Hunting for justice
On October 23, 1998, Bernard Slepian, abortionist, was terminated in New York.
Hunting for justice in an insane, upside down world
By Cathy Ramey
Research assistance: Joe Washburn
Christians have a tough task these days.
BANG! A bullet flies and a man is dead.
There was a time when it could be expected that the body on the floor was, perhaps, some innocent man caught in the crossfire during a burglary or a dispute that got out of control; maybe a gang member or gangster who would have gotten the other guy if he hadn’t been laid cold first. Sympathies are easy to direct in those kinds of cases.
In the old days it was easy to distinguish good guys and bad guys. But these days one can neither assume the innocence of the body on the floor or the moral guilt of the shooter. A radical shift in our cultural worldview makes placing proper biblical blame a weighty task.
Take the October 23 killing of an Amherst, New York man as a case in point.
Just back from synagogue worship where they memorialized the ninth anniversary of his father’s death, Bart Slepian stirred a bowl of soup hot out of the microwave. The steam hit his face and felt good after being out in the chilly autumn air. His voice only slightly raised, he kept up a conversation with one of his sons, a 15-year-old who stood just beyond the doorway.
Only a second later his bowl of soup and the man were cast across the kitchen floor, vegetables and broth mingling with blood.
Bart Slepian had been shot in the back, bullet fragments exploding into both lungs. The next moments were-no doubt-hell in slow motion for his family as police and an ambulance were called. Maybe Lynne Slepian cradled her husband’s head and offered reassurances to the four boys and herself despite the growing pool of red and the sound of Bart Slepian struggling for air.
Then there was the panicked call one of the children made to Mrs. Slepian’s father. In a confusion of words the boy fought to tell his grandfather that his son-in-law was hurt, maybe dying of injuries sustained by somebody haunting the family’s dark backyard.
Immediately one feels sympathy for those caught in such a dreadful situation. Suddenly four sons-Andrew, Brian, Michael, and Philip-are facing life without a father and a wife is now looking at widowhood. It is a tragedy to all, and one of mammoth proportions to those living through the events of October 23. It is something that will haunt them the way that John’s death haunted Jackie Kennedy.
But who is to blame for the terror and pain that they have experienced?
There was a time when anger settled easily on the shooter. However our experience of the reality of this family’s trauma is inexplicably shifted to another reality.
Barnett Slepian Was an Abortionist.
Like ─ No, worse than ─ a Chicago mobster of the 30’s and 40’s, Bart Slepian oversaw the killing of innocent people every day of his adult professional life. Then he drove away to his comfortable home in the suburbs and told himself that what he did for a living was noble and necessary for his family.
If one has seen the fruit of just a single day of Bart Slepian’s “work,” one has a sudden visceral confusion to contend with. After all, “all in a day’s work” means that the work product stacks up to two-ten-maybe a dozen bloody, dead, dismembered babies each shift. Some of them are dead by having their small, soft bodies literally wrenched apart and pulled through suction tubing; others are neatly cut here and there by a knife-like instrument-an arm brought out first or maybe a leg with other appendages and organs to follow.
In each case Bart Slepian slowly, carefully carved away bone and flesh until all of the child was extracted from the womb.
Among the pieces is a heart that was warm and beating only moments before. Tiny fingers and a thumb that once sought the comfort of this baby’s mouth lay gently curled and discarded next to what was a liver and a foot. The face of this infant has been nearly shorn from the rest of his head, the eyes open and dark with sudden terror. The safety the child was feeling has been shattered; his view of a loving protected existence-no matter how simply developed-proven to be utterly false.
The dissonance or emotional confusion can be overwhelming, so overwhelming that most men and women simply do not want to see what Barnett Slepian and hundreds of other such practitioners do for a living. It is easier to focus on the outrage one feels at seeing the man on the floor without muddying the waters with images associated with his occupation.
Forming an opinion as to the guilt of Bart Slepian’s killer has suddenly become something far more complex. As with every homicide, one needs to know what motivated such an aggressive act on the part of one who has killed. Here it seems that motive may not be so easily settled as mere “corruption,” “evil,” “political ideology,” or reduced down to simple hatred of the man.
Almost immediately in the case in point it was assumed that moral concerns-a decision to protect other babies from Bart Slepian and his occupation-might have played a part in the shooting.
Enter the Abortion Lobby:
In an upside down world, one where justice has been turned on its head, having no legs to stand upon, it is sometimes necessary to prop up the preferred worldview, that is, the worldview adopted by Slepian and so many others. The abortion lobby is called into action, each player stepping forth with a sound bite of outrage. Each player smoothly suggesting that birthing babies in pieces is part and parcel of a noble healthcare tradition.
