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

Megan Phelps-Roper, picketing with Westboro when she was still an active member of the family hate cult.

On December 20, 2009, Phelps-Roper was in the basement of her house, for a church 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 church members reacted with glee, celebrating another righteous judgment from God… 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 God 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 church: 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 church 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 church's founder, Fred Phelps.

[Image, top: Megan Phelps-Roper. Read the rest

Pastor Kevin Swanson has some unusual tips for parents who attended his "National Religious Liberties Conference." After he interviewed fellow Tea Party darlings Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal, he went on to describe how he would celebrate one of his children getting married to a person of the same gender:

"There are families, we're talking Christian families, pastors' families, elders' families from good, godly churches whose sons are rebelling, hanging out with homosexuals and getting married and the parents are invited. What would you do if that was the case? Here is what I would do: sackcloth and ashes at the entrance to the church and I'd sit in cow manure and I'd spread it all over my body. That is what I would do and I'm not kidding, I'm not laughing."

What a party animal!

He also had advice for parents of children whose minds had been poisoned by Satanic, pro-homosexual propaganda like Harry Potter and How to Train Your Dragon: murder them.

“For tens of millions of parents it would be better that a millstone be hung around their neck and they be drowned at the bottom of the sea.”

In the video above Swanson also screams "don't you dare carve happy faces on open, pus-sy sores!" Darn, there goes my plans for the weekend. Read the rest

“I have just endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history,” writes Reddit's recently-departed interim CEO Ellen Pao in a Washington Post op-ed today. “And I have just been blessed with the most astonishing human responses to that attack.” Read the rest

In a video made viral by our pals at Dangerous Minds, a child sings:

"I know the Bible’s right, somebody’s wrong / I know the Bible’s right, somebody’s wrong / Ain't no homos going to make it to heaven."

Then, a crowd of adults cheers and gives a standing ovation.

You can watch the video at Dangerous Minds. Read the rest