By January 2002, Paul and I had distanced ourselves from the group that had once represented our mission, amplified our public persona, created lasting friendships, and led us into serious legal trouble. We remained friends with Randall and many of those in Operation Rescue with whom we had worked, but the organization itself had deteriorated during the Clinton presidency. There were lawsuits and arguments about who owned the name, what the strategies should be, and—most of all—who was in charge. The organization’s decline seemed inevitable. In addition to the oversized egos of all the leaders, mine included, there was simply no plan for the next phase of the movement, especially after it ran out of volunteers who were willing to risk the severe fines, lengthy sentences, and judgments levied against them. All the energy, adrenaline, singular dedication, and vitriol that once defined Operation Rescue was gone.
Our exit did not mean abandoning the cause. Our efforts to end abortion continued in Washington by our pushing for legislation, preaching the “gospel of life” in churches, and commemorating all the victims of abortion during our yearly events in connection with the March for Life. A repeal of Roe v. Wade was impossible; Justice Antonin Scalia, the pro-life champion of the anti-Roe Rehnquist court, had told us so himself in a private meeting. But we knew incremental restrictions could also save the unborn and, over time, possibly make it so difficult for women to access the procedure, they would have no option but to choose life. So we decided to join the mainstream anti-abortion forces that set their sights on a more gradual and legislative approach to ending abortion in America. That meant focusing on the strategic targeting of abortion restrictions—from twenty-four-hour waiting periods and parental notification, to more substantial laws banning partial-birth abortion and acknowledging the legal personhood of the unborn.
There was a lot of competition in this arena. Many similar organizations to ours were lobbying Congress or working with the White House on policy, so Paul and I decided our ultimate goal would be to inform the consciences of those in the judicial branch. There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions. We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench—they were appointed for life—so why not convert them while in office? In 2003 we created the National Pro-Life Action Center, securing headquarters just one door north of our Faith and Action offices, putting this center of pro-life advocacy right at the nerve center of judicial activism. The new location became a beehive of activity as we invited several other large-scale pro-life advocacy organizations to move their Washington operations into our facility, allowing us to share personnel, resources, and expertise.
The trauma of 9/11 was quickly being superseded by the deployment of troops and concerns about security, but domestic issues remained at the top of the list of priorities for religious conservatives. That made those same issues important to the Bush White House and the Congress. As Paul ramped up engagement with the judiciary, our Faith and Action team continued its work with those other two branches.
The ban on partial-birth abortion was again introduced in the Senate, this time by our good friend Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, and passed in March 2003. The House cleared a similar measure in June, and after minor differences were resolved between the two bills, it was ready for Mr. Bush’s signature by the end of October. The signing ceremony took place not in the White House or the Rose Garden but in a large auditorium of the massive Ronald Reagan Building. As I looked at the crowd, it seemed as if all the most important conservatives and evangelicals were there. President Bush knew exactly how to frame this momentous event. “The right to life cannot be granted or decreed by government, because it does not come from the government,” he said. “It comes from the Creator of life.” Bush was the most loyal and accessible president evangelicals had ever had. We had worked and prayed with such intensity for over eight years to put a stop to this barbaric and evil practice, at last we could feel that we were making real progress toward its demise.
Paul and I knew that in order to widen the breadth of pro-life support in the country, we would need to broaden our agenda. Being pro-life didn’t end at birth but spread across life’s continuum. We found the perfect example of this in the case of Terri Schiavo, who had suffered a heart attack in her St. Petersburg, Florida, home in 1990 and, ever since, had lived in what doctors called a “persistent vegetative state.” For eight years her husband sought treatments that might bring her back to some state of awareness. Finally concluding there was no hope, he went to court to have her feeding tube removed, insisting his wife would not have wanted her life prolonged by artificial means.
Terri’s devout Catholic parents vehemently disagreed and claimed their daughter would never have wanted to be a victim of euthanasia. It would be wrong to deprive her of nourishment when she was still manifestly alive, they argued. Litigation dragged on for seven years, and when a county judge ordered Terri’s feeding tube removed, the Schiavo family hired Randall Terry to mobilize his pro-life network to stop the courts from interfering.
Paul and I worked intensely behind the scenes to move legislation in Congress to preserve the life of this young woman. The issue was not just the feeding tube but judicial overreach, the same problem we encountered during our pro-life demonstrations. We had long pointed to judges acting as super-legislators, reinterpreting and misapplying law, as the core problem in America. In many sermons, I had decried judges—especially on the federal level—as vestiges of the monarchy America broke from in the War of Independence. Our own attorney general, John Ashcroft, had reminded the American people that the early patriots emphatically cried, “We have no king but Jesus!” Federal judges were like fickle princes making and nullifying law with a single stroke of the pen.
What we called the fight against judicial overreach had become an article of faith for those of us in the religious right. These wicked judges were behind everything bad in America: they had ordered prayer and Bible reading out of public schools, yanked the Ten Commandments out of courthouses and state capitol buildings, and erased the immorality from homosexual relations. By now we had teamed up with Richard Land, the head of policy for the Southern Baptist convention, who announced, “We’re seeing this in case after case, with homosexual marriage, with abortion, with the Terri Schiavo case. Are we going to have a government of the people, by the people and for the people? Or a government of the judges, by the judges and for the judges?”
