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Making Connections— Racist Terror and Abortion Rights by Mary K. Moore

THE COLD-BLOODED MURDER of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida by an anti-abortionist has catapulted the issue of terrorism against womens' rights onto the front pages around the country. But while the media and the government looked the other way, the groundwork was laid for this murderous attack over the previous decade. Since the mid 1980's, the so-called "right to life" movement has used harassment of clinic staff and patients, arson and even bombings to deny women the right to choose abortion. After the open violence and destruction diminished briefly from their peak levels in 1985-87, the issue disappeared from the mass media. But the fire-bombings, death threats and other attacks on clinics and their personnel never ceased. In fact 1992....registered the highest number ever of acts of violence aagainst women's clinics and abortion providers.

The killing of Dr. Gunn must be seen for what it is, a naked act of terrorism, directed at all women and at all health care practitioners who would defend women's rights and meet their needs. The assassin was no fringe fanatic, but a conscious adherent of the strategy expressed by Randall Terry that "the doctor is the weak link". Dr. Gunn had appeared on a "wanted poster" at an Operation Rescue rally in Montgomery, Alabama which gave his home phone number. Leaders of Rescue America and other anti-choice groups quickly issued a moral justification for the execution of Dr. Gunn by labeling him a mass murderer. John Burt, the "former" Ku Klux Klan leader who as regional director of Rescue America led the protest at which Dr. Gunn was killed, drove the point home on national TV, that the "godless" doctors who perform abortions should fear for their lives. Burt referred to the killer Griffin, and the doctor Gunn, as equally "victims of the abortion system." We need to analyze who is responsible for this campaign of terror, where it's leading and what can be done about it.

By draping itself in the mantle of overwhelming moral commitment on a single issue-opposition to abortion, hard core rightist forces have disguised their true agenda and won open support from the government and favorable treatment in the media, despite their use of violence and intimidation to achieve their political ends. The "anti-abortion" movement is serving as a radical right united front, in which open racists are winning legitimacy and the use of reactionary political violence is winning adherents. The killing of Dr. Gunn illustrates this as well.

More than seven years ago PART had identified Pensacola anti-choice "preacher" John Burt as a Florida Ku Klux Klan leader. In the 1980's three Florida clinics were bombed by two young white couples who were followers of Burt, in some of the earliest acts of such violence, helping to initiate a national trend of terrorism. Burt had shortly before changed his title from grand dragon to "lay Preacher" claiming that he was "born again" and no longer a racist. In the public anti-abortion campaign in 1986 that continued after those bombings failed to shut the clinics down, Burt knocked down the manager of the Pensacola Ladies' Center and a volunteer when he led six protestors in invading the medical facility, which had already been bombed twice before. Burt and his followers injured two women, one seriously, and damaged equipment in the invasion.

Yet despite this history of racism and violence in which Burt carried over his Klan tactics to his new calling as an anti-abortionist, the mainstream movement at the time did not isolate or repudiate him. Its embrace of him then eased the path to this new and more fatal violence. Jerry Falwell, then of the Moral Majority, offered to defend and provide financial aid to the four clinic bombers in Pensacola, who came out of families involved in Burt's public picketing in a pattern similar to most of those who have been caught for such bombings.

Although he didn't condone violence Falwell said the four were "probably sincere people" and the blasts had focused national attention on abortions. He compared the clinic bombings with the civil rights movement and noted that there had been "lootings, burnings all over America" after Martin Luther King was killed. In attempting to equate the clinic bombers with the Black liberation struggle, Falwell chose to ignore the "irony" that the Pensacola bombers were brought into the anti-abortion movement by the former head of the local KKK.

Undaunted and unopposed by "mainstream" anti-choice groups, Burt continued his organizing, becoming the leader of forces allied with Rescue America, a radical national anti-choice group. Although Michael Griffin, Dr. Gunn's assassin, had asked Burt's congregation to pray for Gunn to come to Jesus, and had publicly stated that he would "bring Gunn to Jesus," Burt and his fellows did not report Griffin's threatening remarks or do anything to stop him from carrying out his murder. Only a few press reports of the killing acknowledged Burt's documented history of Klan activity and of anti-woman violence, accepting him at his word as a "lay preacher" and allowing him to claim moral high ground for his cause. A few reports also noted that Griffin's wife had sought an injunction against him to prevent him from further battering her.

Will these failures lead to further killings as the Pensacola bombings led to further arsons and attacks? Despite this documented record of racism and violence, the right has mobilized and radicalized a mass base of thousands on the basis of the abortion issue, for door to door canvassing, direct action against clinics and electoral activity directed against womens right to control their own bodies. It's out of this mass movement that the bombers, stalkers and killers have come—the Army of Godand other groupings whose extra-legal para military actions have been legitimized and justified by the rest of the anti-choice movement. The government, unprepared to use open repression itself to completely outlaw abortion, de facto accepted the use of illegal political violence to reach the same goal.

One reason anti-abortion violence reached a new crescendo in 1992 was a series of favorable court rulings for Operation Rescue and its cohorts, opening the door to more militant intimidation, and stripping the clinics of the protection they had enjoyed under the Reconstruction era anti-KKK civil rights act. The attack on abortion rights, as serious as it is in itself, also serves as the spearhead for a broader right wing offensive. Raising the banner of god, mother and country, the right is attacking women's liberation in a step towards mobilizing people to defend the American empire at home and around the world. With the end of the Cold War as a defining issue for the establishment right, more nakedly racist, anti-woman and anti-gay politics are coming to the fore.

The Republican Convention which renominated George Bush gave stark evidence of the extent of the power which has fallen into the hands of these forces under the slogans of "family values" and "cultural war". Although the rejection by most people of these fascist rallying cries forced Bush to back away from them, much of the Republican Party apparatus on the national, state and local level remains in the hands of these Christian rightists. And despite the defeat of Bush, the radical and racist right will only further step up its campaign of anti-abortion violence as PART predicted last year.