Every major political change in our society has been preceded by social upheaval. The pro-life movement has failed to learn the lessons of history, which show how the labor movement, the civil rights movement, Vietnam protest, and gay liberation all occurred because a group of people created social tension.
Randall Terry
The romance of the outsider helped white conservative Christians navigate the post-civil-rights-movement world. It enabled them to hold on to a sense of difference and yet recast it as a strength. It gave them a way to navigate the contradictions between their feelings of alienation from and yet entitlement to the resources of modern America. And it provided a way to reconcile their growing political agency with their unshakable belief that they were oppressed. Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the emerging Religious Right led fundamentalists back into politics, in rebellion against both their own subculture’s separatism and the larger American culture’s secularism. But some conservative Christians went further, insisting that voting, running for office, and lobbying elected offi-cials could never be enough in a fallen world. Like some New Left ists in the 1960s and early 1970s, they needed to bring the transformation of their inner life out into the world. They needed to act. In the 1980s, Randall Terry, the founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, pushed conservative Christians to take up direct action and make their politics as real as their faith.
Conservative Christians were not the first people of faith to take up civil disobedience in the postwar era. Many Catholics, Quakers, and mainline Protestants used nonviolent direct action in the civil rights and peace movements. “There are places and times when law so abuses the inherent rights of people that the only way to make grievances known, and begin to create a more just situation, is to violate the law,” the Quaker civil rights and peace activists Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey wrote in their 1965 book A Manual for Direct Action. “Every individual must decide for himself just when such a point is reached in society. We do not presume to make that decision for others, nor do we presume to choose tactics of direct action for others. The final choice is yours.” 1
For many conservative Christians, especially fundamentalists, voting and speaking publicly about politics were radical steps. Randall Terry wanted evangelicals to embrace even more radical political work. “For so many years, those in the pro-life movement have been saying that abortion is murder and then writing a letter or carrying a sign once a year at a march. If you were about to be murdered,” he argued, “I’m sure you would want me to do more than write your congressman!” In what became the motto of Operation Rescue, which he founded in 1986, Terry urged, “If you think abortion is murder, act like it!” True Christians could not be satisfied with campaigning and voting. They needed to rededicate themselves to living as moral outsiders and work directly to stop the “baby-killing.” “My main issue mission has never been to convert people to being pro-life,” Terry wrote his supporters in 1990. “My mission has been to convert Christians into activists.” 2
When Falwell and other ministers urged fundamentalists to take up politics at the end of the seventies, they meant using white-male-led organizations like the Moral Majority to force the Republican Party to enact a conservative Christian agenda. Other conservative Christians had begun in the sixties and seventies to use more of a community-organizing model, political action as building networks of like-minded people (not necessarily Christian but sharing a moral agenda) at the local level. In the seventies and early eighties, this kind of organizing emerged on the right around rising property taxes in Orange County, California, gay rights in Miami, Florida, the textbook choices of local schools in Kanawha County, West Virginia, and the state-by-state battles to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. White women, from well-known figures like Anita Bryant to housewives turned activists like Alice Moore, played prominent roles. In southern California, upstate New York, St. Louis, and Chicago, anti-abortion activists used these same community-organizing methods to create local anti-abortion movements. This kind of activism worked on the premise that if America came back to God, conservative Christians would no longer be outsiders and could resume their deserved position at the center of the nation.3
Nonviolent direct action, in contrast, moved away from interest group politics and community organizing and instead offered a model that small, committed groups of activists could use to call attention to their cause. Direct action worked through mobilizing enough bodies to create a spectacle, as opposed to other political strategies that focused on mobilizing enough voters to swing an election or win a referendum or determine a party platform. Oft en, this spectacle involved civil disobedience, activists deliberately and publicly breaking laws that they considered unjust. By disregarding the law, activists announced their break with a corrupt status quo. Direct action often momentarily brought into being the better world that activists imagined—the sit-in, for example, that integrated the lunch counter or halted the work of an abortion clinic for an hour. In this way, direct action worked simultaneously as a symbolic and a material form of intervention. It blurred the line between drama and action. The nonviolence of the protesters highlighted the violence of the social order. Activists performed the contrast and thus created a tension between what could be and what was. They acted out their outsider status by refusing to live in the existing world. They gave their interior sense of difference material form. For these reasons, many young middle-class whites took their activism into direct action protests in the second half of the sixties.4
This type of political action had a long liberal and left history in the twentieth century. The NAACP’s 1917 Silent Protest Parade in response to an East St. Louis riot was an important precedent. Ten thousand African Americans marched down Fift h Avenue to mark the massacre, their startling silence pierced in a slow rhythm by the muffled beats of a drum. Politics as spectacle depended upon more urban environments where people could witness the performance with their own eyes or on well-developed, free, and widely distributed forms of media that could spread news of protest activities. As the media expanded internationally in the postwar period, more activists turned to direct action. Peace activists acutely aware of their minority status in the aftermath of World War II used direct action to oppose the emerging cold war. Liberation struggles, most famously in India, developed and spread direct action strategies throughout the decolonizing world. Back in America, the southern civil rights movement used nonvio-lent direct action to dismantle southern segregation. What was new about the period after the civil rights movement was the use of direct action by activists on the right.5
Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue was not the first group of conservative activists to adopt the strategies, including direct action, widely associated at the time with the civil rights and anti-war movements. In 1974, anti-busing activists in Boston seemed to have taken SNCC activists as models as they marched on Washington, wore militant buttons on their clothes and backpacks, picketed schools, and quoted Martin Luther King on civil disobedience. In the George Wallace campaigns of 1968 and 1972, conservatives cast themselves as outsiders within the liberal, integrationist establishment. Conservative women fighting ERA and working to take over the 1977 National Women’s Conference described American families as an oppressed group, under attack from the federal government. Catholic peace activists, in turn, brought a New Left style into the fight against abortion. When evangelicals began to organize against abortion, however, they could lay claim to the moral authority of a long tradition of Protestant religious dissent on political questions, from abolitionism to civil rights, as their own. Building on the growth of evangelicalism in the seventies, they fused secular and Christian ideas about outsiders’ greater moral authority and access to the truth and proclaimed themselves the new civil rights movement. For evangelicals, direct action techniques possessed a strategic usefulness. But they also asserted a powerful appeal for conservative Christians who felt a great desire to make their inner psychic transformation—their conversion—visible in the material world.6
No other single organizer proved as skilled as Randall Terry at using conservative Christians’ deep yearning to see themselves as outsiders, as a moral remnant surrounded by sinners, to push them into New Left –style direct action. Terry told evangelicals not to get too comfortable in their new embrace of the larger world. “We are in jeopardy, ” he argued repeatedly in speeches and direct mail solicitations for Operation Rescue in the late 1980s and in his 1990 book Accessory to Murder, because conservative Christians had failed to stop abortion: “God is handing us over to be oppressed … More and more, Christians and Christian principles are being mocked, scorned, and attacked in magazines, newspapers, television shows, movies, classrooms, the American Medical Association, and the American Bar Association. This barrage of anti-Christian bigotry will take its toll—on us—in the form of severe persecution.” True believers needed to put it all at risk—their careers, their community standing, and even their personal freedom—to stop the “murdering” of “the unborn” and other immoral acts. Abortion was not just a sin. It was also a powerful sign of Christians’ oppression in the modern world. Randall Terry made Operation Rescue into the most important conservative direct action movement in American history by reminding Christians that no matter how they voted or the faith of their politicians, God’s people remained outsiders.7
Randall Terry carries a human fetus while leading an Operation Rescue protest at Northeast Women’s Center in Philadelphia on July 6, 1988. Associated Press.
