- In the article “Unfollow”, written by Adrian Chen, a woman named Megan Phelps Roper is described to have a very significant change in life. She was a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. This church had very extreme beliefs ranging from God hating gay people to even celebrating when people died that didn’t hold the same beliefs as them. Phelps Roper can be quoted saying “I wanted to be good, and I wanted to be obedient, and I wanted to be the object of my parents’ pride. I wanted to go to Heaven.” (Chen 8) She thought that being “good” meant to hate everyone else that did not believe in what she believed in. I have always wondered if you were always a good person and did the right thing than you would go to heaven if there is a past life. You don’t need to follow a religion to be considered “good.” She then downloads twitter and starts to interact with outside people and she realizes that they aren’t so bad. There were many instances where you could see a change in her beliefs. Abitbol, a man she was talking to over email, “wrote that if gay people were killed they would have the opportunity to repent.” (Chen 20) Phelps Roper was very confused in this situation so she went to her mother for answers and “concluded that Westboro was in the wrong” (Chen 20) This was one of the biggest turning points in her life because this helped her start to think of how many other things the church was wrong about. She goes onto learn a lot more about her own personal beliefs and decides to leave the church in 2012 with her sister.
- When Phelps Roper first downloaded twitter she used it push her religious agenda. After one of her tweets blew up she was “exhilarated” by all the interaction she was getting. Good or bad. She said “she loved that twitter let her talk to large numbers of people with the filter of a journalist.” (Chen 4) At the beginning, social media only increased her religious beliefs. But, that didn’t last for long. She started to learn more about the people that she had often disagreed with and found that they were regular human beings just like her. One of the first times we see a shift in perspective from her is when an actress died at a pretty young age. Her younger self wouldn’t think twice of posting a tweet thanking God for her death. But this time was different. She said she would feel like “such a jackass to go on and post something like that.” (Chen 16) She thought this was because she was seeing tons of grief on twitter from the people she had been interacting with. In the case of Phelps Ropers, social media was one of the most impactful things that came into her life.
- One of the communication styles that I saw that really “got through” to Phelps Ropers was how people were nice to her no matter their own beliefs. Phelps Ropers and many others were able to have fun conversations with each other that had nothing to do with her religion. She soon lightened up to them and realized that she had probably been hateful to a ton of people that she would have loved talking to. I think this story can really teach us how to deal with hate speech. A lot of the time, a person has extreme beliefs like that because of how they grew and they did not know any better. So, instead of automatically hating that person back, we could try and talk to them as we would any other person. We could try this because we would learn more about the person and they may even realize whatever they might stand, might not be true.
- One question I would ask her if I was able to meet her today is almost the same question that was asked in the question above. Which is, coming now from both sides of the situation, at one point being the hateful person, to now being on the other side, how would you now go along with a hateful person? I would ask this because I actually think about this a lot. With so many different opinions in life right now, not everyone is going to change their beliefs and not everyone should have to. But, how do we deal with opposing beliefs and how do we get along with people with different beliefs?
