Posted on 07/31/2005 12:01:52 PM PDT by eartotheground
The First Coast's 2006 state Senate primary between Jim King and Randall Terry is 15 months away, but fast becoming a bellwether race. At the very least, there is increasing national interest in how such a conservative core of the state defines conservatism, how powerful the religious side of the party continues to be and how big of a tent has been built by the GOP.
Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman is among the national figures diving into the debate.
"This is precisely the type of race I'm interested in, because it's a good, moderate incumbent who's not in trouble with the electorate but from people who say he's not Republican enough," said Whitman, who has offered King campaigning and fund-raising help.
"I don't think my race is going to define the Republican Party, but conceptually that's the right track," Terry said. "To me, the question is if the party is going to be the party of Ronald Reagan or Christine Todd Whitman. Those are not the same party."
King in recent years he has played key roles in major debates among Florida Republicans that may have divided the support beneath him. In 2003, while Senate president, he led a chamber that bucked Gov. Jeb Bush by refusing to support any medical malpractice lawsuit cap beneath $500,000. The result was a summer-long political stalemate and still-simmering debate about fiscal conservatism.
A second wound came this past spring during the Schiavo episode.
Former state party Chairman Tom Slade of Jacksonville said King's gains for Northeast Florida are more than long enough to overcome lingering resentment.
Slade said. "If that wild-eyed nut can beat him I'll be shocked, disappointed and wondering if this is a party I want to identify with."
(Excerpt) Read more at jacksonville.com ...
Perhaps Hillary Clinton could fly in to lend him a hand as well.
What was he doing before the Schiavo case?
I'd chose Whitman over Terry anyday!!
Well I hadn't heard anything about him since the early 90s. I'm just wondering how he's an attention whore?
Losing credibility...
Isn't that what a spokesman campaigning for an issue is suppose to do?
Founder of Operation rescue.
Has pissed off libs to no end, as easily seen by the endless lib papers cited, (but they are factully correct), but his methods are way too far over the line for me when there is blood in the streets. And that makes us look bad.
On his own website, Terry noted that he "has been arrested over forty times for peaceful opposition to abortion," but he neglected to mention the details of his anti-abortion activities with Operation Rescue in the 1980s and 1990s.
In an April 22, 2004, Washington Post article, staff writer Michael Powell summarized some of Terry's anti-abortion actions:In 1988, Terry and his legions started standing in front of local abortion clinics, screaming and pleading with pregnant women to turn away.
They tossed their bodies against car doors to keep abortion patients from getting out.
They waved crucifixes and screamed "Mommy, Mommy" at the women.
When Terry commanded, hundreds went jellyfish-limp and blockaded the "death clinics."In 1989, a "Holy Week of Rescue" shut down a family planning clinic in Los Angeles.
More than 40,000 people were arrested in these demonstrations over four years.
Subtlety wasn't Terry's thing -- he described Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, as a "whore" and an "adulteress" and arranged to have a dead fetus presented to Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.Additional evidence suggests that actions by Terry and Operation Rescue may have provoked violence at abortion clinics.
As the New York Times reported on July 20, 2001, "One of his [Terry's] most avid followers in Binghamton was James E. [sic: C.] Kopp, now charged in the 1998 murder of a doctor who performed abortions in Buffalo [New York]."
Kopp was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
A November 6, 1998, Times report further detailed Terry's connection to Kopp:In July 1988, when Randall Terry drove through the night from his home in Binghamton, N.Y., to Atlanta to start the series of anti-abortion protests that would finally put his new hard-line group, Operation Rescue, onto America's front pages, James Charles Kopp was in the van riding alongside him, said former leaders of Operation Rescue.
And when Mr. Terry was arrested on the first day of Operation Rescue's "Siege of Atlanta," Mr. Kopp followed him into jail, said the leaders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Along with more than 100 other Operation Rescue members, according to some people who were there, Mr. Kopp remained in jail for 40 days and adhered to Mr. Terry's orders not to give a real name to the police or courts.After his release, Mr. Kopp returned to Operation Rescue's Binghamton headquarters, and was there working alongside Mr. Terry as the group's power and influence in the anti-abortion movement surged in late 1988 and 1989, according to the former leaders of Operation Rescue.
