A Little FYI On Operation Save America, AKA Operation Rescue

After years of violently blockading abortion clinics, terrorizing women and doctors, and agitating for biblical rule, there is a smug sense of triumphalism coming from the pro-life organization Operation Save America/Operation Rescue.

Operation Rescue was the organization responsible for the infamous "No Place to Hide" campaign during the 1990s that distributed the home addresses and travel routines of abortion providers in the period before the first killing of an abortion doctor. (Background here and here)

Rather than being permanently discredited by those actions, the organization has survived, and even prospered. Indeed, with George W. Bush in the White House, OSA/OR and its ideological kin have cause to be optimistic about their prospects. After all, one of Bush's first presidential pen strokes prohibited U.S.-funded international organizations from mentioning abortion to the people they served. Since then there has been a torrent of nearly 2,000 restrictions and challenges to abortion introduced by legislatures nationwide*, most notably the statewide abortion bans in South Dakota and Louisiana. During the same period, individuals in two states have been sent to prison for their involvement with self-induced abortions. (More info here and here)

Less known, but perhaps more revealing: OSA/OR’s office space was donated by Lincoln Log Homes International, whose CEO, Richard Schoff, was once a leader of Indiana's Ku Klux Klan. Fittingly, a picture of the famous segregationist George Wallace hangs in the hall not far from OSA/OR's door.

And a look at the cast of characters involved with OSA/OR over the years turns up a "who's who" of the Bush regime's most influential and demanding theocratic supporters. Among them:

• Tony Perkins, who 14 years ago could be found at Operation Rescue's siege on the last abortion clinic in Baton Rouge, La. Today that clinic is closed and Perkins is the head of the Family Research Council. He organized the three "Justice Sunday" events to rally support to hammer through Bush's theocratic Supreme Court nominees.
  
• Pat Robertson, who not long ago received a phone call from Karl Rove to discuss Samuel Alito before his nomination was made public and who penned the foreword to Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry's 1988 book. That book detailed the "righteousness" of defying man's law and launched the group's hundreds of violent blockades of abortion clinics.
  
• Randall Terry himself, who became a fixture on nighttime talk programs last year as the lead on-the-ground operative of the theocratic power grab staged in the Terri Schiavo case.

At the core of OSA/OR's efforts is an attempt to tighten the patriarchal chains of tradition. Consider: There is not a single anti-abortion organization in the country that supports birth control. Beverly LaHaye, the founder of Concerned Women for America, a group whose members Bush has sent as delegates*** to United Nations commissions on women and children, put it this way: "The woman who is truly Spirit-filled will want to be totally submissive to her husband.... This is a truly liberated woman. Submission is God's design for women."

As Flip Benham, the OSA president, explains, it is this same ideal that motivates his thuggish approach to women at the doors of the clinics: "It seems ugly, my speech. But it's because we love them that we scream at them. You have to have a bad guy who will confront them."

The simple truth is that a woman who cannot control her own reproduction has no more freedom than a slave. And if half of humanity is not free, then no one can truly be free.

Factual Info from: An article from Sunsara Taylor, who writes for the Revolution newspaper.