Anti-Abortion Activism from Left to Right
After the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, a small group of anti-abortion activists began to create a direct action wing of the anti-abortion movement by consciously adopting some of the strategic methods and symbolism of the civil rights movement in particular and the New Left more generally. It was not completely clear, in the first half of the seventies, that anti-abortion activism would become so identified with the right. Scholars writing in the 1972 book Abortion and Social Justice argued that abortion was “nothing less than a question of civil rights: Does the unborn child have a civil right to life?” The book opened with an epigram from Gandhi: “It seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.” Some Catholics and many Quakers saw the fight against legal abortion as related to their anti-war and anti-death-penalty activism and a part of their broad support for life.8
Direct action protest against Roe did not begin immediately. At the 1974 regional conference of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition (NYPLC), young Catholics Burke Balch, Tom Mooney, and Chris Mooney heard a speech by Charles Fager. A former peace activist, Fager had just published a book on the 1965 Selma civil rights march, and he spoke that night about what anti-abortion activists could learn from the nonviolent direct action of the civil rights movement. In accepting suffering—allowing policemen, for example, to beat them on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge—civil rights activists made visible the violence of segregation. Fager told anti-abortion activists to enter clinics peacefully and sit-in. Their peaceful actions—let the “violence be visited on me, not the unborn”—and their arrests would make the horror of abortion visible in America, just as civil rights sit-ins and marches had made white people see the brutality of southern segregation. Fager’s speech inspired the three to try nonviolent direct action in the fight against abortion.9
By early 1975, Tom Mooney, a former anti-war activist, had become president of NYPLC. He and his wife, Chris, decided to organize an abortion protest the next summer. Unsure of exactly how to proceed, they asked Balch to research civil disobedience. At the Library of Congress among the piles of Quaker pamphlets on pacifism and protest, Balch found Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey’s A Manual for Direct Action. Billed as “a product of the civil rights direct action movement,” the book was nothing less that a practical, do-it-yourself guide to nonviolent social change. Dedicated to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, A Manual for Direct Action provided detailed, pragmatic instructions on how to organize an effective picket line or consumer boycott, how to behave at a sit-in, and how to talk to reporters. Balch distributed copies of the manual to other NYPLC leaders, and soon Chris Mooney was guiding a small group of young anti-abortion activists in the Washington area in training and role-playing sessions modeled, through the guidebook, on the SNCC-led Mississippi Summer Project training weekends eleven years earlier. Oppenheimer and Lakey described three kinds of direct action: “demonstrations,” which were “primarily expressions of a point of view”; “non-cooperation,” or actions in which “campaigners withdrew their usual degree of cooperation with the opponent”; and “direct nonviolent intervention.” This final method required “physical confrontations rather than withdrawal of cooperation or demonstrating,” Oppenheimer and Lakey taught. “It carries the conflict into the opponent’s camp and often changes the status quo abruptly.” Balch and the Mooneys decided to stage a sit-in.10
On the morning of August 2, 1975, the three organizers led a small group of abortion opponents in the first acts of civil disobedience at an abortion clinic. Several men began picketing outside Sigma Reproductive Health Services in Rockville, Maryland, as at least six women entered the clinic and began to sit-in. The group had decided that only the women would actually enter the abortion clinic. “You had to get across something that would break the stereotype of misogynistic males trying to control women,” Balch remembered later, aware of the power of organized feminism then and most feminists’ support for abortion rights. As the women inside sang and prayed, the men outside gave out literature and spoke to women entering the clinic. Eventually, police arrested the six women inside the clinic for trespassing. Still following their New Left script, their comrades named the women “the Sigma Six,” after the Chicago Eight, and tried to get the press interested in their trial. The press, for the most part, ignored them. On July 4, 1976, they staged a second sit-in at another Washington, D.C.–area abortion clinic to mark the Bicentennial. Again, they failed to gain much media attention.11
In the internal movement history that anti-abortion activists often tell, John O’Keefe, another left ist Catholic who followed peace activism into the anti-abortion work, gets the credit for founding the pro-life sit-in movement. O’Keefe met Balch and thus had access to what the original small group had learned from staging the two sit-ins and from studying A Manual for Direct Action. From Washington, D.C., O’Keefe’s New Left –sounding Pro-Life Non-Violent Action Project worked to create a region-wide series of sit-ins in the Northeast, a kind of anti-abortion version of the southern student sit-in movement of the early sixties. Singing civil rights songs like “We Shall Overcome” and carrying picket signs with quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., O’Keefe and his small band of activists sat-in at clinics in the Washington area and in New England. The civil rights movement not only provided a strategic model for using direct action protest. It also provided a model for using direct action to cultivate and use moral righteousness. O’Keefe believed evoking the civil rights movement would build support for a new radical social movement.12
In 1978, O’Keefe wrote the recruiting pamphlet A Peaceful Presence to spread news about this latest round of civil rights organizing: “With Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., we must come to believe that unearned suffering is somehow redemptive. A change of heart will not occur without suffering, and we have to ask ourselves whether we are willing to suffer ourselves or only ask others to suffer … It is not enough to change people’s minds; we are engaged in a struggle to change people’s hearts.” Using late-sixties, New Left –sounding language, O’Keefe argued that sit-ins would demonstrate protesters’ “ solidarity with the child.” He envisioned a new version of the civil rights movement’s Beloved Community, a living example of how the whole world could be after the fight: “Any movement that sets out to change society has to provide a picture of a world that is an ideal, that is convincing, so you can compare what is going on with what ought to be, and so you can be prepared to struggle for it.” And this ideal world in the moment was the group of protesters sitting in at a clinic and prayerfully, peacefully stopping abortion, putting their bodies on the line to aid the most oppressed, voiceless, and innocent Americans. He thought that other activists on the left, prodded by their alienation from a militarized America that had proved its dedication to death in Vietnam, would follow him into peaceful direct action protest against abortion now that that war had ended. He thought that people on the left who identified with marginalized and oppressed people globally would see the plight of unborn babies as part of their fight. He was wrong. Few people on the left became publicly involved in anti-abortion activism. However, many conservative Americans eventually adopted “the unborn” as the oppressed group they were fighting to save.13
