On Friday night, October 23, 1998, in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst, abortion doctor Barnett Slepian—whose clinic we had demonstrated against for years—and his wife returned home from annual memorial prayers for his father at their synagogue. He stood in the kitchen heating some soup for his dinner while talking to one of his four sons when a single sniper’s bullet pierced a window, severed his spine and aorta, and narrowly missed his son’s head. Two hours later he was dead. New York governor George Pataki described the shooting as an “act of terrorism,” and Attorney General Janet Reno said the Justice Department would begin “actively investigating the possibility that Dr. Slepian was murdered because of his work providing abortion services” and that “the federal government would continue its vigilant defense of constitutionally protected rights to provide and to obtain reproductive health services.”
Immediately a tsunami of blame began to swirl around Operation Rescue and especially the Schenck brothers because of our work blockading his clinic during the Spring of Life. In one instance Dr. Slepian had begged me to back off, but Paul tried to block his car as he denounced him for being a “pig” who spilled innocent blood. Slepian emerged enraged. I can remember his face and voice. This was not someone who was just another name. I knew Barnett Slepian.
When I heard the news, I was in New York City for a speaking engagement. I wish I could say my immediate reaction was pastoral compassion for the doctor and his family. Unfortunately, by then, my pastoral sensibility had been dulled by my concern about the pro-life movement and my reputation. I didn’t ask what this would mean for his wife and now-fatherless children. A torrent of emails and phone calls from movement leaders convinced me that I needed to go to Buffalo to make some statement distancing us from this act. They urged me to do something publicly healing and do it fast.
I flew directly to Buffalo and twenty thousand feet above the usual distractions and demands, I started asking myself the hard questions: Who in our world would ever perpetrate such a horrible act? Was it possible someone under my spiritual care was an assassin? Our people put themselves in harm’s way to prevent murder; how could one of them commit one? Had I ever said or done anything that contributed to this terrible event? Could I have prevented it? For Paul and me and so many of the activists around us, “abortionists” were not real people but had become symbols of the worst of liberal and secularist ideals, manifestations of a selfish and materialistic culture. But as I looked back on how my life had intersected with Dr. Slepian’s, remembering our encounters and even our exchanges, I had a sense of understanding him. He was not just the embodiment of work I found abhorrent but, indeed, was a real human being who had been murdered by someone who claimed to be one of us. The implications were too terrible for me to fully absorb.
As the plane made its familiar descent into Buffalo, my more meaningful reflections were cut short when my old defensive reflexes sprang into action. I had a job to do and that was to control the narrative somehow, so that our anti-abortion work—and the Schenck brothers in particular—would not be connected to this vile act. By the time we landed, I decided to make a symbolic pilgrimage to the slain doctor’s office, where an improvised memorial had already been created.
As I emerged into the airport terminal, reporters ambushed me: Was I acquainted with the man who murdered Dr. Slepian? Was he part of your organization? Did I feel any personal responsibility for the shooting? The pro-choicers had pointed to our work in their attempts to assign blame. I emphasized that the murder was wrong, sinful, and cowardly, and that the Sixth Commandment was clear in its prohibition of the wanton taking of human life. I felt desperate to convince everyone that shootings or arson had no place in the fight against abortion. I wanted to be sure that none of Dr. Slepian’s blood stained my hands.
On my way to the memorial site, I picked up flowers and contacted other Western New York pro-life leaders to join me in a delegation there. When we gathered in front of the modest storefront clinic, I remembered all the rescues, the calling out to pregnant women who still had a chance to save their babies during our numerous large-scale blockades. I recalled denouncing Slepian for the killing of unborn children and accusing him of murder. I watched him go from his car to his office door, climbing over rescuers deliberately inserting themselves in his path. I remembered his rage when we showed up outside his home—that same house where he would bleed out on his kitchen floor—and how he swung a baseball bat, smashing the back window of a minivan carrying our protestors.
Clearly what had happened violated the basic tenet we all held dear: respect for life was at the core of everything we did. But much as I condemned his actions, I could not condemn the man, who was a loving husband and father—just as I was. And a sinful human being—just as I knew I was. I knelt on the lawn and laid my bouquet amidst others. I thought of the prayerful crowds who had once assembled there and winced at some of our tactics. I would not accept any responsibility for the violent act of one madman, but I regretted, painfully at that moment, the incendiary language we used to get our point across and acknowledged the harm it may have caused.
The place where I was kneeling was not just an abortion clinic but now a makeshift shrine of mourning and loss. Flowers were piled atop the steps, and the door we had so often blockaded was covered with loving messages of sympathy and sadness. I bowed my head, confused and ambivalent, praying for an end to all violence, inside and outside abortion businesses. While the prayers I was saying in the aftermath were important, I remember thinking more about the optics. This was just what was needed to correct the perception that our movement endorsed this kind of violence. At the same time, I felt an unfamiliar but profound sense of moral culpability and grief.
Then I stood up and stepped back. I explained to a reporter that each flower in the bouquet I laid there was symbolic: a red one commemorated his death and that of all the babies who had died in his clinic, a pink rose was for his widow, four yellow roses were for each of his sons, and a single white rose represented the hope that someday God would end all violence. I had envisioned this modest ceremony as proof that, in the end, pro-lifers were reasonable and considerate. We cared—even about our vilest opponents.