Bypassing the “product” of Slepian’s work, they use women as mannequin-like props, turning them center-stage and adjusting the lighting so that the harvest of such an untimely birth is carefully kept out of sight. They cleverly suggest that the life and death struggle of abortion is ultimately representative of a threat to fertile women rather than small, soft, infant bodies.
Slepian, they say, “was one of the few physicians with the integrity to stand up for what he believed,” slyly suggesting that those many thousands of physicians all across the country who have refused to commit abortions are cowardly; they have not taken up the abortion-cudgel and advanced the cause. Somehow by their non-activism they have allowed a substantial part of the public to believe that the abortion-remedy is not essential to a woman’s healthcare.
So begins the process of turning a mediocre foreign medical school graduate into a hero. It takes some fine footwork to make an academic under-achiever, a zealot for the right to kill unborn babies, into a bastion of pride for the militant feminist movement. It requires making excuses for his brutality not only to pre-born children but also to the born.
For example, so far the abortion lobby has successfully translated a 1988 assault against a man and another person’s vehicle into an act of wartime bravado. Slepian beat a pro-life protester with a bat and smashed the windows of a van. His act of barbarism against an unarmed, peaceable protesters resulted in a judge ordering him to pay damages both for the vehicle and the victim’s medical bills.
Beyond an ability to turn pond water scum into wine, the abortion lobby is lucky this year. They have a sex-addicted president in the White House who has said that no abortion, no matter how late or patently barbaric should be disallowed. Coming on to woman with child is apparently a turn-off to a guy who can’t keep his zipper closed.
Some abortion sacrifices may happen even after all but the baby’s head has emerged from the womb. Death comes suddenly with a jab into the back of the skull ─ something like pithing a frog in a lab-even as the infant’s warm legs and arms move for safety beneath an abortionist’s fingers.
HOORAY!
The abortion lobby rules. Round up the usual suspects.
In news articles sent out across the country they point to the man lying in his pool of blood, inflaming a population against those opposed to killing innocent unborn children.
“Every abortion opponent has had a part in the death of Slepian,” so they say. And they may be right. After all, by expressing an alternative 2000-year-old worldview, these Christians have suggested that Barnett Slepian is himself a class-A killer.
Bart Slepian too has weighed in on the debate:
“They can proudly display their ‘Abortion Kills Children’ bumper stickers on their automobile bumpers,” he once wrote to the Buffalo News, “and, of course, contribute to the cost of the billboards the claim, ‘Abortion Kills Children.’ Every year thousands of them form the ‘Life Chain’ with the same message repeated over and over, printed on hand-held signs . . . But please don’t feign surprise, dismay or certainly not innocence when a more volatile, less-restrained member of the group decides to react to their inflammatory rhetoric by shooting an abortion provider. They all share the blame.”
Bart Slepian-were he able to roll over and address the nation from his grave-might be saying, “I told you so.”
But what about the speech this serial abortionist would reduce down to “inflammatory rhetoric”?
Babies unearthed from dumpsters, sent off into the sewers by means of high powered garbage disposal units, and couriered to pathology and tissue labs testify to the fact that the passion over aborting babies is more than political bombast. There is a great evil taking place and arguably the bullet that flew forth on Friday October 23 merely reigned in a small part of the terror.
Apparently no babies died at the Buffalo GYN Women’s Services facility on Saturday.
Under a biblical worldview it is the innocent-not those like Slepian-whose protection is commanded. Stopping a killer-if defending innocent human life against such a monster was the goal-is considered nothing short of heroic (Rom. 5:7).
Instead, all of the forces of government and hell are put in place to protect those who kill babies in the name of “terminating a woman’s pregnancy.” Some even argue ─very reasonably ─ that it is the government and the abortion lobby themselves who ought to be blamed for making a man like Bart Slepian into a cold gray corpse. After all, civil protest; picketing, sit-ins, prayer vigils and the like have been squashed under the weight of judicial authority propelled by an abortion lobby bent on removing all public disapproval of the sacrament of abortion.
In a culture that has effectively adopted abortion as a basic right, a fierce competition ensues. There is a clash between one’s constitutional right to speak freely and the so-called U.S. Supreme Court-mandated right to abort without being unduly challenged over the decision. Words like “baby,” “murder” and “murderer,” even simple factual statements like, “Abortion Kills Children,” discomfit those engaged in making small sacrifices of unborn infants.
