Travesty at Wichita

Thousands of abortion protesters have been arrested. Why do the media refuse to treat them like other rights-movement activists?

Guest editorial by James T. Burtchaell, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, currently a visiting scholar at Princeton University. In this article, Burtchaell, a Roman Catholic priest, presents observations and comments the editors believe will be of interest and value to CT readers.

Is Wichita the Selma of our time? For comparisons with the recent protests at the Wichita abortion clinics you have to go back to the sit-ins and the freedom marches of the 1960s, the raiding of draft board files in the seventies, the denting of nuclear ICBM nose cones in the eighties, the blockading of the South African Embassy in 1984. These activists took the hazardous step from legal demonstrations to what they called nonviolent civil disobedience. In so doing, they were no longer protesting violence; they were reviling a society that made violence legitimate.

Wichita is that same kind of affront to the nation’s conscience. Kansas Gov. Joan Finney saw the point: “It is the character and the courage of our state which is at risk. We shall not achieve the ideals for which this state is founded as long as Kansas turns its back on the powerless, the helpless, the unborn.”

The leaders of the abortion rescues closely resemble those of the earlier civil disobediences in that they have large egos and narrow purposes; they are not coalition builders; they infuriate the leaders of the mainstream movement. They rip off the scab.

There are differences of scale, though. In the succession of sit-ins beginning in 1960, 3,600 persons were arrested. Since Operation Rescue began its movement of civil disobedience less than four years ago, more than 65,000 have been arrested—probably more than in any other rights movement in this century. Yet the starkest difference between the rescues and the other civil-disobedience struggles is the remarkable antipathy with which the rescues have been reported.

First, there is the strange reluctance to report it at all. This is not a local outburst. Rescuers appear in Brookline, Portland, Cherry Hill, Hartford, Denver—27 cities in one day, 65 cities in another. There have been two thousand arrests in one day—a blowout in the history of American civil protest—yet the New York Times gave it one wire photo on page 26.

A 72-year-old bishop was seized, cuffed behind his back, then lifted from the ground by billyclubs between his wrists, dislocating both shoulders. A congressman described the scene in Pittsburgh: Seventeen female college students had their clothes ripped off, were forced to walk in the nude, and in some cases crawl. Some were sexually assaulted. In other towns women were strip-searched and cavity-searched. Two protesters were driven over while prostrate on the gound (police did not intervene; the driver was arrested only after the incident was publicly disclosed).

One police unit chief explained that inflicting pain was appropriate because the protesters “are religious and consider it necessary to absorb pain.”

Stories of this kind (there are hundreds of depositions) ordinarily make good copy when they come from Montgomery or Soweto or Lubyanka. How is it that they have been edited out of the media’s reporting on the antiabortion demonstrations?

The justice system showed no less passionate a face to the rescuers once they were delivered by the police. Sentences have been extraordinary. In New York, a media spokesperson who was standing across the street from the clinic, supplying background information to the media, was fined $25,000. Rescuers note that while actor Martin Sheen was given three hours of community service for his eighteenth conviction for antinuclear protest, a first-time abortion protester in Fargo was sent to prison for 21 months.

The conventional story line on the rescues themselves is that they are largely the work of out-of-town enthusiasts who quickly alienate the locals. The New York Times, for example, on Burlington: “In many ways the drama being acted out … is standard abortion theater with archetypal characters—on one side, an evangelical Christian minister and a have-protest-will-travel group of 100 people crusading against ‘baby-killers’; on the other, the abortion providers, a group of committed feminists who say they will not be intimidated by ‘fanatics.’ ” Townsfolk manifest “widespread irritation with the protesters.”

The same was reported of Wichita: “Residents here say they cannot recall a time of such discontent … a time of divided families and congregations, of splintered friendship and shaken love.” That, of course, is what the citizens of Little Rock, Cicero, or Montgomery said throughout the sixties. But the Times reported their annoyance in a very different tone.

