I received a dispatch the other day from a bunker in another
terror war, one in which the jihadists have names like Hill and
Kopp, rather than Al-Zarqawi.
It came from the Rev. Michael Bray, who wrote that because of
his religious beliefs he was
”
about to have [my] house seized and, along with a wife and eight
minor children, be thrown into the street.
”
Further evidence of the persecution of Christians? Not
quite.
I received a dispatch the other day from a bunker in another terror war, one in which the jihadists have names like Hill and Kopp, rather than Al-Zarqawi.
It came from the Rev. Michael Bray, who wrote that because of his religious beliefs he was “about to have [my] house seized and, along with a wife and eight minor children, be thrown into the street.”
Further evidence of the persecution of Christians? Not quite.
If you were living around the District of Columbia 20 years ago, you knew Rev. Bray’s handiwork. In the 1980s he committed a string of arsons of clinics where abortions were performed, for which he spent four years in jail. One of the tips that gave him up to police was a note left at a crime scene that referred to the “Army of God,” of which Bray was a “chaplain.”
Bray can be fairly described as the Godfather of anti-abortion terrorism. To Bray, murder in defense of the “unborn” was a moral imperative. In his 1994 book, “A Time to Kill,” he provided the philosophical underpinnings for the wave of violence against clinic workers that would follow.
That year, Paul Hill acted on that so-called imperative, killing Dr. John Britton and a bodyguard – hired in response to threats from Bray’s followers – in Pensacola, Fla., and wounding the bodyguard’s wife. Hill was executed for the crime nine years later.
Four years after the Britton murder, Amherst, N.Y. physician Barnett Slepian was murdered in front of his family while making soup for dinner. Afterwards, Dr. Slepian’s name was posted with a line through it on a grizzly Web site called the Nuremberg Files to indicate he had been eliminated. The site listed the names, addresses and phone numbers of doctors who performed abortions. It was the brain child of Neal Horsley, an associate of Bray’s through their membership in the American Coalition of Life Activists.
In March 2001 James Kopp was arrested in France and charged with Slepian’s murder. He was convicted but escaped the death penalty because he was extradited from a country that didn’t have one.
Arrested and convicted on charges of aiding Kopp as a fugitive was Dennis Malvasi, who had previously spent six years in prison for a string of clinic bombings in New York. Malvasi has since been released from prison.
Following the Slepian murder, Planned Parenthood sued the ACLA, claiming Horsley’s Web site was an incitement to kill. Planned Parenthood eventually prevailed in 2002 in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, winning a judgment in excess of $100 million against 12 ACLA defendants, including Bray.
Which brings me back to Bray’s communique.
I ended up on Bray’s email list because in January, 2001 I interviewed the Rev. Bray, Horsley, Malvasi and others at a meeting of anti-abortion extremists called the “White Rose Banquet” near Washington, D.C. – named, perversely, after a 1942 anti-Nazi group.
In his email Bray wrote that his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court had been turned down May 1, and Planned Parenthood was trying to collect $5 million. His plea was a stark reminder that, while crippled, the Brays, Horsleys and Malvasis, and possibly thousands who share their views, are still out there.
Lately their place has been taken by anti-homosexual extremist Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist church in Topeka, whose followers stage nasty demonstrations at military funerals, claiming the soldiers’ deaths are proof of God’s anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuality.
On Memorial Day President Bush signed a new law banning such demonstrations. Similar demonstrations at clinics in the 1980s eventually led to deadly violence. One of the underpinnings of a new law signed is the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, condemned at its passage by many conservatives yet upheld in 2001 by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the militia movement of the 1980s, which spawned Timothy McVeigh, has reemerged on the Mexican border, its more extreme supporters calling openly for the murder of illegal immigrants.
Homegrown fanaticism hasn’t gone away; it has merely become a kind of domestic Cold War, rendered mute, not moot, by events since 9-11.
It may turn out to be true that we really are fighting terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here. But the terrorists we aren’t, for the moment, fighting here are just as likely to be the domestic variety as Middle Eastern imports.
