memories but then there was this, our lives were organized around the picketing ministry, from the age of 5i went out to protest gay people originally and then from there it morphed to everyone outside ofin our church was headed for hell and we had a duty to go and warn them of the consequences of their sins and our whole lives were organized around that ministry. How did the picketing ministry begin, you talk about the loving family that you have and a normal childhood, when did the god hate fags come . In 1991 when i was 5 years old an incident occurred, shortly before that, incident happened at local park where my grandfather was biking in the park and he thought he saw my older brother who was then about 4, 5 years old being approached by two men trying to lure him into the bushes and he discovered that this local park was a place t well known for as Meeting Place for gay men and so he went and started trying to get the city to clean up park, my grandfather called it the great gauge park decency drive, first protest we had a sign that says gays are worthy of death and inside the bible passage romans 132 and almost immediately, again, the response to that very first protest was outrage from the community, people came out, you know, local churches came out to counterprotest and said things like god loves, speaks loudest, the response to west borough ministry, i thought it was a stgood thing, blessed are you women and pursuit you and say all men are evil against you falsely for name sake, they hated me, they will hate you, anybody who speaks the word of god will be hated. So i learned from a very young age that we were the good guys and everyone else, they were the bad guys and we had a duty to go and tell them what god required of them. What was fred phelps like a grandfather . He was loving, sweet and funny, he was the fire peacher that you could hear in the sermons, see it in interviews, obviously very passionate believer, zealous believer in everything that he preached but he wast also a loving grandfatr who, i absolutely adored and i i miss him terribly after i left. What was the Phelps Family reputation in topeka, you talked about playing video games, did they say stay away from megan phelps . Our participants raised us to be polite and friendly and Good Students to help others with our homework, things like that and so we had aquinces, acquaintances and i started protesting and i had cohort of classmates that i was out of cochurches and performing arts center, so we were constantly protesting the same people that i was going to school with and then by the time i got to high school i actually would leave class, you know, at lunch period, cross the street and picket my high school as classmates were driving by and sometimes screaming and throwing things, there was a sense of otherness, sense of us versus them, we might be required to sit in class together and to play nice for a while but i understood that i couldnt trust them, that i needed to keep them at arms length and, of course, i didnt work very hard to do that but for the most part people didnt want, you know, didnt want to be close to us. Did you rebel in our otherness . Yeah, for the most part, i mean, there could be times where it could be a little bit, little bit awkward, for the most part i saw it as inevitable, like if i was going to serve god, if i was going to do my duty to my fellow man then i was going to be hated an because i was raised in that environment it seemed normal, it seemed like just, you know, another fact of life that i needed to assimilate. And the numbers are up on the screen if youd like to participate in our conversation this afternoon with Megan Phelps Roper former of the baptist. What happened . I left, i started having conversations there. The social media director for west borough . It wasnt a formal position, i read article on cnn. Com and thought it was ama place for meo go and spread our message to another audience and i ended up being changed far more i think than thet people that i was trying to preach to. There was thean same kind of hostility and confrontation that i experienced on the picket line, having real conversation with me, even the people who started out, you know, with the instinct, following instinct to shame me and to try to isolate me and made me think i was a bad person, they knew i was sincere and the righteousness and they got curious, they were able to really dig into the, you know, the indepth questions to understand best boroughs theology and they were able to find internal and inconsistencies in our doctrine, that was the first time i was able to see that we could be wrong, that west borrow didnt have monopoly on truth, only the truth of god, so it was mind blowing for me and that was the thread that began to unravel, eventually unraveled the whole system for me. Could you raise those questions to your grandfather, granada mother or your parents . I did to some people in, you know, i did to my mother i think more than anyone and the problem was because because of how, you know, west borough, their whole lives are organized around ministry and because they have taken such a public position on the issues, the idea of changing the mind, even if they do change their minds, i mean, almost never talk about it publicly, it would cast a doubt on their message, it is something thats very hard to change minds about something acknowledge something that you have been passionately preaching for so long. I tried to, you know, in cautious way and the response was so visceral and so negative that it terrified me and so i kind of compartmentalized it and ultimately that i rejected, i stopped holding the picket