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, copies of A Peaceful Presence and A Manual for Direct Action circulated among the small numbers of mostly Catholic, action-oriented anti-abortion activists in rebellion against the larger Catholic-led “passive” pro-life movement working to overturn Roe. Joseph Scheidler, one of these Catholic activists, founded the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League in 1980. Unlike O’Keefe, he did not come into anti-abortion work from the peace movement. Drawing on his experiences protesting at abortion clinics and his work in journalism and public relations, he essentially revised and expanded A Manual for Direct Action, publishing it as Closed: 90 Ways to Stop Abortion, in 1985. Closed eventually replaced tattered copies of the Quaker book and other accumulated notes on civil rights and anti-war protests as the conservatives’ direct action guidebook. In adapting sit-in techniques to the particularities of the fight against abortion, Scheidler advocated a more militant style of activism in the form of clinic “invasions” that pushed right up against the edge of nonviolence. Around the same time, Joan Andrews, another dedicated Catholic activist, led a small group of activists that conducted a few sit-ins and provided housing and other help to pregnant women. Andrews had grown up in Nashville, and her own experience of anti-Catholic discrimination there inspired her to participate in local sit-ins protesting racial segregation. In 1986, Andrews was sentenced to five years in prison in Florida for entering an abortion clinic and attempting to destroy equipment used to perform abortions. Andrews’s refusal to cooperate with prison authorities in any way eventually landed her in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison. after a year, many evangelical Christian radio stations took up her cause, making Andrews the first martyr of the anti-abortion movement and spreading news of her activism through the evangelical counterculture. Before hearing Andrews’s story, many evangelical Christians did not understand the meaning of direct action.14
In the mid-1980s, activists trying to inspire people to participate in the anti-abortion fight were working in a historical moment transformed by the rising power of the New Right and the election of Ronald Reagan. O’Keefe had reached out to potential supporters by appealing to the political and cultural alienation of young middle-class whites drawn to the civil rights and peace movements, the same kinds of kids who would have headed to Mississippi for a summer of organizing or marched on the Pentagon. Yet most participants in the New Left, especially women, failed to see abortion as another fight for the oppressed. They adopted a feminist perspective focused not on the oppression of the fetus but on women. In this kind of thinking, the legal practice of abortion empowered women, giving them control over their bodies. Catholic activists who kept up the fight in the early eighties tried a different approach. They worked to tap a deep commitment to protecting all life that united some believers despite their different relationships to recent social movements. This appeal did not work well for evangelical Christians, who were already feeling alienated from what they understood as a country and culture in decline as a result of sixties activism. They saw aborted babies as a symbol of all that Americans had lost. In the fight against abortion, they found an oppressed and marginalized group they could claim. Catholic peace activists’ moral outrage over abortion had somewhat different sources than the moral outrage of Protestant evangelicals. But both fused a Christian sense of believers as outsiders in an evil world with the more secular romance of the outsider, rooted in popular culture and intellectual life, that outsiders were better—more real, more authentic, and more individual—than other Americans. Anti-abortion activism gave some conservative Christians a way to both reject the secular world and yet connect with it through a shared identification with outsiders and rebels.15
In the late eighties, when anti-abortion activists finally succeeded in building a mass movement using direct action strategies, some participants still used New Left ideas to justify their activism. When the Catholic magazine America interviewed two Catholic seminary students, Martin L. Chase and James F. Vandenberg, about their role in protests at abortion clinics in New York City in the spring of 1988, Chase sounded like O’Keefe channeling an anti-abortion version of Freedom Summer participant Mario Savio’s call for students to join the Free Speech movement. “The basic idea was putting our bodies in between the abortionist and the unborn child,” Chase said. “That’s the sort of protest that I’m familiar with from the 1960s and 1970s. I thought it worked then, and I think it works now.” Many participants, however, embraced sixties-style direct action without ever having been supporters of these earlier movements and with no prior experience in civil disobedience. Some were young people who had not been old enough to participate in civil rights and peace activism. Others had actively opposed or ignored those movements. Late arrivals to the anti-abortion fight, many white evangelicals in the South had spent the seventies on the defensive as a result of their opposition to the civil rights movement and exhausted from the huge effort of establishing Christian schools to circumvent integration. Across the country, conservative Christians had also been busy creating their own counter counterculture—a network of independent Christian schools, colleges, and churches, a growing number of organizations like Falwell’s Moral Majority, and a diff use web of Christian bookstores, radio and television programs and stations, presses, and music companies. Intrigued by the stories about Joan Andrews they had heard on the radio and lift ed on a wave of growing conservative Christian activism on a range of issues from opposing gay rights to supporting prayer in schools, many evangelicals were hungry to enact their faith and their sense of themselves as outsiders in the world. Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue gave them a way.16
Randal Terry, Radical Christian Rebel
Fittingly, before he founded the organization that brought evangelicals into direct action protest, Randall Terry wanted to be a rock and roll star. Too young to participate in the social movements that had shaped the lives of his mother and his aunts, he left home as a teenager in 1976 to play his music and find what was left of the counterculture. He seemed to find some of it—there were tales of pot smoking and maybe more drugs. Somewhere in Texas he also encountered that other counterculture. He met some evangelical Christians. Back in upstate New York after a traumatic event never fully explained, Terry lived at home and worked at an ice cream parlor. A customer shared his faith with the young worker. Sometime in September 1976, Randall Terry experienced a conversion and became a born-again Christian. “I was radically converted,” Terry remembered later. “Up until that time, I was part of the rock’n’ roll culture, involved in drugs and immorality.” He caught up with the local remnants of the Jesus People movement and in 1978 enrolled in nearby Elim Bible Institute. The charismatic movement, which spread Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues and an openly emotional, prayer- and music-filled worship style to other evangelicals and even mainline Protestants and Catholics, had swept through the small religious school. Charismatic Christians fused a new secular emphasis on the truth value of the experiential and on emotion and feeling with an older Protestant faith in the centrality of the individual’s experience of God. Terry, a competent musician and counterculture dropout, fit right in. He always portrayed himself as “a young rebel.” “I was born out of time almost … I was in some aspects, I imagine, a holdout,” he remembered later, displaying a revisionist historical analysis even as he revealed a great deal about his sense of himself as an outsider. “The sixties for many was an era of searching. People wanting to know the answers, wanting to know the truth. In the seventies, people just wanted to get high. But I wanted to know the answers.” The head of the only abortion clinic in Binghamton, New York, the site of Terry’s first anti-abortion activism and a repeated target of Operation Rescue protests, described Terry as an outsider as well, though in a less flattering way: “Even though we always thought he was a nut, he has that martyred, rabid quality that attracts people. His movement needed some kind of a figure like that, someone who’s willing to go beyond the pale.” 17
