Randall Terry seeks to attract pro-life Dems in Oklahoma

Red Dirt Report ^ | March 2, 2012 | Andrew W. Griffin

[SoonerStorm09]

OKLAHOMA CITY – It’s just before dawn on a Wednesday and parked at the far end of a Wal-Mart parking lot is an RV, it appears to be a model from the early-to-mid 1990’s. It’s been driven, that’s for sure, and inside the vehicle, the driver is stirring.

The driver happens to be one of the best-known anti-abortion activists in the past quarter century. It’s Randall Terry, the uncompromising pro-life guy who has been arrested dozens of times and served time at the height of the 1990's abortion wars.

A few days earlier, I had conducted a phone interview with Terry for The Norman Transcript. But this being an election year and having covered all the leading Republican candidates so far, Red Dirt Report wanted to learn more about Terry’s candidacy. Frankly, we had not heard much about Randall Terry since the 1990’s, back in the heyday of the pro-life movement. Living in Wichita, Kansas in 1991, we were quite familiar with Operation Rescue and the radical tactics they employed during the “Summer of Mercy” siege.

Terry had made a name for himself for being a hardcore, uncompromising pro-lifer, but in recent years he had sort of dipped below the political radar. As sometimes happens, a controversial figure like Randall Terry will – in classic “shooting star” fashion – rise, shine brightly and then fade out.

Randall Terry had faded out for a while. But he is definitely back for his second act on the national stage and is as passionate about ending abortion – or “child killing,” as he prefers to call it – as he ever was.