signs but i didnt feel like i could bepp completely open, okay, jusa few issues and the rest are right, i came to realize, if we are wrong about all of these things, why do i think, why do i accept that the rest is true and that opened the door as bigger question. How many members of west borough, how many have left . The membership stayed largely the same for as long as i can remember, 70 or 80 people, less than 100. So now its my generation having children because they are going to be raising in that environment. Lets hear from our viewers and lets begin with the call from jordan, georgia, jordan youre on with Megan Phelps Roper unfollow is the name of the book. So megan, i just we wanted to ask you what exactly was the moment that catalyzed your decision to leave, remorse . Im having a little bit of trouble hearing you, what caused my thank you, jordan, just a reminder to viewers we will leave jordan there, reminder to viewers, speak clearly into your phone, makes it a lot easier, but what catalyzed you to leave is what he wants to know . So it started with a question about a sign that people on twitter david raised the question, he asked about a picket sign that said Death Penalty for fags, we were calling for Death Penalty because of the passage and he pointed to two situations, first he said, you know, about jesus, didnt jesus, didnt he without sin cast first spell. Wei are not casting stones, we are preaching words and david gave the very obvious response, but youre advocating that the government cast stones, that quote from jesus was talking about Death Penalty, didnt your mother have a child, your oldest brother out of wedlock and, you know, and heha said, thats another sin that deserves the Death Penalty, isnt it . That was the first time i thought through the fact that my mother we would say that she didnt deserve the punishment because she had repented and that if you kill somebody as soon as they sin you completely call the opportunity to repent and be forgiven, these two points that he made, again, this was one i couldnt acknowledge it to him at the time or even hardly int my own mind that we could be wrong about something that was what started me down the path of questioning, then, you know, the church started doing things that were unscripttural,d and that was contrary to thehe established pattern from the bible and they started doing things like lying, photoshopping themselves in proteststa that they were that they had not actually been at. That was part of it too, the realization and then ultimately the questions became bigger, i knew before i left, i realized i came upon the passage, we were praying for people to die based on things that were king david, prayed for his enemys children to be fatherless and then came to realize that there are passages in the new testament that jesus says love your to pursuitsays love your you and apostle saying bless and curse not, so we were doing the things that i came to believe were unscriptture vale and protests in funeral, west borrow failing to live up to own standards, that wasro where i eventually came to realize, this is not, its not biblical, theres no real justification for this and i cant keep doing it. Your family is quite educated. Yeah. A lot of law degrees. Education was very important, it was something that i understood that i was going to be going to college, i had planned to go to law school for a long time to kind of follow my in the family footsteps, eventually i didnt do that because the apocalypse was coming, the world will end they say,he but, yeah, its one of those things that people have a hard time believing that educated people could really believe these things and to be kind of, you know, how can they be indoctrinated if they are so smart, my answer is almost everyone who was in the church was raised in the church and so from a very young age they learn today, weth all learn today marshal all of our resourced, ouall of our im about to sorry, we learn today marshal all of our intellectual faculties to defend that ideology and since they seem to have an answer for everything, this is why for me it was important that the initial doubts came from these internal inconsistencies. Glen in freeland, michigan, hi, glen. Hi, thanks very much, everybody, and can you hear me all right . Please go ahead, we are listening. Okay, yes, its interesting, i a wanted to quote something bt i was just thinking about the that, its not not to love your enemies but you must also hate your friends, what i wanted to ask, i wanted to ask about what she said and everything thats done out of love takes place beyond good and evil and i was just curious, does she think that does she now think that what the family and former friends were doing was, does she think they are evil or at least being evil with this socalled hate speech or does she take a different view . Thank you, glen. I do think they do things that are evil, i do believe especially for me the funeral protesting is some of the worst things that we ever did, celebrating the death of children, praying for god, we had a sign that said pray for more dead children, pray for more dead kids it said, i believe thats evil, do i believe, though, that for me the fact that my family is motivated by good intention, you know, having lived among them for, you know, first nearly 27 years of my life i see them as good people who have been trapped by bad ideas, you know, and i understand there are some peoplb who really want me to completely condemn myself and, you know, the line from the great gapsy, to me its grace, its what people did for me, they saw me, they were willing to suspend their judgments long enough to show