Alternet.org
, January
07, 2010
Catholic Bishops Embrace Anti-Abortion Terrorizers Missy Smith
and Randall Terry
By Adele M. Stan
As the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops renews its offensive on the anti-abortion
language in the heath-care legislation soon to be finalized by
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,
four of those bishops appear to have given their seal of approval
to a group whose leader gloated over the killing of Dr. George
Tiller, a gynecologist who performed late-term abortions in Kansas,
and called on anti-abortion activists to next "get"
Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who performs similar services at his Nebraska
clinic.
Missy Smith, a stalwart
member of Insurrecta Nex -- Randall Terry's merry band of anti-choice
hecklers and street clowns -- announced plans yesterday to conduct
a training session for her own organization, Wake Up, at Washington,
D.C.'s John Paul II Cultural Center, an institution presided over
by four bishops, including Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington.
(The other members include John Myers, archbishop of Newark, N.J.;
Bernard Harrington, bishop of Winona, Minn.; and Cardinal Adam
Maida, the retired archbishop of Detroit.) Among the speakers
on Smith's program is Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry,
who famously called Tiller "a mass murderer," adding
that Tiller, who was killed in cold blood, had "reaped what
he sowed." Susan Gibb, communications director for the archdiocese
of Washington, refused comment on whether Archbishop Wuerl approved
of the use of the Cultural Center by Smith and Terry, though she
made the point that it was Smith, not Terry, who booked the facility.
George Tiller's patients
often traveled long distances to avail themselves of his services,
since he was one of a handful of doctors willing to perform late-term
abortions, usually to women who learned late in their pregnancies
that the fetuses they were carrying were severely deformed and
would not survive very long, if at all, outside the womb. For
prospective parents left to make excruciating choices, Tiller
provided services believed to promote healing, such as funerary
services for the fetus, as well as allowing the parents to be
photographed with the fetus. Anti-choice extremists often point
to these acts of mercy as evidence of Tiller's "evil";
he is misrepresented as a bloodthirsty criminal who took joy in
committing macabre acts with "dead babies."
Since Tiller's murder,
one of the few remaining abortion providers to offer late-term
abortions is Dr. LeRoy Carhart of Nebraska, for whom two Supreme
Court cases about the issue of late-term abortions are named.
Two weeks after Tiller
was gunned down while ushering a church service, Missy Smith addressed
a June training session for Insurrecta Nex activists.
"So, we’re
all here to march on and to stop the slaughter of these little
babies," she said. "And to tell the truth, the biggest
part is to use -- tell everyone what Tiller did. Most of America
doesn’t know that he took these dead babies and dressed them
up in christening dresses and took their pictures. Most Americans
believe, because of the liberal press, that he was a wonderful,
martyred person, you know, who did -- you have to kill a baby,
don’t you, when a woman’s nine months pregnant -- you
just have to do it? I mean, most people believe that. And now
we’ve got to get Carhart."
With that, she left
the podium in a meeting room at the Arlington, Virginia Doubletree
Hotel to appreciative applause.
I learned of Missy
Smith's planned appearance at the Cultural Center from a press
release sent by Randall Terry, who noted that he would be a speaker
on Smith's program, along with two of his regular activists. The
program coincides with the annual March for Life in Washington,
an event where anti-choice activists mark the anniversary of Roe
v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.
At present, no one
appears to want to take responsibility for allowing Smith's group
to contract the facilities at the John Paul II Cultural Center.
When I called the Cultural Center in the evening (I didn't receive
Terry's release until after closing time), I could find no one
in the directory whose obvious responsibility was facilitating
use of the center by outside groups. I left a message for a Brother
John who oversees something called the Intercultural Forum. I
received a voice mail from Brother John in the morning directing
me to contact Missy Smith with any questions about Randall Terry's
inclusion on her program.
I called Smith, as
well as John Sanders, the director of facilities for the John
Paul II Cultural Center, but as of press time I had not heard
back from either of them.
Archbishop Donald Wuerl
sits on the center's four-bishop executive committee, so his spokesperson
seemed an appropriate contact for any comment the archbishop wanted
to make about the use of the Cultural Center by Missy Smith and
Randall Terry. But archdiocese communications director Susan Gibbs
grew testy with me when I pressed for comment as to whether or
not the archbishop approved of Smith and Terry's training session
at the center, saying only that the executive committee has nothing
to do with the day-to-day operation of the Cultural Center. When
I pressed to get a comment on whether Wuerl judged Terry to be
an appropriate guest for the center, Gibb simply repeated her
claim that the executive committee is not involved in the Cultural
Center's bookings.
"I'm sorry if
you don't understand that," Gibbs said. But she didn't disavow
Smith or Terry in the archbishop's name, and instead used Smith
as her line of defense, saying that it wasn't Randall Terry who
booked the facilities, it was Missy Smith. The same Missy Smith
who told Insurrecta Nex activists that it was time to "get"
LeRoy Carhart, presumably in the same way that George Tiller was
gotten.
Randall Terry, the
antiabortion extremist who founded Operation Rescue (and then
was ousted from the group) has been a busy man since moving to
Washington, D.C. last year. Most of his activities have focused
on President Barack Obama: heckling the president and his nominees
in various venues, and performing street theater that features
a white man wearing an Obama mask while turning a bullwhip on
his confederates. Another Terry street-theater act involves the
stabbing of plastic baby dolls and the profligate use of fake
blood.
On the day that Tea
Party activists rallied against health-care reform legislation,
Terry staged a skit outside a Senate office building in which
he was costumed as the devil, while activists donning the masks
of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pretended to be writhing
in the fires of Hell.
It was Terry who organized
the heckling of the president during his address at Notre Dame,
a Catholic university, and Terry who dogs Catholic bishops he
deems insufficiently pro-life with protests outside their chanceries.
Missy Smith was arrested for civil disobedience at Notre Dame
with Terry and former U.N. Ambassador Alan Keyes. Since that time,
Smith told the gathering of Insurrecta Nex activists last June,
she had joined Terry in "six or seven protests."
This is the same Randall
Terry who sent his minions into the Senate to disrupt the nomination
hearings of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a practicing Catholic.
While it's likely that
the bishops who lead the John Paul II Cultural Center were unaware
of Smith's partnership with Terry when she booked the center's
conference facilities for her training session, the refusal of
Archbishop Wuerl's spokesperson to disavow them is troubling,
especially given Terry's violent rhetoric and racist depictions
of the president.
For Randall Terry,
a talented strategist, the controversy surrounding Missy Smith's
training session at the John Paul II Cultural Center is a win
whether the bishops allow her to hold the training or not. If
they kick her out, they bolster Terry's argument that the bishops
aren't really committed to "protecting the unborn;"
if they permit his group to use the facilities, Insurrecta Nex
-- of which Missy Smith is an integral part -- receives a de facto
seal of approval from the church.
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