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Back to the August 2005 Newsletter Index Truth Tour Keeps Issue Red-HotBringing the truth about abortion to a public that is alternately ignorant, indifferent, irate, irascible – or, sometimes, amazingly elated – can be a dirty business, but someone’s got to do it. Once again, Defend Life stepped up to the plate, bringing the ugly reality of abortion to Maryland via its fifth annual Face the Truth Tour June 20-24. In many ways, this year’s tour resembled its four predecessors: at 15 stops in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, dozens of pro-lifers lined the streets or highways, holding graphic posters of aborted babies and handing out flyers explaining why they were showing these disgusting pictures. But, with every year and every stop, new, often surprising twists occur in the Truth Tour saga. Here are a few. Anger in Winchester Posters of the mangled remains of aborted babies sometimes trigger astonishing visceral reactions. That was the case at the first stop, in Winchester, Va. Iris Rodriguez, a grandmother from Allentown, Pa., was holding a graphic poster when a motorist pulled up beside her and said he was going to go home and get a gun and shoot her. Mrs. Rodriguez, completely nonplussed, was speechless. Whether the poster had aggravated repressed guilt feelings will never be known; after a woman passenger tried to calm him down, the man drove off and was not seen again. The prototype stop
The Hagerstown stop itself offered a sharp contrast to the morning incident. “We had a wonderful turnout there,” said Tour Director Nancy Bradford. “The response was overwhelmingly positive!” But the evening demonstration, in Frederick, was perhaps the prototype stop. Ninety-three pro-lifers lined both sides of Route 40 in front of Fredericktowne Mall, their massive presence and graphic signs offering a silent but powerful condemnation of abortion. Stop co-captain Jody Hammond had notified police in advance of the demonstration, and they arrived in force. “That’s some pretty bad pictures,” commented Officer D.R. Potter. “Too bad there isn’t another way to do it without those pictures.” Ambivalence aside, the officer agreed they could demonstrate, “as long as you’re doing it peacefully.” But, as at most stops, police set up rules: all demonstrators had to move away from the curb to behind the sidewalk, no one could be on the median strip, and no handing out flyers to motorists, “unless they beckon to you.” Some women drivers had complained about their children seeing the photos, the police said. Sure enough, shortly afterwards, a woman driver yelled, “My children need protection from this! Those pictures are disgusting!” “It is disgusting,” replied Don Cummings. “There are 4,000 abortions a day – that’s reality.” Cummings, a tall, vigorous 80-year-old who looked more like 60, had come down from Bethlehem, Pa., to join the tour (to atone for his misspent youth, he joked). He handed out many flyers to receptive drivers. “I’m pro-life; I appreciate this,” a guy in a Jeep Wrangler told him. “Some honk horns [in approval], some give you the middle finger, but I guess it goes with the territory,” said Paris Rodriguez, one of about 25 enthusiastic pro-lifers from Quinn Chapel AME Church, brought by stop co-captain Pastor Luke Robinson. “They’re on fire!” exclaimed Defend Life Director Jack Ames. Windfall in Rockville The morning stop in Rockville on June 21 was nearly finished when a late-model SUV pulled up and a well-dressed, dark-haired woman stepped out onto the sidewalk. Tour Director Bradford thought she looked “Polynesian,” but she had no accent. The woman told Bradford that, as she and her husband were driving down the street, she had been praying about giving money to a good cause. “I saw your signs, and I thought, what a noble cause!” the woman said, taking out her checkbook. Nancy smiled. “Come into my office,” she told the woman. They got into Bradford’s car, and the woman wrote a check to Defend Life and handed it to her. “I went, ‘Wooo!’” Nancy recalled. The check was for $1,000. Two kinds of holocausts For Aaron Kaplan, a Johns Hopkins University student and one of the 18-member core group that traveled to all the stops, the picket in front of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., held special significance. His grandfather, at age 16, had survived almost a year as a prisoner at Auschwitz.