The coverage of religious leaders participating in rescues has been curiously different from that of earlier militants. Think of all the clergy who stood in the front ranks of the earlier waves of resistance: Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, William Sloan Coffin, Jr., Desmond Tutu.… They spoke from Isaiah and Luke and Paul, and nobody wrinkled a nose at it.

Stories on the rescue clergy report either authoritarian Catholics or wacko evangelicals. The entire treatment of the religion angle may tell most about the media view of the rescuers. It is not unfair to say that the religious “fix” on the rescues has been on churchmen as either fascists or fanatics.

Last year’s Los Angeles Times investigation of media treatment of abortion concluded that the media have been consistently biased in favor of abortion. The media elite have been found to hold convictions about abortion that are almost the reverse of those of the American public: Whereas 20 to 25 percent of the public favor abortion on demand, 80 percent of those working in the media favor it. The managing editor of the Washington Post, after an embarrassingly biased treatment of a major story by his news department, explained that not only were his staffers prochoice, they didn’t seem to know anyone who was prolife.

A national study also found that those who are the most influential in the media deviate significantly from national patterns of involvement with religion; 8 percent worship weekly; 86 percent seldom or never. The result appears to be not just an animus towards religious faith but an incapacity to imagine how sensible people could really find their wisdom in it.

Yet Judith Blake, the foremost public-opinion analyst on the subject of abortion in the sixties and seventies, has pointed out that the sole indicator of “polar attitudes” on abortion was not class, or education, or even religious affiliation. It was religious practice. Those who were most involved in their religion tended to find abortion wholly unacceptable, and those who were religiously inactive tended to give it unqualified support.

There may be, in America, more people with more vehemence than the media people have yet been willing to admit, who look for their moral insight to their community of faith rather than to the law of the land or the sagacity of the opinion establishment. The point is not that Catholics and evangelicals are prolife and mainline Protestants and Jews are prochoice, but that abortion somehow becomes a point of moral outrage when people of whatever allegiance make faith their source of moral wisdom. This is why judges keep interrupting rescuers’ presentencing statements, objecting that they are being preached to. Of course they are.

The prayerful, impolitic, persistent rescuers dragged off to the Wichita jails may have something more to show us that was not comprehended at Selma.

Aids In Your Pew

Last year, when Chicago’s landmark Moody Church discovered it had an HIV-infected five-year-old in its midst, it had to face the media and undergo community scrutiny. Although the church had been studying AIDS policy, reality overtook intention and the leadership found itself first taking a position against the child’s involvement in the Sunday school, and then with red faces reversing it.

What counts with the Lord, of course, is not how we look to unbelievers, but how well we love fellow humans in need. Nevertheless, churches that have prayerfully prepared to face AIDS/HIV are in a better position to do both. And they have today more reasons than ever to plan ahead.

AIDS is no longer locked in moral and ethnic ghettos. Tainted blood transfusions, dental work gone awry, and heterosexual intercourse have brought the disease to middle America—and to middle America’s churches.

New resources are available for education and policy-making. One is worth particular note: John E. Dietrich and Glenn G. Wood’s pamphlet The AIDS Epidemic: Developing a Policy for Your Church or Sunday School, released this month by Multnomah Press. In under 20 pages, Drs. Dietrich and Wood provide basic information about how HIV is communicated, outline the specific issues congregations must face, and recommend wise policies and procedures that churches can follow. These physicians deal with disinfectants and diapers, but they also orient churches to the means of avoiding stigma and ostracism.

The doctors note three obstacles the church faces in ministering to persons with AIDS: (1) people fear casual transmission of the disease; (2) some believers are reluctant to minister to those they think are under God’s judgment; (3) some Christians are simply not loving the lost. Jesus did not shrink from contamination, from stigma, or from the lost. “What would happen,” Drs. Dietrich and Wood ask, “if, like Jesus, the church would minister to all who suffer regardless of their spiritual health?” From their tone of voice, you would think they’d been reading the New Testament.

By David Neff.

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