The way Terry told it, a bumper sticker he saw in 1977 first made him think about the evil of abortion: “Abortion, Pick on Someone Your Own Size.” Six years later he had a vision. God wanted him to implement “a three-point plan” to stop abortion: block clinics, counsel young women trying to enter clinics, and provide homes for single women who were pregnant. In some versions of his tale, he says he began to think more about the problem after seeing the film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, based on the book by C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeff er, while he was a student at Elim Bible College. after Terry watched a particularly violent scene of an aborted baby near the end of the film, he recalled, “I literally sat there and sobbed. I remember praying,’God, please use me to fight this hideous crime.’ The Bible says,’Rescue the fatherless from the hand of the wicked.’ It’s my Christian duty to fight abortion.” 18
Koop was a pioneering pediatric surgeon who would become surgeon general in the Reagan administration. Schaeff er, a theologian, cultivated a kind of sage-like persona at his spiritual retreat in Switzerland by dressing in bohemian clothes, growing his hair long, and wearing a goatee. Newsweek named him “the guru of the fundamentalists.” Garry Wills called him “the evangelicals’ C. S. Lewis.” Schaeffer had been urging Christians for years to use widespread civil disobedience to challenge the legitimacy of both the godless culture—what he called “secular humanism”—and the state. For Terry, Schaeffer’s work “legitimize[d] the idea that there is a higher law, that God’s law is above man’s law, to be revered and obeyed before man’s law. That had a profound impact on me.” By 1979, when Schaeffer and Koop traveled across the United States promoting their book and movie, Schaeffer had settled on abortion as the issue Christians should use to create a direct action movement. The Christian’s “duty,” he argued in his 1981 book, A Christian Manifesto (his answer to The Communist Manifesto and The Humanist Manifesto), was “to disobey the state.” Looking back at the emergence of mass protest in the anti-abortion movement, Terry argued: “Jerry Falwell provided the political cover, Francis Schaeffer provided the theological cover; but it was Operation Rescue that brought the two together in the street.” Stopping abortions combined “civil disobedience” and “biblical obedience.” 19
In reality, Randall Terry’s wife, Cindy, led the couple into anti-abortion work. Cindy and Randall met at Elim and married in 1981. after Cindy had trouble getting pregnant, she began picketing Southern Tier Women’s Services in Binghamton in the winter of 1984, haunting the parking lot with armfuls of anti-abortion literature. She came every day and stayed the eight hours that the clinic was open, yelling at women as they got out of their cars, “Don’t kill your baby. I’ll take it. I can’t have a baby.” after a few months, Randall began coming too. In the summer of 1985, aided by members of their church, they invaded the clinic. Inside, they tore out the phone lines, broke up the furniture, and blocked the door. They put Krazy Glue in the clinic’s locks. Other days they followed workers home and called late at night to threaten them. A member of their tiny band of activists made bomb threats. By then, Randall Terry had taken over this small group that would grow into the beginnings of Operation Rescue. It was not an equal partnership between Randall and Cindy Terry. He never seemed to worry, as had earlier protesters, that anti-abortion activism might look like men controlling women. Like the independent churches and Bible colleges that dominated the world of conservative Christianity, the organization was from the start male-dominated and hierarchical. As the founder, Terry had almost absolute power.20
In 1986, Randall Terry recalled, God slowly revealed for him how to use nonviolent direct action to shut down clinics. “It was like the dawn.” Joseph Scheidler remembered it differently. He had been calling for sit-ins against abortion clinics for years, and his Pro-Life Action League had pioneered the kind of clinic invasion Terry and his followers were conducting in the summer of 1986. Terry invited him to speak in Binghamton in early 1986, soon after Scheidler published Closed. He told Terry of his dream to use nonviolent direct action to shut down clinics across the country. Mass arrests, he explained to Terry, would generate national media coverage, just as they had for the civil rights movement. A week after Scheidler left, Terry and his group blocked the entrance to Southern Tier. By the fall, Terry had named his growing group Operation Rescue.21
Unlike Scheidler, Terry and Operation Rescue built anti-abortion protest into a mass movement. Terry quickly learned to use direct action tactics effectively, but he also learned to talk about them effectively. Clinic sit-ins or rescues, he repeatedly told the press in the late eighties, were “designed to save lives by preventing abortionists from entering their death chamber, and to dramatize for the American people the horrors.” Nonviolent mass protest prevented the “murder” of the “unborn” but also, through mass arrests, jail terms, and trials, dramatized abortion as a problem. “When pro-lifers are jailed, it forces the community to reconsider child-killing,” Terry argued. “It gives credibility to our rhetoric.” 22
In the spring of 1988, Terry led Operation Rescue in its first mass protests, a series of sit-ins at abortion clinics in New York City. That summer, Operation Rescue implemented an even more ambitious plan, a series of mass protests at abortion clinics timed to coincide with the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta. Terry and Operation Rescue tried out the tactical and strategic lessons they had learned from earlier activists who had studied or participated in the civil rights and peace movements. Protesters marched and picketed and passed out leaflets. They conducted sit-ins. Scattered use of this form of direct action to shut down clinics since 1975, however, had made clinics change their operating procedures and increase security. Since it was virtually impossible to get inside clinics, protesters sat-in outside, blocking entrance doors with their bodies, linking arms and sitting, lying, and even crawling on the ground. This change in protest strategy generated a wider panorama of dramatic conflict perfect for television, as well as a much greater number of arrests, and an at times brutal response from the police. Mayor Andrew Young, a veteran of the 1960 sit-in movement and Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader (he was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel standing beside King when he died), authorized police officers to use “pain compliance techniques” to stop the demonstrators; 1,235 people were arrested outside several clinics with these methods. National media coverage followed.
