[TOUGH STOUGH]

"Randall Terry was a disaster for the pro-life movement!"

I couldn't agree with you more. The focus shifted from the "babies" to getting operation rescuers out of jail, saving their homes, and preventing bankruptcy. It was the pro-choice left that convinced the courts (wrongly) to apply Rico to pro-lifers protesting at clinics, so they (the left) share some of the blame for that one. But there is no doubt Terry and his Operation Rescue followers helped to set the pro-life movement back fifteen years.

I don't know the man, so I don't care to judge him about his family problems. However, I am extremely angry with him for leading so many pro-lifers and the movement to destruction so many years ago, from which the movement has yet to recover. And the division he caused among pro-lifers was devastating. Not enough can be said about this.

[sinkspur]

You want a stellar example for the pro-life protests?

I offer Flip Benham. He's a good man, a zealous pro-life advocate, and he's rational.

I don't care for the bloody fetus pictures he shows to high school kids, but that's the only thing I disagree with him on.

[Sir_Ed]

I, too, was a member of OR. We went up and down the west coast surrounding abortion clinics, trying to bring an end to abortion. My friend John was one of the guys sharing the hotel room in GA with Randall and others when they were all arrested when OR was just starting. In fact, they had him bring all their wallets to the police station later that day!

I never got arrested, thank God...the cops would always stop just a few people short of me and the leaders would work something out, but a lot of my friends got arrested, and more than a few brutalized.

I remember one OR in particular, in Long Beach, CA, where the cops moved the public five blocks away from the abortion clinic we were surrounding, then marched horses in and through us, STEPPING on the people surrounding the clinic! Lots of people ended up with broken bones and sprains.

Of course, had it been a nuclear missile site, redwood tree or GOP Pro-Life Congressman's office we were surrounding and chained to, why, we'd have been glorified by the press, Martin Sheen and the NY Times, not brutalized by cops and police horses!

I, too, thought abortion could end that way, but RICCO made the stakes too high when they started seizing houses and bank accounts...people weren't willing to lose everything they had worked for.

So, I supported OR and Randall, but not this time, not after he divorced his wife like that. Frankly, I don't support ANY Christian representative who gets a divorce. I stopped buying Amy Grant records when she divorced her husband, stopped supporting YWAM and Melody Green when she divorced her second husband and stopped buying books by another Christian writer, forgot her name, but she used to talk about how she had to cope with her cold, autocratic Norwegian husband, but she was able to, then she divorced him.

I figure that if they can't keep that one major thing right in Christianity, then how are they going to be able to have any authority or have their ministry blessed by God?

Ed