How did your father explain that to you? That you were one of God’s chosen ones and yet he could mistreat you?
He was able to justify using verses out of the Bible. That was a major criteria for him. If he could find an excuse for it, then it was OK to do it, because God gave him permission. As far as how he justified the idea that we were different from the rest of the world, he made much of the ideas that he found in the Bible about the nature of what God expected of us, that extreme Calvinist ideology that is at the cornerstone of their campaign. The fact that other groups had it wrong or got this or that doctrine wrong was proof that God didn’t find favor with them.
As far as the physical violence, that’s a fairly common idea that exists in fundamentalist Christianity, that the husband is the head of the house and has absolute authority — and has the right to bring his wife and children into submission if they aren’t.
Did he use his belt or a cane, what was his …?
When we were younger it was a barber strap. That thing got so shredded at the ends that it would wrap around the sides of our legs and tear the skin. It was kind of like a cat o’ nine tails. When I was about 8 or 9 he introduced us to a mattock handle, which is a farming instrument or tool that you use to pull up roots, and it’s got an axe head on one end and a hoe head on the other end. It’s big. You know, take a baseball bat, add maybe 30 percent to that.
What, he’d have you bend over a chair or what did he do?
Yeah, and then he would beat us anywhere from the lower part of our back down to behind our knees and he swung it hard, he swung it like a baseball bat. And oftentimes what would happen is there would be eight or 10 strokes and then he would go into a 10- or 15-minute screaming session with what we were doing wrong and how it was defying God and that we were evil. You know all of these religious-based threats and insults to the children and then he’d go back to the beating and by then the skin has stretched tight from the damage. So the next blows would just split the skin and so you’d get blood.
Would your father choose to do this in front of your other brothers and sisters?
No, it was very public. It couldn’t help but be public because there was so much noise and ranting, everybody in the house knew that he was on a tear. And sometimes when it got really bad my mom would try to intervene and then he would go after her and beat her for that. He used all of these strategies that appeared to be very deliberate. He required the older boys to start administering the beatings themselves, and if they didn’t do it properly then they would get beat from him because they weren’t hitting hard enough or doing it as he would do it. And that was kind of a pattern he used even with the passing on of the message that he taught. He didn’t just settle for making sure we knew it. He required us to present it the way he did.
http://wunc.org/post/it-will-look-profoundly-different-when-my-father-dies-nate-phelps-son-westboro-church-founder
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