That summer Terry and other anti-abortion protestors also learned to deploy the symbolic value of the civil rights movement. In Atlanta, birthplace of Martin Luther King, site of the headquarters of both the SCLC and SNCC, and a location of major civil rights organizing from the 1940s to the 1970s, the spectacle of new mass protests readily evoked comparisons to the civil rights movement. Operation Rescue leaders used the analogy often when speaking to the press. “When we first came here it was not our intention to make Atlanta a battleground,” an Operation Rescue spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that summer. “But for whatever reason, we believe the Lord has decided to turn this into something that could be another Selma, Alabama.” Terry began to claim King as “one of his mentors,” and he started “reading little things here and there … like a book of [King’s] sayings.” “Every major political change in our society has been preceded by social upheaval,” Terry told reporters, a way of thinking about social change he had learned from King. “The pro-life movement has failed to learn the lessons of history, which show how the labor movement, the civil rights movement, Vietnam protest, and gay liberation all occurred because a group of people created social tension.” He also watched Eyes on the Prize, the celebrated PBS multi-episode documentary series about the civil rights movement that featured extensive coverage of the sit-in movement of the early sixties and the Christian faith that inspired many participants. For Terry, the civil rights movement proved that a Christian-led, direct action movement of courageous people willing to risk arrest could succeed in helping the oppressed, changing the laws, and saving the country.23
In his book Operation Rescue, published that fall, Randall Terry described how his organization used nonviolent direct action to do God’s work and laid out his vision for the future. The Bible, he argued, sanctions sit-ins at abortion clinics and other activist tactics that actually stop abortions. “Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death,” he quoted Proverbs 24:11 as rendered in the Living Bible, a translation of the sacred text into everyday speech. “Don’t stand back and let them die.” Leading evangelical and fundamentalist ministers added their endorsements of the direct action anti-abortion movement led by Terry. Jerry Falwell wrote in one foreword: “I believe non-violent civil disobedience is the wave of the future for the pro-life movement in this country.” James Kennedy, head minister of Coral Ridge Presbyterian in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sounded like a SNCC field worker as he praised Operation Rescue members for putting their bodies on the line and filling the jails. And televangelist Pat Robertson, too, wrote yet another foreword: “Randall Terry has begun the same dramatic nonviolent protest against the slaughter of innocent babies in our nation that brought racial justice and equality in the 1960s.” 24
Sometime in late 1988, Terry condensed the arguments of his book and his frequent statements to the press into an article. “Operation Rescue: The Civil Rights Movement of the Nineties” appeared in early 1989 in the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review. “Today we celebrate as a national holiday the birthday of a man who helped change unjust laws through civil disobedience,” he argued. “I am convinced that the American people will begin to take the pro-life movement seriously when they see good, decent citizens peacefully sitting around abortion mills, risking arrest and prosecution as Martin Luther King Jr. did.” Terry played the role of King in this vision of anti-abortion organizing. He became the outsider who would lead the nation to justice.25
In response to anti-abortion activists’ increasing use of the civil rights analogy, many prominent liberal activists expressed their outrage and revulsion. Civil rights leaders, urged on by Planned Parenthood, protested officially in 1988. Julian Bond led a group of ten civil rights leaders, including Atlanta mayor Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, in denouncing Operation Rescue, comparing the group “to the segregationists who fought desperately to block black Americans from access to their rights.” Throughout the late eighties and nineties, pro-choice activists and their supporters countered anti-abortion activists’ use of the civil rights analogy by flipping the terms. Terry and his followers, they insisted, were today’s Bull Connors, murderers of the Mississippi Three, policemen with fire hoses, billy clubs, and biting dogs. In 1988 and 1989, Kate Michelman, executive director of NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, made this charge repeatedly. Anti-abortion activists used direct action techniques to limit other peoples’ rights rather than expand them. Women were oppressed, and legal access to abortion gave them rights. Anti-abortion activists, unlike Martin Luther King and his followers, were not nonviolent. Pro-choice leaders and supporters refused to give anti-abortion activists any rhetorical claim to the moral authority of the civil rights movement.26
Historically, however, the most influential political movement of the period did share some commonalities with the upstart anti-abortion effort. Anti-abortion activists did work to limit the rights of women to terminate pregnancies, but civil rights activists worked to limit the rights of whites to practice discrimination. When liberals countered that ending racial discrimination empowered African Americans, anti-abortion activists claimed that ending abortions empowered “the unborn.” For some, these claims may have been simply rhetorical, but for conservative Christians who believed life began at conception, they were facts. Some civil rights activists did not practice nonviolence, and others, like SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, changed their positions over time, rejecting the nonviolent techniques they had once supported. The fact that some SNCC leaders rejected nonviolence in the late sixties did not erase the earlier history of the organization. Randall Terry’s growing support for violence, first in private and then, by the mid-nineties, in public as he worked with other conservative radicals to forge an alliance between the militia movement and the activist anti-abortion movement, did not erase his earlier advocacy of nonviolence or its appeal to masses of conservative Christians. As importantly, the anti-abortion movement worked symbolically for conservative Christians much as “white love” for blacks in the civil rights movement worked for many middle-class liberal whites. It gave them a group of outsiders—”the unborn” as they imagined them—with which to identify. Romanticizing fetuses as the embodiment of human innocence gave them a way to disavow their power and see themselves as outsiders.27
Not everyone, however, agreed with Terry’s call for conservative Christians to take up direct action. Some powerful evangelical ministers like Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Atlanta, opposed Operation Rescue’s use of civil disobedience. Like Falwell, in the later seventies Stanley also called conservative Christians into politics. But he drew the line at direct action. In a pamphlet entitled A Biblical Perspective on Civil Disobedience, Stanley and the staff and deacons of his church affirmed that abortion was morally wrong but advocated only “lawful means of protesting.” In response, Operation Rescue leaders backed off from their civil disobedience argument and told the press and congregations that rescue provided a means of “saving the lives of babies scheduled to be murdered.” Some fundamentalists, they admitted, were put off by the left ist-sounding call to break the law.28
