ChristianNews
Reese Witherspoon is helping to produce ‘This Above All’ a film based on the true story of Megan Phelps- Roper. Megan Phelps-Roper is the former member of the Westboro Baptist Church known for its hate speech and vicious protests.
According to Deadline, the film will follow Megan Phelps-Roper’s upbringing around Topeka, KS where they preached God’s power and damned those who sinned. The church has a long history of picketing the funerals of gay murder victims, those who died of AIDS, our fallen military, the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and victims of mass shootings — including Aurora, CO, where thousands showed up to block them, and in Orlando, where a wall of people worked hard to block church signs from the sight lines of grieving mothers burying their children.
Megan Phelps-Roper started protesting at the age of 5 with her mom, and she protested for 20 years. She became one of the most powerful voices on social media for Westboro, where she used both a picket sign and her Twitter handle to doggedly protest everything from cultural events to funerals, until her ongoing conversations with opponents over Twitter led her to question her belief system.
Her life, she recently said in a Ted talk earlier this year, “was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil. The good was my church and its members and the evil was everyone else.”
With her mind open to a different way of seeing the world, she and her younger sister made the difficult decision to leave the church — and be disowned by their family — in order to find a life governed by love. They moved to Los Angeles and found a Hasidic Jewish family who embraced them fully that started them on their way to inclusiveness, empathy, humanity and love.
Check out Megan Phelps-Roper as she shares her story with Ted Talks:
