A Defendant’s Musings on the ACLA Case 11/12/1998
Michael Bray
To: Michael Bauman
(Philosophy Department at Hillsdale College)
12 November, 1998
Dear Dr. Bauman,
I am following up on some email communication from 7 November in which I made reference to a series of articles in the Village Voice (http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9845/gonnerman.shtml) – the nation’s largest weekly (with regard to circulation, at least). The series, written by Jennifer Gonnerman, insinuated that our speech in defense of the use of force to rescue womb children was a threat and therefore disallowable.
Similar articles have appeared elsewhere. Morris Dees’s Southern Poverty Law Center (a left wing organization living off its Klan-busting notoriety gained in the seventies) in the summer issue of their “Intelligence Report” (http://www.splcenter.org/) takes aim at those who defend the use of force to save innocent womb children. The editor, Mark Potok, was quoted liberally in a Canadian paper, the Hamilton Spectator (November 6) in which he says, “there is proof in the U.S. of the anti-abortion movement’s links with right-wing fanaticism, including white supremacists, anti-Semites and homophobes. There is a convergence to show they share the same ideology.”
I have already been contacted for a story with 60 Minutes. (I suspect the bent will be the same.) The drumbeat against anti-abortion speech is being advanced (dare we say conspiratorially?) on many fronts. It is not just the media, but the legal establishment; and how well they coordinate their hostilities! We were sued in federal court in the fall of 1995 for $1.4 billion. The defendants have all refused to condemn the destruction of abortuaries. As we prepare for trial in December, the plaintiffs have changed tacks. They, like the federal investigators before them (Reno’s task force known as VAAPCON: Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy), were able to find no violation of law; even laws as perverse as FACE and RICO could not be bent to impale us. Now the strategy they have taken up is to argue that we are speaking within a “context of violence” in which our otherwise tolerable speech has become threatening to those who “provide” the “service” of aborting children. We are not confident that the jurors drawn from the present well-debased American People will serve the truth or justice. Hope for justice is further attenuated by the fact that the judge – one Robert Jones – has appointed the ACLU to write up the guidelines for voir dire (jury selection). The typical questions proffered to the jury pool in an abortion-related case go something like this: Do you have any moral convictions about abortion? Have you ever actively opposed abortion?
One can expect no improvement (from our standpoint) by ACLU lawyers on the type of questions they will design to eliminate people who believe in the pre-eminence of the law God or even our own Constitution (as written) and therefore justice for children in the womb. The ACLU has its prejudices which certainly color its concern for free speech. William Donohue has pointed out handily in his Twilight of Liberty (Transaction Publishers, 1994) the priority given to the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project over its Capital Punishment Project, for example. Their official policy today (#239) is that “contemporary ideas of the significance of human life make imposition of the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Constitution” (p. 291). Moreover, “Children’s Rights” (policy #272) declares: “Under no circumstances should a juvenile ever be subject to the death penalty.” But this principle was brought into conflict with abortion when the arguments for juvenile abortion rights were faced against arguments for the life of juvenile capital offenders. Donahue reports as follows: “This dilemma came to a head in 1988 in a brief the ACLU drafted in behalf of William Wayne Thompson, a Death Row candidate who committed murder at age 15. The ACLU brief, written by Henry Schwarzwald of the Union’s Capital Punishment Project, maintained that juveniles do not have the same mental and moral development as adults. Due to the “diminished capacity of juveniles, Schwarzchild said, they should be exempted from the death penalty. But the brief was never filed because of opposition from Janet Benshoof, head of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “Benshoof knew what the stakes were: ‘Schwarzchild argues that teens have the incapacity to make moral, even rational decisions. In order to oppose abortion, he forces me to favor the hanging of teenagers’” (p. 292).
Why? because advocacy for the right of teenage girls to get their children aborted depended upon the contrary argument; to wit, teenagers have the mental and moral capacity to make their own decisions regarding abortion.
What was the ACLU to do?