Part of the problem was that Terry was an evangelical Christian but he was not a fundamentalist. He never completely severed his ties with the counter-culture he experienced in the mid-seventies. With his wild and longish hair, his awkwardness in a suit, and his love of rock music, he never really fit in with fundamentalists like Falwell. When his first church, Bushnell Basin Community Church, a suburban Rochester, New York, charismatic congregation, spun off its youth ministry as a satellite, The Ark, that met in an old barn, Terry went with them. The Ark became a Jesus People church. Many fundamentalists, despite a strategically savvy public show of unity, distrusted the mysticism and emotional expressiveness of Pentecostals and other charismatic Christians. Charismatic worship was full, too, of nontraditional music. As head of Operation Rescue, Terry continued to write and play Christian rock. Lists of resources on sale for “educating the Christian activist” included his video, “When the Battle Raged,” footage of the Holocaust, aborted babies, and actual rescues set to a song written by Terry, and cassettes of other anti-abortion and Christian songs he had written and performed.29
Theological arguments too divided Terry and many fundamentalists. Fundamentalist ministers denounced the Living Bible that Terry often quoted when speaking to the press. Terry’s call to action implicitly challenged the dispensationalism essential to fundamentalist thinking. God had divided history into periods, dispensations, and preordained what would happen in each. Christians could not change the course of history—they could only affect how many people would be saved and how many would be damned. These remnants of an older Calvinist Protestantism did not fuse easily with secular or evangelical faith in the moral authority of individual acts of rebellion. Operation Rescue’s calls for action suggested that Christian rebels could intervene in history. Later Operation Rescue materials described this process as making “theology into biography”: “We are propelled to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves … this is how the Word of God becomes flesh and theology becomes biography. This gives God an excuse to do mighty acts and bring real healing to our land.” The future, Operation Rescue told potential anti-abortion activists, was not set. Christians had a duty to act.30
If belief in the ability to change the world came easily to many white middle-class Americans in this period, actually making change proved diffi-cult. In the fall of 1989, Randall Terry experienced the cost of casting himself as a martyr to the cause, as the “King” of the activist pro-life movement. Convicted in September of illegally blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic during the Operation Rescue protests in Atlanta the previous year, Terry rejected his sentence of two years’ probation, two years’ banishment from the Atlanta metropolitan area, and a thousand dollar fine. The judge gave him a six-month prison sentence instead. Terry had lots of time to think as he sat in his cell in the Fulton County jail. The setting helped. King had spent time in this very jail.31
On October 10, Terry wrote from his cell what he envisioned as his version of King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Like King, he dismissed the complaint that activists were “outside agitators.” Like King, he insisted that nonviolent direct action was necessary to force people to confront immorality and injustice. And like King, he worried about the way moderation slides so easily into acquiescence; he embraced the word “extremist.” “I am deeply troubled by what I see happening to the rescue movement nationwide,” Terry confessed. “In city after city… the number of rescuer missions per week is dropping.” The problem, he argued, was not extremists but moderates. Terry called abortion opponents to the struggle, to participation in clinic picketing, “sidewalk counseling,” and sit-ins or rescues. As King had written a quarter of a century before, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create… a crisis and establish such creative tension so that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” Terry pledged Operation Rescue to creating that tension. The time to act, he insisted, citing the example of his own courage in serving his sentence, was now.32
That winter, Terry left the Atlanta jail before his six-month sentence was up, allegedly freed by an anonymous donor’s payment of his fine. Some experienced sit-in veterans understood Terry’s agreement to be released as a moral failing, and he lost some of the moral authority he had gained leading people who opposed abortion into action. He also had to fight to retain control of the original Operation Rescue. Behind the scenes, court injunctions and fines threatened to bankrupt different versions of the organization and its splinter groups as well as Terry and other leaders. In 1990, however, at the height of its power, the Moral Majority endorsed Operation Rescue’s efforts with a highly publicized $10,000 check. Falwell urged Christians to engage in widespread protest: “This is a departure from anything I’ve ever preached,” Falwell told the New York Times. “The only way is nonviolent civil disobedience.” 33
Randall Terry speaks to the press after he receives a twenty-four-month suspended sentence and $1,000 fine in Atlanta on October 6, 1989, for his anti-abortion protests during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. He refuses to pay the fine and says he will serve the time. Associated Press.
By the start of the 1990s, Randall Terry’s public advocacy of nonviolent abortion clinic sit-ins had turned anti-abortion activism into a New Right mass protest movement. Like William F. Buckley two decades earlier, Terry provocatively fused oppositional style and conservative beliefs. The evangelical model of social change—one heart at a time—made sense to a man who had grown up on the cusp of the counterculture. And Terry intuitively understood that people of his generation retained a deep desire to act, as the generation before them had, to change the world. He pushed evangelicals into direct action protest, where they made the fight against abortion the center of an increasingly politically powerful Religious Right. For a time, he forged a highly unlikely coalition of outsiders, what the Wall Street Journal called the “anti-establishment”—”ex-hippies, pacifists, Reagan Democrats, Attila-the-Hun Republicans, far-right Catholics, left ish Catholics, evangelicals, fundamental-ists, Protestants of no-name-brand denominations who pray in tongues and converse with Jesus”—into a powerful political force. In 1990, it seemed like this new alliance of the alienated just might win.34
Outsiders for Life
As the pro-choice movement fought back and the courts issued injunctions blocking anti-abortion protests, nonviolence remained essential to sustaining a mass movement against abortion and establishing the moral legitimacy of the cause. Nonviolence drew thousands of conservative Christians, many first-time participants, to the two largest mass protests against abortion, the 1991 Wichita “Summer of Mercy” and the 1992 Buff alo “Spring of Life.” A flyer for the “Spring of Life Rescue” in Buff alo in April 1992 contained a list of rules and a place for participants to sign to indicate they would behave as instructed. “I understand,” the pledge begins, “the critical importance that this mission be unified, peaceful and free of any actions or words that would appear violent or hateful to any witnesses of the event.” Organizers tried to get participants to think about the audience, the people who would see the event in the news. “Marshals,” like SNCC field secretaries, provided instructions at the protest site. Materials described in detail what would happen at protests so participants would not be caught by surprise. “A rescue,” one flyer claimed, was like having a church service on the “doorsteps of hell … Our intervention for the little babies is an act of worship … Be peaceful and nonviolent at all times in both word and deed.” A “Rescuers Check List” distributed by Operation Rescue California in the mid-nineties explicitly described every detail of the process—from prayer beforehand to jail afterward. “Bring a ziplock bag of trail mix” and some sunscreen, organizers suggested. Avoid underwire bras because they are banned in jails. The single, typed sheet cautioned participants to remember the training provided at pre-demonstration rallies: “If threatened, avoid even the appearance of aggression,” organizers warned. “Remember the principles of solidarity.” 35