Standing side-by-side, Kaplan and John Mihm of Pittsburgh held two pole-mounted signs, one of dead Holocaust victims, the other of a 21-week-old aborted baby. “We fail to see the parallels in what we’ve done in the past and what we’re doing now,” said Mihm. “I think these pictures speak for themselves.” Further down the sidewalk, 12-year-old Nicole Stewart and Megan Marrazzo, 14, took the jibes of passing motorists in stride. “One lady told us, ‘I’m a scientist, I know what I’m talking about; these pictures are all lies! You’ll find out when you’re older,’” said Megan with a grin. “Another lady just told us we should burn in hell.” “One guy rolled down his window and said ‘f-you’ three times,” Nicole chimed in. “But it’s been mostly positive,” said Megan. “We’ve been keeping count of how many positive reactions we’ve had. So far it’s 54.” “Fifty-five!” said Nicole. Standing alone on an adjacent corner in the muggy, late-afternoon heat, Fr. Peter West of Priests for Life, who accompanied the tour for three days, held a sign and tried to read his breviary. “One lady said, ‘You’re disgusting! What about the children?’” said Father. “I said, ‘Are you pro-choice?’ She said ‘Yes.’ I think it’s amazing: she doesn’t want children to see these pictures, but she doesn’t mind killing them.” But many passersby were like the woman who stopped to examine a poster of an aborted baby’s head being held by forceps. “That’s horrendous!” she exclaimed. Then she patted the sign holder on the shoulder and murmured, “Thank-you for being here.” Busted in Bowie Bob Newman, a genial, 76-year-old core member from Pittsburgh, had seen and done a lot in the 12 years that he has been an active pro-lifer – but he had never been arrested. That changed on June 22. Newman has led Face the Truth tours throughout Pennsylvania – he brought down 40 or so signs of his own to the Maryland tour – so perhaps it was his aura of leadership that led Maryland state troopers to single him out from among the pro-lifers holding signs at the intersection of Routes 3 and 450 in Bowie that morning. “The state police told me we couldn’t go out in the street,” Bob recalled. Bob, holding a pole-mounted sign of an aborted baby whom pro-lifers have dubbed “Baby Malachi,” assured the officers that they would not venture into the street. The troopers left, but later, Trooper V. Lassiter returned to where Newman was standing on the berm of the road, adjacent to an empty lot. “He said they were getting a lot of complaints and I had to move,” said Newman. “Of course, I told him about our constitutional rights – but he didn’t want to hear it. “He said, ‘I’m ordering you to leave. If you don’t, I’m going to arrest you.’ “I said, ‘We’re only going to be here 15 more minutes!’ He said, ‘Leave now, or I’m going to arrest you.’” Bob thought that the trooper “was trying to teach us a lesson – but I really felt they were taking away my legal rights.” So he decided to stand his ground. “I said, ‘I’m staying. You’ll have to do what you have to do.’” The trooper handcuffed him, put him in his car, and took him to Hyattsville, where he was photographed and fingerprinted. “Then they put me in a jail cell and slammed the door.” Bob was left to his own thoughts for four hours. “Then they came back. They chained my leg, put a chain around my waist and handcuffed me to that chain, then they marched me to the town commissioner for a preliminary hearing.” Newman was charged with refusing to obey a lawful order. A trial date was set for September, and he was released on his own recognizance. A pro-lifer picked him up and drove him to the evening stop in Westminster, where he good-humoredly regaled his fellow Face the Truthers with an account of his arrest and incarceration. “I’m not mad,” he said. “But I don’t think it was a lawful order. I think I was unlawfully arrested, and I’m going to pursue the legal implications of that. “The only thing I’m afraid of,” he added with a grin, “is telling my wife.” New location, same optimism
“I lost my oldest son in ’96,” the heavily bearded man explained. “He was 16 years old. He hooked school one day and went out to Pretty Boy Reservoir. He never came out of the water. “It gives you a whole different outlook on life,” he mused. “Life is precious.” Hall, a member of St. John Catholic Church, credited stop captain Vince Perticone for getting him involved in the Truth Tour. Perticone, unfailingly cheerful, pronounced this year’s stop location, at Main Street and Route 27 in “old” Westminster, a better location than last year’s, on busy Route 140. There, irate car dealers and shopping mall managers had demanded that police remove the signholding Truthers from “their” property which, they claimed, extended all the way to the highway. Vince subsequently worked for three months with the State Highway Administration, trying to prove that Route 140 had at least a 15-foot right-of-way on which the pro-lifers had a right to demonstrate. “They made a blown-up view of the area, but the lines they overlaid were faulty and crooked and didn’t prove anything. So rather than be thrown off again, we moved here,” said Vince. Now, instead of cars whizzing by at 55 miles an hour, he said, the narrow, congested streets in the older section cause drivers to go by much more slowly. “They can see the signs better,” Vince observed happily. The Sun relents After four years of studiously ignoring the Face the Truth tours, the Baltimore Sun acknowledged their existence with a photo of the June 23 stop near Harborplace in downtown Baltimore. Titled, “Street Protest,” the photo shows Noble Morton of Front