It was as if I had pulled a pin from a hand grenade.
One columnist called me a “hypocrite and a charlatan.” Lynn Slepian, the doctor’s widow, later collected my bouquet, smashed it, and sent it back to me with an angry note. She blamed me for the violence against her family, citing the inflammatory language my cohorts and I routinely used about her husband, charging it had provoked her husband’s murderer.
The more the accusations piled up, the more my need to assert our innocence grew. Nobody I knew would ever condone cold-blooded murder. We may have been a bit intemperate during the Spring of Life, but an unstable person could be set off for many reasons. Who could ever know what the murderer’s motivation truly was? It seemed to us that the name calling, blame shifting, scapegoating, and false accusations against highly visible Christian leaders was part of a much broader pattern. We were under siege by the media establishment and others.
* * *
In October, the House of Representatives impeached President Clinton following perjury charges against him after he lied about an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Owing to the president’s misstep, the folks in my circles could not imagine the midterm elections of 1998 would be anything but a wholesale repudiation of Clinton and his administration—a replay of what had happened in 1994. We miscalculated. The Senate voted not to remove the president from office, Republicans lost five seats in the House, and Newt Gingrich was forced to resign as speaker.
The official explanation for Gingrich’s abrupt departure was that he bore the blame for the loss of Republican seats in the 1998 elections. But nothing is quite so simple. A year after Gingrich had lost his speakership, he divorced his second wife and married a former staff member with whom he was rumored to have had an extramarital affair. But it didn’t stop with him. One after another, prominent members of our trusted Republican leadership demonstrated they had a great deal in common with the president they vilified when it came to infidelity.
It’s a peculiar experience to be a clergyman when the misbehavior of people in the public eye is revealed. We’re charged with being the moral center of gravity, an earthly authority on rectitude because we have devoted our lives to the Lord and, in doing so, are supposed to be above it all. Every day back then, it seemed, I was asked questions like “What do you think of this, Reverend?” and “Did you expect this?” I tried to be measured, talking about compassion, the importance of marital vows, how God’s laws transcend partisan divides, but it was difficult to sustain the moral high ground of the Christian right and the Republican Party in the face of the revelations that many of our political allies were acting immorally. Whatever partisan triumphalism I might have experienced with Clinton’s serial humiliations quickly faded with the barrage of embarrassing news that followed concerning the secret behavior of some of our luminaries. And yet, even as it was causing no small measure of pain and many accusations of double standards and outright hypocrisy, I was almost grateful for the period of reckoning that transpired during those months. It seemed a moment when our system might be purged of such sinful behavior and perhaps we could start again.
There is much to be said for public penance and atonement. I knew Clinton’s excesses had become a part of his character, but similar ruptures of marriage vows and violations of basic decency existed on both sides of the aisle. I tried to maintain the façade of objectivity, pointing to questions of law, accountability, checks and balances. Inside, though, I felt differently. I thought of the families, the Clintons and the Lewinskys. I even thought of Clinton himself. I tried not to allow any empathy to enter too far into my consciousness, because the stakes were too high, but sometimes I thought that I had to acknowledge he was human like me. Who among us would have wanted our private, most embarrassing sins litigated by federal prosecutors, the United States Congress, producers, directors, and journalists? This all started to feel more like political retribution than anything else. And in private times of reflection, I was ashamed.
As members of the Christian right, we had dominated Republican politics throughout the decade, but we realized after Clinton was acquitted that our power and our values did not seem to be a part of any broad consensus. It seemed inevitable after the Lewinsky scandal surfaced that Clinton would be defeated, and yet he was more popular than ever, abortion was still generally accepted, and gays had made great strides into the mainstream. What had we done wrong? What did we not understand? “What has alarmed me throughout this episode,” James Dobson wrote to his supporters, “has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior, even as they suspected, and later knew, that he was lying. I am left to conclude that our greatest problem is not in the Oval Office. It’s with the people of this land.”
Our mandate was to reverse what one of our revered philosophers, Robert Bork, referred to as our nation “slouching towards Gomorrah.” We needed to redouble our efforts, work harder to mobilize fellow Christians, and make a difference in the next election. I relished being an underdog. The experience of being underestimated had served me well over the years. For members of the religious right, the Clinton presidency and impeachment catalyzed a period of taking stock; we had to come to terms with how we communicated our values and failed to engage the American people. For me it confirmed that I had made the right decision in coming to Washington. My mission seemed to be even more urgent.
As Faith and Action became more successful, and I took my place among influential figures in the Republican Party and among the religious right, my unguarded midnight thoughts became more uncomfortable. I struggled with how oversimplifications of difficult and complex human problems and actions were a convenient shortcut for me. If I could make them into binary equations—the right-thing-versus-the-wrong-thing, full stop—people and problems became easy to handle. But was that truly the way people lived? By morning I would tuck those pangs of conscience into the deep basement spaces reserved for ideas unserviceable to The Cause. Nuance, ambiguity, conundrums, even the once-hallowed concept of spiritual mystery neither motivated people nor raised the money necessary to accomplish our goals. No appeal letter that included lofty concepts about human frailty and tough choices would succeed. Decades later, that cheapening of the human experience would haunt me. But not yet.