Further, the Miami Herald reported on March 20 that Operation Rescue's "sympathizers continue to make an impact, some serving for the Bush administration."
As CNN noted on March 4, 1998, Terry was named in a lawsuit -- seeking to "force anti-abortion leaders to pay for damages caused in clinic attacks" -- which was filed by the National Organization for Women (NOW) under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, and Terry settled with NOW out of court.
The New York Times reported on November 8, 1998, that Terry "filed for bankruptcy last week in an effort to avoid paying massive debts owed to women's groups and abortion clinics that have sued him."
As the Los Angeles Times reported on February 28, Terry's use of bankruptcy law to avoid paying for the judgments against him helped prompt Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) to propose an amendment to the bankruptcy bill recently passed by Congress that "specifically would prevent abortion opponents from using the bankruptcy code to escape paying court fines," although it was not included in the final version of the bill.
Versions of that amendment appeared in earlier versions of the bankruptcy bill, which stalled action on it in 2002 and 2003 when "a core of House Republicans balked" at the provision, the Los Angeles Times noted.According to a June 14, 2003, report by the conservative World Magazine (no longer available online, but reprinted on the right-wing bulletin board Free Republic), Terry solicited donations by declaring on his website that "The purveyors of abortion on demand have stripped Randall Terry of everything he owned," but failed to disclose that the money would be used to pay for his new $432,000 house.
The report noted Terry's defense: "Terry told World that he wanted a home where his family will be safe and where 'we could entertain people of stature, people of importance.
I have a lot of important people that come through my home.
And I will have more important people come through my home.'"
World noted that the same month he paid the deposit on his new home, a court ruled that Terry, who divorced his first wife and has remarried, "was not paying a fair share of child support."
In an article on his website, Terry denounced the World report as "journalistic trash, a 'hit piece' of malice and misinformation."Terry's words and personal life have also stirred controversy.
As the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News Sentinel reported on August 16, 1993, at an anti-abortion rally in Fort Wayne, Terry said "Our goal is a Christian nation. ... We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country.
We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. ...
Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules."
In that same speech, Terry also stated that "If a Christian voted for [former President Bill] Clinton, he sinned against God.
It's that simple."These things following, I agree with.
According to a March 18, 2004, press release, Terry declared on his radio program that "Islam dictates followers use killing and terror to convert Western infidels."
As The Washington Post reported on February 12, 2000, in his 1995 book The Judgment of God Terry wrote that "homosexuals and lesbians are no longer content to secretly live in sin, but now want to glorify their perversions."
In a May 25, 2004, interview about his gay son with The Advocate, Terry stated that homosexuality is a "sexual addiction" that shouldn't be rewarded with "special civil rights."
Defined as....?
What blood in the streets?
And that makes us look bad.
Do you know any way to make us look good to the admittedly liberal sources you cited?
Associate understudy to the real queen of the pro-death andti-Rpublic RINOs, Olympia Snowe and her hand picked understudy, Susie Colins.
What utter nonsense. That's the same contorted logic that finds gun manufacturers responsible for gun crime. Besides, I'd hardy call half a dozen murders in twenty some years "blood in the streets."
Did you employ this level of hyperbole when they were prosecuting a defacto charitable organization under RICO statutes?
I'm talking about average citizens who are turned off by such methodology, myself included
Which methodology is that? What methodology would you prefer?
Keep it up and it is very easy to lose massive support. - Again.
Empty warnings. The tide is moving in the right direction for quite some time now, in spite of Operation Rescue, if not because of it.
You may as well be critical of Gandhi's methods. Was he to blame for other Indians that sought independence with violence?
You know something? You are an idiot.
Never seen the wanted dead or alive posters that they waved?
The old men they killed?
Of couse not. you are in a blather(which is all you have) about defending someone that you don't even know and have never met.
FYI, his headquarters was just up the road from here, and we witnessed these nuts on a daily basis for quite a while.
Even met the creep myself.
You would be one of them, I see.
Don't bother responding. I won't read it.
Go protest, because those things that you think are going in the "right" direction is the empty illusion and they are not going to happen.
Well that may be, but I haven't accused good people of being bad because they have more guts than I do.
How would a man that flaunts half-dressed women and shiney red sports cars know about what standing for ones convictions looks like?
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