Forsaken Courage: Death of a Man's Soul

The following story is courtesy American Rumpo Blog

The story I am about to tell you is a true story. It is a story that not many people know about or care to listen to. However it is one of the most important stories to the future of our sons and daughters.

One of my closest friends from my young years called me a few months back. We had a great friendship. We were always catching crawdads, fishing, splitting wood, eating green apples until we got sick. Summers were the best as we would play sharks and minnows at the local pool for hours on end with our friends. We grew up together and then I joined the Marines and he went his way, we never heard from each other again until recently.

Getting a call from this long lost friend brought up some chilling feelings in my soul. See I knew this guy before I was a Catholic. I remember the things we used to do that were not so innocent. At the time I never really thought about it because I really didn't know any better. So I was both excited and concerned about the contact.

We decided to meet up and catch up on old times. When I saw him I was immediately oppressed by his weary look and heavy heart. This could not be my old friend, my buddy that used to make me laugh at the drop of a hat. Where did my friend go?

We talked for a long time my friend and I. As with everyone I meet I tried the best I could to get my faith into the subject of discussion. He was looking and is looking for something to help him rebuild, that is another story for another day. What he has given me permission to tell all who will listen is one of the most important story of our times. So my friend says from experience.......

Men I don't think understand courage anymore. They do not understand that when they act or omit action in a cowardly manner they kill the very soul that God gave them. Satan knows this fact. It is the number one virtue (fortitude) in man that he will attack head on because it is the quickest way to enslave a man's heart and soul.

Keep in mind my friend grew up a protestant, he had no way of knowing the above very Catholic thinking. Also he had no father from the time he was 11 years old so also he had no role model for courage or manhood. My friend continues......

Simplex, I have not lived a very good life. I am broken and often I feel beyond repair. It was a single decision I made many years ago a little before you left for boot camp. Do you remember my girlfriend, Lisa?

I tell him yes I remember her, she was very nice, especially good to you even though you were not so nice at times.

Yes, I was a perfect jerk much of the time. Well I got her pregnant. We did not know what to do we were very scared, not so much me because I knew my mom would just tell me that it was OK and she would help. She has always been like that, she felt that she had to make up for my Dad leaving and so she never wanted to make me feel bad.

What I was afraid of was facing Lisa's father and mother. She was scared to death too. After a couple of days she came to me and asked me if she should have an abortion. There it was, the moment the rest of my life would balance on.

At first it seemed like the best solution, her parents don't find out. I am not smacked around by her Dad, no one gets hurt. The day came around and I took her to the clinic, it felt all wrong from the word go. I had no guts, no balls, just a piece of shit coward sitting there in the car. I let her go through with it.

She was so scared you could see it in her eyes, in her walk, her whole innocence gone in a split second. That was not even the worst part of it. When she came out...she was gone, if she didn't know it was wrong going in, she sure knew it now and so did I!

I failed the test of manhood that day, I was officially and forever more a coward by any standard. My failure had more important consequences. Lisa saw me for the first time as the coward I was. I ruined her for the rest of her life, she would always have this scar that I put on her. Every year on that day or the day we would have had that baby she would remember what I did to her. I also allowed a life that God made for me to be killed for my convenience, for my lack of courage.

I have always felt less of a man from that point on. This one instance in my life shaped me for the rest of it. No one ever understands that the easy way out is usually the wrong way out. For a man with a self inflicted wound to the soul and no courage to make amends is lost forever. The only thing that can bring him back is another man who can teach him how to act with courage.

Of course he is doing his best to repair his soul. I told him the truth that there was never going to be a way to take back what he had done. As a Catholic I told him that I believed that he could be forgiven and still get to heaven, and that he would most certainly spend some time in purgatory as would I. I told him that 90% of all men in today's society were weak and lacked the appropriate level of fortitude and that it was like anything else in that it take practice to get better at being courageous. Start with little situations and work your way up.

As fathers and mothers we need to understand that this could so easily be one of our children, hell it may even be one of us who holds this kind of pain and wound. That is why it is ever so important for us to teach our young men to be courageous in every thing they do. Our sons deserve it, our daughters need that type of protection and respect, and more importantly the slaughter of the innocents needs to be stopped and this is the only way that it will.

Fathers do not teach your sons to make women a conquest, teach your boys to be valiant champions of virtue. Train them up to be tough, intelligent, and gallant. Give them the tools to slay the dragon, the charm to win the fair maiden, and the fortitude to withstand Satan's wicked and forked tongue.

The Pro-Abortion Movement’s Best Kept Secret

In the wake of George Tiller’s killing, many pundits and pro-abortionists have tried to project the shadow of his assassination onto the entire pro-life movement.