mein empathy and compassion at a time when i seemed to deserve it the least and that was what changed, that was able to allowed them to get through to me and to change my heart and mind and so thats how i view my family now, i try to give them the same grace and compassion and empathy that people showed me and i hope that they can be as well. Can you walk us through a couple of steps connecting christianity to pray for more dead children or protesting at a soldiers funeral . Yeah, the funeral protest, so best borough, i was 19 years old when we started protesting soldiers funerals, this is a question that i asked my mother, we had protested funerals before but specifically soldiers funerals, i need to understand why we are doing this, i need to understand why, and she took me over to me and my siblings and said this passage where god says i set before you day of blessing and curse, blessing if you will obey and curse if you wont. Can we agree that a dead child is a curse from god and not a blessing, west burrow views it god well deserved, they believe in predestination, anything that happens is by definition the will of god, will wills this to happen and punishment is sin, youre a filthy matter of life to point b, punishment, the person is dead and so we need to tell the living that the funeral protest, it wasnt about the dead it was about the living to give them an opportunity, we are saying repent or perish and repent or you will be killed in a war like this man or repent or you will go to hell like this man did. Thats how we thought. They see it as definition of love, the definition of compassion because if you see somebody going down the path, its going to lead them as my mother would say curses from god in this life and hell in the next. W if you see them going down the path, you hate them in your heart, again, because of that framing it was one of those things, it cast into your desire i think as human being to do good and that was the definition you mentioned that as a child you held a poster and protest of homosexuality as 4yearold or 5 or 6yearold, what was your understanding of what homosexual ity was obviously not a church. Did you just claim the nominational title . West borough sees themselves as baptist as john the baptist, not part they have no affiliation with any other Baptist Church and they see that, you know, any kind of affiliation like that as unscripttural, west borrow is independent and they saw what a new Testament Church should be, so everyone has disavowed them and theyy have disavowed everyone, your other question about what did i understand home as homosexuality, it wasnt a choice, a decision that god caused my grandfather would say god doesnt hate you because youre gay, youre gay because god hates you, god has given you over to sin, growing in the picket line, i understood it was men having sex with men, that was how and my grandfather from the time i was young would stand andi describe gay sex acts as e understood them in detail and, you know, i read about this in the book too, so by the time i was 7 or 8 years old i could describe all of these things to you because of what he taught us in the pulpit, give us the sense of discuss to have be instinctive reaction when we saw gay people. Youve been out of the church 7 years, what was the last conversation you had with fred phelps your grandfather. My last conversation was on his death bed, i went in secret, my sister and i went to visit him in hospice. What year was this . March of 2014, he had been, i found out at the end of february that he had been voted out of the church. I had a brother who had just left, you know, i wasnt sure exactly, i wasnt sure that the last conversation i had with him was the day before that, the day that i left the church and he had kind of, you know, his voice was so disdain as he said to my mother, i thought we had us a jewel this time, talking about me and heartbreaking to look at him and to realize that, you know, i was losing my everything, my community, my family, my home, you know, every aspect of my life in chose to go leave the church and so i didnt know what i was going to find, if he would have any interest in speaking to me, if he was trying to get back into the church and he was incredible by kind, he was clearly suffering from, from some kind of dementia, his systems were kind of shutting down at this point, a couple of weeks before he passed away, but he eventually came back to the present and was incredible by kind to my sister and me and im so, so grateful that i got to have that moment. Why was he voted out of the church, he founded the church, didnt he . He did, this was from my brother that had just left, the day that my grandfather was voted out he went onto front line of the church where, you know, directly across the street in 2012 i think it was this lgbtq affirming charity had bought a house and they painted in the colors of the rainbow and, you know, kind of standing symbol against west boroughs message and my grandfather went out and called out those people running the charity and said youre good people and my brother said that when he was voted out, they said he had cast and what further proof did they need that he was held down and i recently saw, west borrow has not tried to talk about that and since i left and i originally saw a video where one of my uncles said that gramp is probably in hell and clear that he was voted out and just a heartbreaking thing. Kevin, topeka, kansas, go ahead. Hi, megan, i just wanted to congratulate you on your book and i just happened to come across this on tv, i usually record Something Else and i want putting out for your book and i hope people read