Read Online A Death in Wichita by Stephen Singular - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stephen Singular
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one, and began to chant, “We are home! We are home!”
In the weeks following the Summer of Mercy, the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life saw its mailing list grow by ten thousand names. A grassroots uprising was emerging from the protests, as those who’d gone to jail for their beliefs now entered mainstream politics. In 1992 in Sedgwick County, where Wichita is located, 19 percent of the new precinct committee members had arrest records from the Summer of Mercy. That year Republicans won the state legislature, and their victory in 1994 would be larger still. Many of the new legislators began to agitate and organize for changing the state’s abortion laws. Since Roe v. Wade twenty years earlier, Kansas had made no alterations to its abortion statute. That was about to change, presenting Tiller with problems he’d never faced before.
Nobody knew, but the Summer of Mercy was the crescendo for the anti-abortion movement in terms of organized protests. No future demonstration would be nearly as big, as unified, or as successful at focusing the public and media on this single issue. The Democrat Bill Clinton, who strongly supported abortion rights, was about to win the White House, and the conservative Supreme Court justices David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor had not sided with the anti-abortion forces in the relevant cases that came before them. Roe v. Wade had not been overturned. States could try to modify their own laws regarding late-term abortion, but for those who opposed all abortions, like Randall Terry, hope was vanishing that they could end the practice by lobbying politicians or lying down in the streets. It was time to consider alternatives.
For Dr. Tiller, a certain kind of hope was also disappearing. He’d spent his adult life in the Republican Party, committed to the economic and political values it had once represented. But it wasn’t the same party he’d known in the past. In the summer of 1992, the former President Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan had used the Republican Convention in Houston to deliver a prime-time televised address on his favorite subject: America’s “cultural war.” Buchanan spoke heatedly about the moral battle being waged in the country and the critical need to win it. Both moderate Republicans and Democrats watched Buchanan in Houston, shocked at his vitriol and at the importance he’d assumed within his party. He was anything but a fringe player inside the GOP.
Gary Bauer had been President Reagan’s undersecretary of education from 1982 to 1987. He defined the battle for the nation’s soul this way: “We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There’s a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody’s values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.”
One year after the Summer of Mercy, Tiller dropped his politeness, and his feelings about the new GOP finally erupted, when four protesters came to his clinic and chained themselves to a gate. Sprinting out from his office in a white lab coat, he rushed up to the gate and jerked a microphone from the hand of a startled TV camera operator covering the event.
“This right here,” he said, pointing at a protester, “represents what the Republican Party is all about now. They have been taken over by religious fanatics like this man right here who wants to deprive citizens of the United States of their religious freedoms.”
As he headed back toward his office, a demonstrator jammed an anti-abortion poster in his face.
“Why don’t you stick that,” Tiller said, “someplace where the sun doesn’t shine?”
He had far more to worry about than protesters’ signs.
Six weeks into Bill Clinton’s presidency, a young man named Michael Griffin spotted David Gunn, an abortion doctor in Pensacola, Florida, pulling into a gas station and approached him at a pump. Early in 1993, someone in Pensacola had created
In the weeks following the Summer of Mercy, the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life saw its mailing list grow by ten thousand names. A grassroots uprising was emerging from the protests, as those who’d gone to jail for their beliefs now entered mainstream politics. In 1992 in Sedgwick County, where Wichita is located, 19 percent of the new precinct committee members had arrest records from the Summer of Mercy. That year Republicans won the state legislature, and their victory in 1994 would be larger still. Many of the new legislators began to agitate and organize for changing the state’s abortion laws. Since Roe v. Wade twenty years earlier, Kansas had made no alterations to its abortion statute. That was about to change, presenting Tiller with problems he’d never faced before.
Nobody knew, but the Summer of Mercy was the crescendo for the anti-abortion movement in terms of organized protests. No future demonstration would be nearly as big, as unified, or as successful at focusing the public and media on this single issue. The Democrat Bill Clinton, who strongly supported abortion rights, was about to win the White House, and the conservative Supreme Court justices David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor had not sided with the anti-abortion forces in the relevant cases that came before them. Roe v. Wade had not been overturned. States could try to modify their own laws regarding late-term abortion, but for those who opposed all abortions, like Randall Terry, hope was vanishing that they could end the practice by lobbying politicians or lying down in the streets. It was time to consider alternatives.
For Dr. Tiller, a certain kind of hope was also disappearing. He’d spent his adult life in the Republican Party, committed to the economic and political values it had once represented. But it wasn’t the same party he’d known in the past. In the summer of 1992, the former President Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan had used the Republican Convention in Houston to deliver a prime-time televised address on his favorite subject: America’s “cultural war.” Buchanan spoke heatedly about the moral battle being waged in the country and the critical need to win it. Both moderate Republicans and Democrats watched Buchanan in Houston, shocked at his vitriol and at the importance he’d assumed within his party. He was anything but a fringe player inside the GOP.
Gary Bauer had been President Reagan’s undersecretary of education from 1982 to 1987. He defined the battle for the nation’s soul this way: “We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There’s a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody’s values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.”
One year after the Summer of Mercy, Tiller dropped his politeness, and his feelings about the new GOP finally erupted, when four protesters came to his clinic and chained themselves to a gate. Sprinting out from his office in a white lab coat, he rushed up to the gate and jerked a microphone from the hand of a startled TV camera operator covering the event.
“This right here,” he said, pointing at a protester, “represents what the Republican Party is all about now. They have been taken over by religious fanatics like this man right here who wants to deprive citizens of the United States of their religious freedoms.”
As he headed back toward his office, a demonstrator jammed an anti-abortion poster in his face.
“Why don’t you stick that,” Tiller said, “someplace where the sun doesn’t shine?”
He had far more to worry about than protesters’ signs.
Six weeks into Bill Clinton’s presidency, a young man named Michael Griffin spotted David Gunn, an abortion doctor in Pensacola, Florida, pulling into a gas station and approached him at a pump. Early in 1993, someone in Pensacola had created
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