A June 2 Associated Press (AP) article titled: “Suspect in doctor killing railed against abortion” exemplifies the attempt. Although the AP professes to be an unbiased news source, the only pro-lifers interviewed expressed support for Tiller’s slaying and a substantial part of the story outlined the increased security measures abortion mills will now assume.

Although every mainstream pro-life organization issued immediate condemnations of the killing, the article lacked a single quote from any of these statements. The only recognition of the pro-life movement’s rejection of the killing was a paragraph that stated:

Police said it appears the gunman acted alone, and some anti-abortion groups quickly distanced themselves from the killing. Outside Tiller's clinic, the Kansas Coalition for Life placed signs saying members had prayed for Tiller's change of heart, "not his murder."¹

Britain’s liberal newspaper The Guardian was even more biased. A June 5 story titled: “On the front line in the US abortion war,” is not an objective representation of the struggle against abortion, as the title suggests, but an interview with and character sketch of Georgian extremist Neal Horsley who justifies violence against abortionists and even honors the perpetrators of such violence, dubbing them: “soldiers in the war against terror.”

Worse yet, rather than admit that Horsley does not represent the pro-life movement, author Chris McGreal shockingly affirmed:

Horsley has been at the forefront of an unrelenting campaign against abortion that straddles the blurry line between the mainstream movement characterising itself as "pro-life" and men like Scott Roeder who has been charged with Tiller's murder.²

Meanwhile, the feminist pro-abortion group National Organization for Women (NOW) decried the killing as “the most recent in a string of murders in the service of the anti-abortion cause,” and called upon the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “root out and prosecute as domestic terrorists and violent racketeers the criminal enterprise that has organized and funded criminal acts for decades.” They urged the government to put “the full resources of their two departments behind that effort.”³

National Abortion Federation (NAF) president Vicki Saporta went so far as to dub the last thirty years a “reign of terror” against abortionists.⁴

Similarly, late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart called on the government to define as hate crimes all efforts of “anti-choice domestic terrorists” and likened planting crosses in the yards of abortion-performing doctors to actions of the KKK.

Warren Hern, another late-term abortionist from Colorado, told London’s Guardian that pro-lifers constitute:

a national terrorist, totalitarian, fascist movement that is violent, well organised and well armed and they do not accept the basic premises of American society. Everything they've done for the last 35 years is designed to animate, to inspire, to give encouragement to anti-abortion assassins and anti-abortion violence.⁵

Indeed, the pro-abortion movement and leftist media are intent on equating the vast majority of peaceful and legal pro-lifers with savage terrorists. As conservative columnist Michelle Maklin aptly described it: “When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger.”⁶

However, is this demonizing justified? Are pro-lifers really the violent people they are being made out to be? And what about pro-abortion violence, does it exist?

Skewed Statistics

Skewed Statistics and Misrepresentations
To track pro-lifers’ “offenses,” pro-abortion groups tally acts of “violence and disruptive actions” the former allegedly perpetrate in the United States and Canada. The NAF publishes a table of the data they accumulate.⁷

At first glance the numbers are impressive, indeed. According to the chart, the total disruptions and acts of violence since 1973 is a full 156,961. However, a closer look reveals that 141,837 of these incidents are peaceful picketing of abortion mills, 13,995 are “hate mail” or “harassing” telephone calls – which certainly include many peaceful and legal actions –, 1,993 are trespassing violations and 1,400 are generically termed “vandalism.”

The section of the NAF chart on violence is even more misleading. Under this heading it lists trespassing violations, vandalism, invasion, threats and butyric acid attacks. The latter may look violent at first glance. However, butyric acid is a harmless but foul-smelling liquid. Thus, the frightful sounding “butyric acid attacks” amount to nothing more than the use of stink bombs. Admittedly this costs money to clean up, but to classify it as “violence” is simply dishonest.

Furthermore, a 1995 Life Research Institute study investigated all available claims of pro-life violence and uncovered major inconsistencies. The study is titled: Abortion-Related Violence and Alleged Violence and is readily available online.⁸

It shows that many claims made by NAF and other groups are simply not substantiated nor is any evidence provided. Readers are expected to accept many incidents without proof.

Furthermore, an investigation of the more detailed “offenses” reveals major flaws. For instance, pro-lifers are assumed as the culprits of any act committed against an abortionist or even near an abortion mill.

Other examples include:

The 1993 murder of abortion doctor Wayne Patterson is categorized misleadingly as a murder that forced the closing of two abortion facilities. The truth is that Wayne Patterson was robbed and killed by an unknown assailant while leaving a pornographic movie theater. What his killing has to do with the pro-life movement is not explained.⁹

On October 21, the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Redding California burnt down. The event and was designated a pro-life arson, despite police reports that identified an electric fan as the cause of the blaze.¹⁰

In June of 1990, the Minnesota director of Planned Parenthood was supposedly assaulted, although he escaped the event without a scratch. His assailant, who certainly attacked other clinic employees, was an escapee from a mental institution. It was proven in court that he had no links to any pro-life organization.¹¹

Those Who Live in Glass Houses…
In addition to greatly exaggerating (and even inventing) incidents of pro-life violence, the pro-abortion movement is deathly silent about the violence from within its ranks against pro-lifers.