“Sorry Willy. The right of the teenage girl to get that abortion is more important than sparing teenage kids from the death penalty. We have our priorities.”
Or, as Nat Henthoff put it, the ACLU’s hatred of the death penalty was made subservient to abortion” (Ibid.)
The ACLU, putatively the premiere defender of free speech, has demonstrated a clear departure from its radical support of any kind of speech when it comes to abortion. Just as it places the right to abort over the life of a juvenile capital criminal, it places the same right to abort over the right to free speech.
Anticipating a loss in court, given the favor this judge has shown the plaintiffs, we offered to settle before trial. On 3 November in the federal court in Portland, our lawyers proposed that we satisfy the plaintiff’s chief concerns over “wanted posters” by offering a promise from the defendants that they would not create posters featuring any of the plaintiffs on such works of art and expression.
The response was conveyed to me by defendant Cathy Ramey as follows:
“Number One: They want each and every defendant to “apologize for threatening” the plaintiff abortionists. Number Two: They want each and every defendant to publicly denounce any and all acts of violence used against abortionists and/or their facilities.
This is the heart of the matter. We acknowledge no commission of threats by our speech. We have propounded the truth: Abortionists are murderers who ought to be prosecuted as such; laws or policies of all municipalities ought to comport with this truth. Moreover, the corollary of this truth is the application of the principle of mercy and justice which allows the private citizen to use the force necessary (even lethal) to defend the innocent targets of Abortionists. We cannot refrain from speaking this truth on the basis of alleged fear that abortionists or their accomplices possess as a result of our proclamation. We regret the fears that the abortionists suffer; of course we lament all the more their decisions to continue in their misdeeds. Therefore, we can make no apology for the truth we have spoken, neither can we denounce the use of force against abortionists and their machinery of death.
The effort to suppress our speech in deference to the whinings of guilt-ridden abortionists is not surprising. But the failure of evangelical pastors to come to our support and affirm the truth we have spoken is disconcerting. The title of Well’s popular book comes to mind: “No Place for Truth.” The truth many speak – the imago Dei in man – is inextricable from the truth concerning the defense of innocent human beings. The one is a corollary of the other. You cannot keep the postulate and reject the corollary.
In short, the question which has not been answered with any thoroughness is this: If children in the womb are innocent human beings or what principle may they not be protected from harm in the same way that any other person may be protected?
The issue was taken up in a write in “symposium” printed in the December, 1994 issue of First Things. Most replies were not cogent. Helen Alvare representing the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, for instance, concluded her 60-word piece with: “One can, under Christian principles, act to defend another’s life; one may not intend to kill.”
Others were not thorough. Hadley Arkes of Amherst College contrasted the selfish killing performed by abortionists and Paul Hill’s killing of an abortionist saying, “Unless we dismantle moral reasoning altogether, or remove the gradations that are critical to moral judgment, it should be evident that these two acts of killing cannot stand on the same moral plane.”
Robert P. George was the only delightfully sarcastic: “I am personally opposed to killing abortionists. However, inasmuch as my personal opposition to this practice is rooted in sectarian (Catholic) religious belief in the sanctity of human life, I am unwilling to impose it on others who may, as a matter of conscience, take a different view. . . In short, I am moderately pro-choice.”
Ronald Sider ducked the issue by subjecting it to “criteria required by ‘justifiable revolution.’”
There were several other respondents answering quite cursorily.
The point here is that academics have not been honest and they do a disservice to the church. We have expected this from those who do not love God’s word. We hope otherwise for evangelicals.
At last, I come to your question: how to help. You can urge evangelical academics to grab hold of this issue which they have avoided to this point. How good and pleasant it would be, for example, for Francis Beckwith to include at one of those bio-ethics convocations a seminar on the “Ethics of the Use of Force by the Private Citizen”?
Thanks for enduring this lengthy missive. I don’t expect to be so windy next time.
Cordially,
Michael Bray
Conversing with James Kopp Judge Robert E. Jones Shuts Down Free Speech 11/18/1999
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