Training materials also stressed the actual mechanics of civil disobedience. “Do not talk to, touch, or call out to the police, pro-abort opposition, clinic personnel, mothers, passersby or anyone else.” To block clinic doors, “walk, crawl or scooch, as directed by marshals. Never run. Always scooch to fill funnels or gaps.” Rescue training materials urged participants to “remain passive during arrest… Do not resist the officers, but do not assist them either.” By “going limp,” Operation Rescue insisted, activists would “buy more time for babies scheduled to die” because it would take longer for the police to drag them away. They also mimicked the passive response of the fetus to the assaults of the abortionist. Like civil rights activists after the first sit-ins, anti-abortion activists trained and practiced and reviewed instructions. Nonviolent direct action was difficult.36
Instructional materials stressed that participants needed to be prepared for arrest. “Th ink of your jail time as the’second part’ of the rescue.” Jail gave Christians “an opportunity to truly trust in God.” Incarceration became a time for worship and prayer. “Being in jail for your faith,” a flyer claimed, “can be a wonderful experience.” Filling up the jails would tax local government resources and keep abortion in the news. Participants could use their time behind bars to think and to write letters—as Terry had in Atlanta in 1989, or Bob Jewitt in the Harris County Jail in Houston in 1992, or Keith Tucci in Melbourne, Florida, in 1993—that urged activists to continue sitting-in in the face of persecution.37
By the early nineties, the nonviolent direct action wing of the anti-abortion movement invoked the civil rights movement and other sixties-era social movements in almost every action they planned and executed, every publication they produced, and every media story they circulated, whether they consciously appealed to these earlier direct action campaigns or not. Traces of the sixties continued to haunt much Operation Rescue rhetoric as other leaders replaced Terry. A call to work in the Buff alo “Spring of Life” stressed that the project formed part of the long “battle for the oppressed.” Abortion, another pamphlet argued, was “a violation of the rights of unborn boys and girls”—it attacked the powerless. A journalist who went under-cover in New York City to a planning meeting for clinic protests in the summer of 1992 described speakers talking about “civil rights for the unborn.” “If I must go to jail for being a Christian, then I will,” announced Keith Tucci, the leader of Operation Rescue National in 1992. “I will let the court know, however, that I will not be silent, for the oppression of the few leads to the oppression of the many.” Operation Rescue materials frequently used as an epigraph a poem by Chris Cowgill that began “We stand for those who have no voice.” “If every Christian put their lives on the line in front of abortion mills for just one day,” Operation Rescue leaders argued, “we could shut down the abortion business in a matter of hours.” The activists should “interpose themselves between a defenseless child and the killer bent on destruction.” “We as Americans,” a pamphlet called What Does One Abortion Cost? reminded readers, “have a proud tradition for standing up for the rights of individuals.” Operation Rescue materials continued to sound vaguely left ist, denouncing the “multimillion dollar abortion industry that sells abortions in the same ways that the corner drug-store sells aspirin.” The people who change society, a call to participate in the 1993 summer project, “Cities of Refuge,” proclaimed, are always small in number. “The pro-abortion secular media would like to portray people who risk arrest to save preborn children as fringe fanatic activists.” The truth was that they were Christians, “a remnant,” following “the biblical command to execute justice and defend the innocent.” Operation Rescue existed to “put action behind our words.” 38
For people old enough to remember and the many, like Terry, who had seen Eyes on the Prize, the visual images—newspaper coverage, television footage, and the photos in Operation Rescue’s own publications—continued to look like sixties-era civil rights protests. Crowds of sign-carrying people with determined faces, surrounded by police, in the commercial districts of towns and cities looked like they were reenacting earlier demonstrations. Pictures of protesters with bashed and bandaged heads visually quoted the photographs taken by SNCC workers a quarter of a century earlier. People filling police vehicles, jails, and courtrooms also evoked the imagery of earlier movements.39
On one level the civil rights movement analogy worked. It gave conservatives a chance to work for and imaginatively connect with their own marginalized and oppressed group. Identifying with the fetus—the ultimate example of powerlessness—mostly white middle-class protesters reconciled their own contradictions much as other middle-class whites had identifying with blacks. Their deep sense of themselves as outsiders coexisted with their growing political and economic power. Their profound faith in the individual united with God coexisted with their devotion to autocratic leaders and racial and gender hierarchies. With the unborn, they did not have to think about trade-offs or limits. They did not have to think about the nature of democracy in a nation of equal citizens. They did not have to feel responsible. Identifying with the unborn, they shared their innocence. The irony, of course, was that the civil rights analogy did all this work for anti-abortion protesters regardless of whether they supported civil rights activists or segregationists at the time or understood the results of the freedom movement as positive or negative.40
At the level of conscious adaption of civil rights methods, however, grass-roots protesters sometimes did not understand the connection. Potential recruits in Buff alo in 1992, for example, were bewildered and even offended by training sessions filled with film footage of King’s speeches. Activists in the late 1970s had coined the term “rescue,” in fact, to avoid the left -sounding term “sit-in.” In the courts, Terry denied rescue was civil disobedience. The necessity defense—that Terry had to break the law for the greater good, saving a baby—demanded it.41
For anti-abortion activists who embraced the call to direct action, though, thinking of rescue as solely an intervention rather than also as symbolic action had a major liability. If rescues were actually about saving lives, then what effort could ever be considered enough? A pamphlet for Operation Rescue: Boston made this clear. “A rescue” was “not a demonstration.” “Firemen do not’protest arson’ at the site of a burning building. They rescue people and property. Likewise, pro-life rescuers block abortuary entrances to rescue children.” Operation Rescue’s “If you think abortion is murder, act like it”—like the Black Panther Party’s “Off the pigs” and the Weather Underground’s “Bring the war home”—ultimately pushed some proponents of direct action into violence. In 1992, the police dug up a book in the backyard of an arrested activist. A group of anti-abortion extremists who had formed an underground group they called the Army of God supposedly distributed the anonymously authored text. When Life Hurts, We Can Help combined a detailed philosophical and theological justification for violent attacks on clinics with an explicit, step-by-step guide for producing explosive chemicals, building bombs, and carrying out other acts of sabotage, a version of Closed for the activist ready to use violence. From its first line, it described the abortion fight in religious terms: “This is a manual for those who have come to understand that a battle against abortion is a battle not against flesh and blood,” the text begins, “but against the devil and all the evil he can muster among flesh and blood to fight at his side.” America was “a nation ruled by a godless civil authority that is dominated by humanism, moral nihilism, and new-age perversion of the high standards upon which a Godly society must be founded if it is to endure,” “a nation under the power of Evil—Satan.” What, the manual asked, except a lack of knowledge would stop an activist this alienated from using violence? Where did an activist stop if protest ceased being even partly symbolic and she no longer believed in calling out the conscience of a broader public? Anti-abortion activist Michael Griffin provided one answer when he shot and killed Dr. David Gunn at a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic.