it and get the truth of whats going on because a lot of people dont understand whats going on and i appreciate you. Kevin, youre from topeka, kevin, being from topeka, what was it like or what is it like having the west borough Baptist Church in your city . I see them when going to church sometimes i see them at different churches around town and i just drive by, i just ignore t them, you know. [laughter] its one thing i got to hand it to them. I dont know. Would you consider them a major factor . Well, i dont know much about them, you know, i know what the church is and stuff, you know. All right. Kevin, thank you. Other than what megan said lets leave it there. Lets hear a little bit from megan about the city of topeka, growing up there, being a part of the community, when you went to the stores do people recognize you, you kept phelps in your married name . Yeah, i kind ofn just took t for granted, i knew we were never going to leave, my grandfather saw the city of topeka as the seat of faith, the golden city, same as ancient babalo, in that was destroyed. You know, since i left the church its hard to go back because i run into my family there, i cant help, you know, i cant help going back, i cant whenever im there i cant help going back to the place that i spent my whole life. Of course, i believe that theyre doing wrong but i also believe that theyre human beings, so its kind of complicated, but i lost your question, i think. Thats fine, we will leave it there, Megan Phelps Roper, memoir of leaving the west baptist show, on to take your call. Watch live tuesday at 1 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan2 as the Senate Begins the trial with vote on rules. The Senate Impeachment trial of President Trump live unfiltered coverage on cspan2 on demand at cspan. Org impeachment and listen with the free cspan radio app. Over the years book tv covered several authors covering president ial impeachment, here is a portion of one of them. For us to question was never impeach or nothing, it was impeach or what else and when is impeachment really the right move and as we saw it there are basically 6 questions that you have to ask and answer in order to make that decision and it was those six questions that structured our book although we provide tons of historical examples and support from constitutional law and we do at times speak about President Trump and the question sort of begin at the beginning, why is there impeachment power, what were the framers trying to do when they included the process in the constitution and we start by talking about benjamin franklin. If we dont provide right away to get rid of the president peacefully, they will assassinate him. We saw that the stories that the framers knew of failed leaders was basically a tale of assassinations, coups, he thought there had to be a way to end cycle. On the other side of the ocean but they had internalized as English Common law and they said that we can remove the president when he abuses power and that way of society and we can do it peacefully without killing him, without more generally destabilizing the country as a whole and the question of when you can do that and who you can do that was to the framers intimately linked to the question of what will the checks and balances look like, you know, the question of who is going to be the president was linked to the question of who can remove the president and when and why, and they were concerns with creating a system where you could have adventures creative energetic president , one who could flex muscle and use powers in way that is might not have been foreseen but who things really went off the rails could be ejected and that understanding of what they were trying to do ran throughout their thought process and we talk about the framers not because we think the word is final, but rather because in order to understand the impeachment power we think its vital they have a grip of where they came from and what its role is in the broader constitutional scheme, and so in the first chapter we end by 3 basic lessons about impeachment power, first put in place to prevent abuses of the executive power, the power vested in the presidency, leeway there because the constitution underspecifies what the powers of the president really is and they have evolved in extraordinary ways across time. On the one hand you have to watch for abusive power but on the other hand you need to measure that against evolving understanding of life and the second lesson we offer that in general partisanship should not play a role in impeachment and impeachment motivated by personal animus have not only historically failed and have been condemned, the longterm consequences of democracy could be quite dire because they would destabilize elections as something that we use to define who is going to Govern Society and provided by elections is important to maintaining stability and the last thing we emphasize is that although its tempting to focus on watergate, a case for when to impeach, impeachment power heavier than that, ordering the cia to destroy his political enemies but also where you have someone who is corrupt, highfunctioning moron, really anyone who uses their powers in way that is threaten to undermine democracy as much and then we turn to what is often presented as the only relevant question, whats a high crime and misdemeanor or what justifies impeachment, under the constitution interpreting it in good faith, when is it appropriate to remove the president from power, now, theres some folks that set this back in 1970s when nixon was trying to impeach douglas, theres nothing more to the story and all of the legal stuff