Operation Miscue

That is a sufficiently disturbing statement for those of us who are not Christians, and for Christians who are not biblical literalists like Benham and Newman. The threat of physical violence is also still very real, and still spawns an atmosphere of fear in reproductive-health clinics across the country. The violence has fallen off considerably since its peak in the mid-’90s, and no one has been killed in the United States since Slepian‘s assassination in 1998, but a clinic security guard was fatally shot in Australia last summer, and a doctor was stabbed in the back while entering a Vancouver, Canada, clinic in July 2000. A bomb went off at a Washington clinic as recently as last June, and the lobby of a Michigan Planned Parenthood was set afire in January 2001. Last year, Clayton Waagner escaped from jail and, in postings to the Internet, promised to kill 42 abortion providers. He has taken credit for mailing hundreds of fake anthrax threats to abortion clinics last fall. Waagner was arrested last December, but Nancy Sasaki, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood--Los Angeles, says the mere a presence of protesters, no matter how diminished their numbers, is enough to inspire fear. ”You don’t know that one of them couldn‘t be one of those crazies,“ she says. ”So it doesn’t matter that they‘re not chaining themselves to the doors anymore. The fact that they’re there and they‘re still yelling at you and you can hear and you can feel their anger and their hatred for what you represent to them [means] the threat is there.“

The violence has also caused its share of damage within the anti-abortion movement. In 1994, anti-abortion extremists organized a conference in Chicago. In attendance was Paul Hill, there to push a biblical justification for the murder of abortion doctors. Just a few months later, Hill would kill a physician and his escort in Pensacola, Florida. Thirty-four people, including Joseph Foreman, at the time a close associate of Jeff White, ended up signing a statement declaring ”the justice of taking all godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force.“ Flip Benham, in his trademark Texan twang, recalls attending the conference to argue against the proponents of ”justifiable homicide.“ ”I can remember beseeching them in the name of Jesus to cease and desist from their heresy,“ Benham says. ”That led to a great and much-needed split in the group.“

Benham’s move, and his insistence that his followers publicly condemn violence, was at least as important as a PR strategy as it was a principled stand. The belligerence of Operation Rescue‘s tactics had already alienated a good portion of American fundamentalist ministries, and Benham had every incentive to distance what was left of the group as far as possible from anyone who refused to openly condemn violence (which included White, who, though he insists his own commitment to peaceful protest is absolute, says, ”I believe that what I am doing is right, but in my heart of hearts, I don’t know that in God‘s eyes it’s not going to come up short. So I don‘t condemn“).

Regardless of any attempts at damage control, in the mid-’90s, Operation Rescue ”took the brunt of the heat“ for the escalating violence, says Troy Newman. ”It became very, very unpopular within churches and on street corners to say that you were pro-life, because if you said you were pro-life, all of a sudden people equated you with being a bomber and a murderer.“

Tim and Terri Palmquist learned that lesson well. Tim, sitting in the lobby of the Bakersfield ”Life House“ -- a blue A-frame just across the street from the only clinic in all of Kern County that provides abortions -- remembers a brighter era, before violence and factionalism slowed the movement to a crawl. A tall man with a red beard and tired blue eyes, he was in Wichita in 1991 with Terri, his wife. ”You had the feeling,“ he says, ”that we had got the momentum going here, and abortion was going down and it was going down fast.“

Back then, Tim and Terri regularly took part in Operation Rescue actions, traveling around the state and participating in, by Terri‘s estimate, about 30 clinic blockades. Terri, Tim says, has a gift for what people in the movement call ”sidewalk counseling,“ confronting women as they approach family-planning clinics to talk them out of having an abortion. ”Most of the time my wife was out there sidewalk counseling, and I was watching the kids,“ Tim laughs. (The Palmquists have nine children. Large families are the norm in the anti-abortion movement: Jeff White has 10 kids.) ”Throughout the rescue period there were times that she did let me do something, but most of the time it was her, because she is just more effective in terms of being able to talk one-on-one with the women.“

The Palmquists originally wanted to stage a rescue in Bakersfield, says Terri, a small woman with brown frizzy hair, dressed in khakis and Winnie the Pooh sneakers. They decided against it, though, once the sentences started getting tougher. ”When we sidewalk counsel,“ she says, ”one or two babies are saved every time I’m here, so it‘s really more effective one life at a time than to spend a whole bunch of time in jail.“ They ruled the possibility out completely in 1993. That year, the Family Planning Associates clinic in Bakersfield was burned to the ground, along with the entire office complex in which it stood. (In the same month, two other clinics in Illinois and Pennsylvania were burned, and a bomb exploded at a clinic in Newport Beach.) The Palmquists were out of town when it happened, at an Operation Rescue leadership meeting in Florida, but right after the fire, Terri says, ”They were showing our pictures on the news, trying to blame us for it.“