Royal, Va., holding an aborted-baby sign. The photo is shot at a side angle, with Morton and his sign in the background, effectively diminishing the sign’s impact. In the foreground, pedestrians, including two rather busty young ladies, stride by, ignoring the sign. The Washington Times also covered the Truth Tour for the first time, publishing a photo taken at the Holocaust Museum stop. A Washington Times reporter had spent several hours with the Truthers at the Naval Observatory stop in Washington, and stayed with them through lunch. “She took down lots and lots of information,” said Nancy Bradford. But except for the Holocaust photo, no story appeared. “It must have got spiked,” concluded Jack Ames. Thwarted assault When core members Don Watts and Albert Stecklein drove to the White Marsh stop June 24, they found themselves, around noon, on a stretch of Campbell Boulevard with the rest of the group nowhere in sight. The two taped a dozen or so signs to trees on the median strip. Then Stecklein drove off to find the other pro-lifers. Watts remained, holding a sign by himself on the median strip. His daughter, Tabitha, and Monica Miller of Chicago, who had driven with him, spread out, handing out flyers at different traffic lights, while daughter Shayla held a Honk for Life sign. After a while, Watts spotted a Baltimore County police car parked nearby. He was a little disconcerted when an officer emerged from the car and came over to him. “I’m not here to harass you; I’m here to protect you,” the officer assured him. “We’ve been getting threatening calls.” Watts told the officer that he was a correctional officer, employed at the Maryland Correctional Institute at Hagerstown. As they stood talking, a driver in his thirties stopped his truck, got out and strode quickly toward them, clearly angry. “Are you going to move him and the signs?” the man shouted to the officer. Without waiting for an answer, he came running at Watts. “I took a defensive stance,” said Watts. “But the cop stepped between me and him. He grabbed him and physically took him away.” Don watched the officer talking to the man. They were too far away for him to hear what was said. “But I think, basically, the conversation was, ‘If you leave now, I won’t arrest you.’” Pro-lifers often have complaints about treatment by police officers, Watts observed. But this incident, he said, “shows they’re not always against us.” Keeping the issue red hot Has there been a noticeable change in public attitudes toward the Face the Truth message in the five years that Defend Life has held the tours?
At the Northern Parkway stop, for example, as Cookie Harris held a Honk for Life sign, one woman driver yelled at her, “You have no business telling me what to do with my body!” “She was so mad, she was almost climbing out of her car,” said Cookie. Nancy Bradford remembers a woman at the Bel Air stop who “went berserk. She’s standing there on the parking lot, at least 50 feet away, screaming at us. She was taken aside by the police – she screamed at them too.” The positive reactions are at a lower decibel: the honks for life, the thumbs up, the quiet words of support (“Good for you!” “I’m glad you’re doing this”), the $1 and $20 donations. Director Ames says he has noticed an increase in them: “I think, generally speaking, the reactions are more and more positive.” This year, a lot of things just seemed to go right, said Nancy. For one thing, the weather “was very cooperative,” with moderate temperatures and low humidity, for the most part, and no rain, except for a brief “whopping thunderstorm” at Westminster. “We had some really good, high-traffic stops,” she added. At Severna Park, for example, on Ritchie Highway’s wide, grassy median strip, the Truthers were able to tape signs on a long row of trees. “There happened to be a fire south on Ritchie Highway; three or four fire engines went by, causing traffic to be very slow, so people got a good look at the signs.” Ames shares Nancy’s optimism. Participants were enthusiastic, and, especially where they shared a bus, at the Holocaust and Harborplace stops, there was a lot of high spirits and camaraderie, he said. The Truth Tours offer invaluable opportunities for networking, said Ames: “We’re continuing to attract people to the pro-life movement – we added at least 100 new people to our data base.” In Bel Air, he recalled, the Truth Tour caught the attention of painting contractor Bill Pilcher, whose wife Terry has designed pro-life car magnets, using Support Our Troops-type ribbons overlaid with a baby in utero. Jack invited Bill and Terry to join the party for the pro-lifers hosted by Joe and Mary Frese after the Bel Air stop. “That’s one of the things that’s so encouraging,” Ames reflected; “if you just show up and put the signs up, good things happen!” Most importantly, though, he said, “We’re showing the pictures that are not going to be shown in the mainstream media and academia. And we probably gave out 2,000 brochures and 1,000 flyers explaining why we’re doing this. “We’re keeping the issue red-hot.” “We did the same thing we’ve always accomplished,” Nancy concurred: “we got the truth out there.” |
Things were
calmer in Hagerstown where, before the noon stop, Fr. Tom Euteneur,
director of Human Life International, celebrated Mass for the
Face the Truthers at St. Mary’s Church with Fr. Bob Morey.
“There’s
a definite comparison between the Holocaust and abortion,” said
Kaplan.
Terry
Hall had a special reason for taking part in the stop at Westminster.
Certainly, negative responses are a constant, and their sound
and fury make a strong impression.