Paul begged our friends in Congress to act, arguing there was no time like the present—and no case like Terri’s—that could both advance the cause of life and limit the out-of-control judiciary. Two Republican leaders in the House negotiated a bill to protect Terri from what one lawmaker described as a “merciless directive” from a state judge. The bill passed and President Bush signed it at one in the morning. But all our efforts finally failed in 2005, when the courts insisted again that the feeding tube be removed. I went to Pinellas Park, where Terri was in hospice care, to lead a prayer vigil within view of where, we believed, Terri was being starved to death. She died on March 31.
I was outside the facility and when the news of her passing was announced, I fell to my face on the ground and cried out to God for mercy, a photo of which would appear on the front page of the Washington Post. But my feelings were more complicated than what was captured in that image. I wanted to truly inhabit the family’s sphere of loss and fragile hope that something could have been done. But more than that, my major concern was that this was a unique opportunity to galvanize the attention of those who may have been on the margins in protecting the lives of unborn babies. They would care about Terri and by extension be brought fully to our cause, I thought. If I was sad that day, I was also satisfied that we might have moved the needle for life further than ever before. Terri’s death was tragic, for sure, but there was something bigger at stake. While I was busy decrying the depersonalization of the unborn, I’m afraid I was doing that very thing by exploiting the situation of this tragically damaged woman.
* * *
Once back in Washington, I continued to distribute the Ten Commandments on Capitol Hill, but I was frustrated I had still not gotten them into the White House. There would be no president as receptive as George Bush, I thought; I just needed the right opportunity to propose it to him. We may have been seen as a constituent group important to him, but we hadn’t yet made our mark with these stone tablets on the inside of his White House. Our chance presented itself when Cheryl and I were invited by two of our supporters to join them at a reception where the honored guests would be the president and first lady.
We arrived early for the dinner and soon found ourselves standing next to the president and Mrs. Bush for a photo. We engaged them in small talk, but knowing I had only a few minutes, I seized the opportunity and told the president that the National Clergy Council wanted to send a delegation to present him with a framed sculpture of the Ten Commandments for display in the Executive Mansion. He looked surprised, as if I had broken a rule by turning a social conversation into a business proposition, but then, without a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Accepted!”
When the president’s special assistant, Tim Goeglein, called to tell me the president would likely not attend the ceremony but wanted it to be scheduled, I replied with undisguised annoyance. Plain and simple, I was offended. We had done a lot to help George Bush; the least he could do was duck into a room for a quick handoff of our plaques. That I was incredulous that the president of the United States had better things to do was a testament to how inflated my self-regard had become by then. Nonetheless, I accepted the proposed date and asked some major donors, the officers of our National Clergy Council, and several handpicked pastors and leaders of well-known ministries to join me in presenting the president with the sacred tablets.
The ceremony was set to take place in the ornate Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, immediately adjacent to the White House, where the Office of Public Liaison was located. I stood to the side of the Secret Service security clearance desk while two uniformed officers checked the ID for each of the fifty members of our delegation against a computer database. After they had passed through a metal detector, they were instructed to wait for me on the other side of a set of turnstiles. I had wanted to be sure everyone got through, and I was the last to be screened.
The officer scrolled casually to my name, then, with a look of alarm, stared up at me and back down at her screen. Turning to her partner at the desk, she drew his attention to her monitor and pointed at my name. The other officer rapidly nodded his head, apparently confirming the cause for her concern. I looked at my delegation on the other side of the security detail and shrugged my shoulders, reading this as a momentary inconvenience.
I was wrong.
She told me that there was a flag next to my name that meant I could never, under any circumstances, gain access to the White House. Tim Goeglein immediately tried to argue on my behalf, but there was no point. I had to leave the premises. I learned several weeks later, the Secret Service had placed the flag next to my name because of my involvement in the episode with the aborted baby at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. My “flag” would eventually be lifted, but only after a Herculean effort, my own Operation Enduring Freedom, which included internal advocacy from the White House and calls from several well-placed friends to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.
The years of the Bush presidency passed as a kind of dream of achievement and influence. Having a friend in the White House emboldened me on every front. I now walked through the halls of Congress with an air of entitlement. I had earned my place. I mingled with Supreme Court justices, and more than one reached out to me for a private moment. I had penetrated the opaque federal judiciary, and sitting judges and their staff attended my regular prayer groups and Bible studies. I trusted our friends in public office and took pleasure in assisting them to achieve their goals as they assisted me in achieving mine. And yet this time of achievement also had its darker sides: the sacred became confused with the political; my own ambitions and arrogance contrasted with the claims of Christ on me for humility, kindness, and generosity. While I was contrite at the altar, when in the political arena I was thrilled at being a part of the modern-day blood sport. In these turbulent waters, Jesus would come to me, offering his hand and leading me toward a different path.