just missing the underlying politics, we think thats right but interestingly so, people and congress are not acting by reference to understandings that they and their constituents have about what high crimes and misdemeanors means, its also only long if you think that they are real badfaith actors who dont care about the constitution and its value and structure and we have to hope that thats not the case because the constitution gives Congress Many tough judgments to make and it doesnt tell them how to make them and so all of this ultimately fends to some degree on the proper functioning of our political system and its officials and so in thinking about high crimes and misdemeanors, when the president engages in this conduct is appropriate to remove him from office and when the president has acted and someone who risks posing a great deal of future damage to our society, if hes allowed to remain in office, impeachment is not punitive, its not about punishing him, you can indict after he leaves office for that, its about preventing him from exercising power in a harmful way Going Forward, when is the president Going Forward a real risk to society . And there we emphasize at some length that corruption betrayal, abuse of power subverting government, coupled with intentional and evil deeds, theyre basically something so plainly wrong that no reasonable president could honestly profess, not the same as committing a crime, some crimes are impeachable and if we survive presidency, what kind of nation will we become and in some ways will we even be a democracy anymore, and in that chapter we do address allegations relating to President Trump identifying a few that could potentially justify impeachment. Now this leads us in our third chapter to a question that we think everyone should be asking but no one ever seems to which is when should congress exercise the power not to impeach, if the president has committed a highcrime misdemeanor or bribery or treason which justifies the president s removal from office, congress doesnt automatically have to impeach, the constitution doesnt establish the house and doesnt mandate that they reach for the most extreme weapon whenever doing so could theoretically be justified, powers of investigation and oversight, powers to legislate and it says figure out what you need to use to deal with the problem at hand and if you think about impeachment that way, not as is there a high crime and misdemeanor, the whole framework looks a little bit different especially great powers come with a price when they are exercised and the potential price of impeachment is great, and so in chapter 3 of the book and i will just sort of sketch it out we basically say in thinking about impeachment you have 3 questions to ask, what if we impeach too early, what are the risks of impeaching not at all or too late and what risks are unavoidable in any impeachment no matter how well timed and no matter how well justified and we will try to provide framework that we think would apply to presidency to come to emphasize judgment calls about what the future may hold and how people will respond in an effort to end the presidency, of course, the main driver in that effort is always congress and this brings us to chapter 4, where we talk about the role where congress should play and thereto we begin at the beginning, why did the framers give power to congress, we address at some length, they invested in house and senate, divided into two branches and impose a super majority requirement on the senate which was quite unusual in the history of western constitutionalism. We also note they basically considered giving to everything that they have considered giving it to. They considered the house, the senate, the Supreme Court and the senate and the Supreme Court sitting together state governors, legislatures and committee of chief justice of all courts, these are people who left no stone unturned including stones that they were actively creating at the convention and ultimately they settled on congress as branch to exercise power and to understand what that means, we not only talk about why they gave it to them but how congress understood the power. What should the trial process be, should there be evidence, should there be lawyers, whats the standard of proof. We provide a quite comprehensive tour from beginning to end of how impeachment actually works. First among them the process fair and impartial and legitimate because at the end of the day the American People need to accept congress judgment, even people who might be strongly opposed to it from the very beginning and the least congress owes to people of the country is fairness. Now, this turns, this leads us and turns to fifth chapter to have book where we step back because lately theres a lot of impeachment talk going around, members of congress are expected to have opinions on whether you should impeach President Trump, i suspect many people in this room might have thoughts on that matter as well, thats not normal, you know, when i was writing this book i called my grandparents pretty early on and i said we are writing a book about impeachment, he said thats funny, i dont remember growing up and that being a thing people talked about, when the president did something bad, nobody raised in the air and said we must impeach him. They definitely didnt have impeach him because they didnt have the internet. We live in a period where impeachment has become default response to allegations of president ial wrongdoing in our politics and how you know, how does that situate in u. S. History and it turns out as we go back in chapter 5 and look at impeachment resolution ever