As the abortion lobby prevails, all are muzzled into a grudging silence over the violent death of babies. Yet., a few maintain a stubborn insistence that they must be represented and protected. Absent so many other ways of calling for their safekeeping, an odd man here or there determines that even bullets must be called into play to defend them.
One wonders if the muzzling of the pro-life movement is not an act of God as intimidation and silence give way to the sort of defense that the born anticipate receiving. After all, an entire class of innocent people-the unborn-have been denied protections morally, if not legally, rightfully theirs while a movement insists upon calendar protests in response to the rampant killing ─ 4,000 every day-taking place in the name of “choice.”
In a culture gone mad with a sort of militant-matriarchy at the helm there is the bloodcry for accountability. James Copp (or Kopp, depending on the news article you read) represents the pound of flesh the abortion-industry wolves are hunting. He is a man who once owned a car reportedly seen in the Slepian neighborhood the week before the shooting. Apparently, assuming his brother-in-law’s recollection is correct, he has not had the car in some time. He sold it or gave it away and the new owner, it is conjectured, never registered.
James Kopp is wanted “only as a material witness,” perhaps one who will be coerced into identifying who he sold the car to and who it is that demonstrated remarkable marksmanship that Friday night.
James Kopp remains at large; he has “gone off the grid,” according to investigators. Speculation is that he is afraid for his own safety. Pro-life activists-even avowed pacifists like Kopp-have learned that their safety too is fragile, though not as uncertain as an unborn child’s.
Damned if you do turn yourself in (they may never let you go), and damned if you don’t (they are likely to shoot first and ask questions later).
Other suspects taken to task without any evidence of wrongdoing include a man with a website. Neal Hosley has constructed what he calls “The Nuremberg Files: Visualize Abortionists on Trial,” a place in cyberspace where those like Slepian can be listed for posterity; the record saved for a time in history when a class of people called “the unborn” are given equal rights and protections under the law. At that time a trial would be held and Horsley’s archive would be indispensable in identifying the criminal players in the abortion holocaust.
Horsley had the audacity to put a line through Slepian’s name the day after his death. And of course, abortion zealots made haste to claim that such an act was callous at the very least and more than likely an indication of a broad anti-abortion conspiracy to kill doctors (never mind that millions of Justice Department-tax-dollars failed to find the one they insist must exist).
Brushing aside allegations meant to send him into fearful silence, Horsley dismisses the abortion-lobby claims against his website stating, “People who unjustifiably kill people suffer consequences . . . The lesson of Nuremberg is that no matter how high and mighty you may be at one time, you will eventually be brought before the bar of justice. Someday there will be an accounting.”
The net intended to cast guilt goes even further than former car owners or website owners. One paper trumpeted that magazine editor Paul deParrie had been prohibited a year earlier from entering Canada to “visit his Canadian right-to-life friends.” The implication made is that some evil was in the offing and that alert border guards rescued the moment by turning an innocent man’s car back at the border.
Marilyn Buckman, an abortion facility worker whose paycheck is swelled by the number of hideously unnatural births done in Buffalo asserts that, “those who picket the doctors and clinics” contributed to the death of Slepian.
Slepian, speaking as though from the grave, asserts through an old newspaper clipping that “rosary-holding churchgoers and the bishop” who allows them the expression of their sincere religious convictions are liable for acts of force like the one which took his life.
An Episcopalian minister, Reverend Paul Schenck, laid his body down in front of Slepian’s car one day, impeding his progress into the abortuary. According to ABC News, it was “his determination [that] made Barnett [Slepian] a marked man.”
In a culture that has turned justice upside down the amount of finger pointing hits the phenomenal mark. Surely there are postal workers and GMC plant managers who bear guilt as well because in the final analysis abortion promotion requires more than one’s silence.
You don’t believe that?
Consider the barrage of abortion promotion mandated by recent UN Women’s Conferences held in Cairo, Beijing, and other countries. Silence on the so-called right to abortion is tantamount to vocal disapproval. In a climate where God and His law are rejected, every prop-every person-is necessary to support a wrong of that magnitude. Ultimately one’s silence-just like the silence and absence of James Kopp-serves to testify to one’s guilt in such a crazy world.
What is obvious-Slepian’s own moral guilt (never mind that he attended synagogue)-shouts through all of the elaborate speeches in an effort to be heard. Failure of the average person to see his culpability ─ his blood-guiltiness for his own death as well ─ is reminiscent of the village people who complimented the king on his fine clothing when he wore not a stitch. It takes rare, bold people to shout the truth in such a climate of deception.
May God grant us many more brave, bold people before we are all judged for our injustices against these children.
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