Direct action as a strategy of protest worked by fusing the symbolic and the material—an intervention that stopped some targeted activity momentarily and thus dramatized for others the beliefs of the protesters. When protesters no longer had faith that there was anyone out there for their drama to speak to, direct action lost this tension. It ceased to be both symbol and act, to both live inside the existing world as a thing and to make an alternative to that world. When activists lost hold of the symbolic meaning of their acts, only the material act of intervention had value. At that moment, the outsider had nothing to lose.42
In response to the murder of Gunn, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which President Bill Clinton signed into law in May 1994. FACE brought federal penalties against anyone using “force, threat of force or physical obstruction” to “intimidate or interfere” with a person “obtaining or providing reproductive health services” and against any person damaging facilities that provide these services. The new law made participation in the sit-ins that pro-choice activists called “clinic blockades” a federal crime.43
The same month FACE became law, Randall Terry and Matthew Trewhella, founder and leader of the Milwaukee-based anti-abortion organization Missionaries to the Preborn, attended a conference publicly billed as the Wisconsin state meeting of the United Taxpayers Party. Anti-hate-group activists described the convention instead as a major effort by anti-abortion and militia leaders to combine their missions. Terry told participants, “Our goal is a Christian nation … We are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.” Trewhella called Christians to “do the loving thing” and buy their kids “an SKS rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition” for Christmas. Then he held up his toddler and asked him to show the crowd his trigger finger. When the little boy held up his right index finger, the crowd laughed and applauded. In the militia movement, the postwar romance of the outsider fused with an older celebration of vigilante “justice” and “moral” outlaws.44
Fellow participants and journalists disagree about the extent to which leading activists actually privately encouraged or helped facilitate acts of violence against clinics and providers as they publicly promoted nonviolent direct action. In a January 1995 letter from Allenwood Federal Prison, Terry tried to refute the charge that “taking non-violent action to save children from death inevitably leads to the use of lethal force.” The violence, he argued, occurred because Americans refused to stop their attacks against “unborn” children. “Just as segregation and the accompanying violence possess the seeds for further violence, likewise it appears that the Law of sowing and reaping is being visited upon the abortion industry.” FACE “turns peaceful pro-life activists into federal felons.” Was it “logical to leap from non-violent life-saving activities to lethal force?” Terry asked. “Has God authorized one person to be policeman, judge, jury and executioner?” He made no mention of his speech in Wisconsin the year before, and denied that he had ever asked his followers to pray for the death of abortion providers or had any responsibility for the actions of James Charles Kopp, a former Operation Rescue member and close Terry associate who murdered abortion provider Barnett Slepian in Buff alo on October 23, 1998.45
The increasing numbers of murders and attempted murders—from two in 1993 to twelve in 1994, one each for 1995, 1996, and 1997, and three in 1998— made it difficult to recruit more than a small hardcore group of itinerant rescuers who lived on the road, traveling from protest to protest. The fact that federal fines shut down organizations as the courts seized assets and bank accounts and forced leaders to spend their energy staying a step ahead of the law did not help recruitment efforts either. The shocking murders of abortion providers pushed the press to publicize other acts of violence—clinic bombings, fires, and other acts of sabotage—more broadly as well. Not just pro-choice advocates but many conservative Christians too had trouble believing the direct action movement was nonviolent.46
In 1997, anti-abortion activist Neal Horsley created a Web site he named the Nuremberg Files. In the late nineties, activists talked less about civil rights and increasingly compared legalized abortion to slavery in America or to the Holocaust in Europe. The site asked visitors to “visualize abortionists on trial” for “their crimes against humanity” and listed the names, addresses, and even phone numbers of over two hundred abortion providers. Interviewed for a documentary on the Army of God, Horsley described how he had become an anti-abortion activist and narrated his own journey from the sixties to the nineties. As a young man, he claimed, he believed that the Vietnam War was wrong. “What will stop this war,” he decided, “is if everybody in this country that presently supports it looks around and sees themselves surrounded by freaks and counterculture outlaws. And what made outlaws in those days … all you had to do was reach out and pick up a marijuana cigarette and you smoke[d] it. If you inhaled, [you were an] an outlaw. And all of a sudden you begin to manifest behavior characteristics of outlaws.” Breaking the law made people into outsiders. “The reason I started selling marijuana was I intended to strew it all over the United States of America so that I could participate in creating the counterculture. It was my strategic input into the process. It was something I could do, and I did it, and they put me in prison for it.” Once people became part of the counterculture, he argued, they understood the immoral acts that propped up the center. They could see. “What I am doing today in defense of the unborn children is that same kind of willingness to get down and understand how the system works,” Horsley insisted. “And recognize that the only way we can really stop legalized abortion is if we the people can find a state that’s willing to secede and then the threat of that secession movement will wake the majority up and make the majority ask themselves are they willing to see the United States of America destroyed in order to perpetuate legalized abortion.” 47
Horsley represented the growing alliance of anti-abortion extremists and the militia movement, a new right-wing coalition of the alienated, promoted at the 1994 Wisconsin meeting. However far from full equality African Americans were in America, most Americans saw the early, southern phase of the civil rights movement as such a great success that even conservatives tried to claim its legacy. This consensus, in turn, made the supporters of white supremacist arguments and members of white supremacist groups like the Klan, people who had supported the oppressive system that civil rights activists were fighting in the sixties, look like the new outsiders. Horsley’s use of the secession argument revealed his ties to white supremacist, states’-rights thinking and demonstrated how the anti-abortion cause united Americans whose alienation from contemporary society seeped from a variety of sources. Ironically, the romance of the outsider that had done so much to pull young middle-class whites into support for the civil rights movement in the 1960s worked to rehabilitate right-wing extremists and white supremacists in the 1990s.48
Terry lied about his own actions, but he was right when he argued that direct action did not inevitably lead protesters to act violently. Some Catholic activists like Joan Andrews, for example, have participated in regular, nonviolent protests against abortion clinics for years without becoming murderers. Civil disobedience certainly depends on violence to work—acts of protest make visible the violence of the law as well as of the institutions charged with upholding it. Violent acts of protest, on the other hand, can never make this distinction. They cannot dramatize the difference between a particular vision of morality and particular vision of legality. It was not the logic of civil disobedience but the logic of the outsider romance that pushed anti-abortion activists, especially men, into acts of violence.
An oppositional stance only possesses meaning in relation to the beliefs and acts it stands against. Outsiders and rebels are not so much identities as relationships. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the romance of the outsider has encouraged a view of the world that celebrates individual will, disavows collective white middle-class power, and imagines relatedness at a symbolic rather than a material level. In this kind of thinking, a symbolic, imaginary relationship with a fetus can become so important that it necessitates murder.