introduced in the house, every mention of impeachment in congress, every Major NationalPolitical Movement that had impeachment as prominent theme that we live in strange times, a few flashes right at the end of the civil war that impeachment vanished from the national scene, when truman fired douglas mcarthur, a national cry with impeachment talk which was followed again one year later, but then impeachment as at least the president again from the scene until nixon and then after nixon it really disappeared into regan and appeared little bit more under reagan and bush but wasnt until bill clinton and the clinton impeachment and ever since then that impeachment that became dominant motif how americans think about presidency and in the period and whats alarm to go me a ton of impeachment talk with no benefit and quite a few harms, certainly doesnt appear to be the case that president s are notably more constraint or more likely to be impeached in this period of time, hyperpartisanship that they are less likely to be because mustering a consensus is more difficult, massive oversupply of impeachment talk has given politics more existential character, encourages tribalism and poll abization and worse, it can actually help a president who is abusing his power because as we saw under bush, obama and now trump, president s facing impeachment threats from the ideological extreme of the other side use them to motivate their base, to raise funds and to enhance loyalty within their own Political Party and worse, a party that runs on a promise to impeach historically loses in the midterm elections and in that way too a party that overdoses on impeachment talk may ultimately suffer in its ability to restrain the president to other means and so we worry in chapter 5 that we live in a strange new world of impeachment talk in which the president including president s who are misusing their power may benefit and in which the underlying dynamics may suffer from that change and we suggest the simple answer, people need to chill out a little bit. This is a running theme of our book, impeachment is an act of judgment, the constitution only schedules in very vague terms when its necessary and when its appropriate, what it ultimately asks of us is judgment which powers to use, which political strategies to invoke, what manners of understanding democracy are most appropriate and impeachment is not always the right first move but not always the last right move. Can the impeachment power achieve its basic purpose in the world of broken politics . The answer isnt simple, by requiring a super majority in the senate the u. S. Constitution essentially makes a wager on the u. S. People, gambles that president ial wrongdoing that menaces our democracy will arose opposition Strong Enough to overcome partisanship and all of the dynamics that otherwise interfere with Effective Governance in our country and that gamble doesnt seem awfully well placed these days. You know, alternate facts, hyperbipartisanshop have made it all the more difficult, if not impossible to muster the national will and consensus that impeachment seems to ask of us, and thats not to say it can never happen and not to say that it shouldnt ever happen but it is to say that especially so long as people attach these fantastic consequences so impeachment, so long as the president s opponents view it as cure all, snag will solve all the problems and set the whole world awry and one that threatens to implode everything that they believe in and everything that they fought for, the impeachment power cant function, they have to think reasonably and create scenario in which if they dont impeachment may serve only to undermine and rather to protect our democracy, and so although this is a book call presidency and in some way title may have been better save democracy, thats our goal and goal that can be achieved if the American People fully and realistically understand the appropriate way to exercise it. To access all of the cspan and book tv archives on impeachment, visit our website, cspan. Org impeachment. Here is a look at authors who recently appeared or will be appearing soon on book tvs afterwords, our weekly Author Interview program, that includes bestselling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. Last week examine the world of sex and leaves of young men, coming up andrea, chronical the trump and kushner familys rise to eminence. Financial times columnist and cnn analyst argues that Tech Companies are failing the public. Silicon valley has a real problem that theyre very good at taking credit for the wonderful things that they do and theyve given us all the Terrific Technology and entertaining productivity enhancing to certain extent but theyre not so good at taking responsibility for the downsize and i think that theyre also not so great at admitting that they didnt do it all themselves, these technologies were basically built on federallyfunded r d, if you think about the internet, touch screen technology, gps, these were things that came out of the pentagon actually, taxpayer funded darpa innovation that is were commercialized by the valley and so you have very similar to 2008 crisis, you the privatization of process but socialization of losses in so many ways. After words airs saturdays at 10 00 p. M. And sundays at 9 00 p. M. Eastern and pacific on book tv on cspan2. All previous afterwords are available as podcast and to watch online at booktv. Org. Book tv recently visited capitol hill and asked congressman jim banks about his reading list. Well, this summer i had ambitious reading list, currently im finishing a wellknown book by Steven Ambrose on d day, a couple of