In fact, the vast majority of active pro-lifers have endured acts of pro-abortionist violence. A common example is abortion mill workers who try to run over pro-lifers demonstrating in front of clinics.¹² Dr. Tiller, himself, ran over a pro-lifer and rammed a policeman on a motorcycle in a 1989 incident at his Wichita clinic.¹³

Human Life International's logo

Pro-life organization Human Life International (HLI) has documented cases of pro-abortion violence for years. Their research is published online at: http://abortionviolence.com/ and on a blog titled: Tree in the Sea (see: http://tree-in-the-sea.blogspot.com/2008/05/pro-abortion-violence.html). The latter has a list that is over 100 pages long and contains more than 2,000 cases.

For example:

Seven-year-old Ekaternia Engelke was kneeling in prayer at a Wisconsin abortion mill when leftist Catherine Doyle approached and screamed profanities at the little girl. When the latter replied: “You are killing babies!” the former kicked little Ekaterina in the face, injuring her. Afterwards, a hotline for Doyle’s pro-abortion group, Milwaukee Clinic Protection Coalition, instructed fellow pro-abortion activists to “brush up on their football skills.”

Despite numerous witnesses, charges were never brought against Doyle. Incidentally, her sister was Wisconsin Attorney General at the time of the attack.¹⁴

Worse yet, in Los Angeles, three pro-abortionists were arrested in 1989 for trying to burn down a church, packed with pro-lifers. Police also found concussion grenades underneath a speaker’s platform that was set up for a rally scheduled later in the day. There were 2,500 pro-lifers at the event.¹⁵

Senator Tommy Burks

In Tennessee, Byron Looper, pro-abortion candidate for the state senate, shot his pro-life opponent Senator Tommy Burks in the face, killing him. Afterwards, he bragged about the murder to his friend Joe Bond, saying: “I did it, man, I did it! I killed that dude.”¹⁶

Last, activist Eileen Orstein Janezic shot pro-life talk show host Jerry Simon at his home. She proceeded to hold the police at bay for six hours, while she recited quotations from Antoin LeVey’s Satanic Bible.¹⁷

These four events are merely the tip of the iceberg. There are literally thousands of documented cases of pro-abortion violence.¹⁸ In fact, these substantiated incidents greatly outweigh the alleged acts committed by pro-lifers.

Denunciations and Silence
Furthermore, when an abortion opponent commits a violent crime, all mainstream pro-life organizations instantly condemn the act and reaffirm their commitment to engage only in peaceful activities.

Thus, when George Tiller was killed, immediately an ocean of rejection flooded from the pro-life community. Human Life International President, Father Thomas Euteneuer affirmed that Tiller’s killer “proved that he was no better than Tiller.”¹⁹

Likewise, American Life League executive director, Katie Walker, stated that Tiller’s killing defied the principles of the pro-life movement.²⁰ Pro-Life Action League President Joe Scheidler affirmed: “We deplore the killing of George Tiller on Sunday morning.” He also stated that his policy is to try and convert abortionists, not kill them.²¹

Tony Perkins, Family Research Council president, decried the murder saying: “We strongly condemn the actions taken today by this vigilante killer.”²² Doctor James Dobson of Focus on the Family declared: “We are shocked by the murder of George Tiller, and we categorically condemn the act of vigilantism and violence that took his life.”²³

Last, an Operation Rescue press release condemned the attack saying: “We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.”²⁴ (To read the American TFP denunciation of the murder of George Tiller, click here.) The list goes on and on.

However, when a pro-abortionist commits violent crime, abortion groups react at best with deafening silence.

When 69 year-old Ed Snell was counseling women entering Hillcrest Abortion Clinic in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania from atop his car, the boyfriend of a potential “client” became angry and threw him to the pavement below.²⁵

Ed Snell talking with the author.

The force of the fall was such that Mr. Snell was knocked unconscious. After being rushed to the hospital, doctors found he had two broken ribs, four fractured vertebrae, a cracked scapula and bleeding in the tissue between his skull and brain. Until they were able to stop this bleeding, doctors feared he would die.

Nevertheless, when the author called Hillcrest Abortion Clinic for a statement on the assault, a receptionist shouted: “He got what he deserved! He earned what he got!” then hung up the phone.

Additionally, the author’s research did not uncover a single condemnation of the attack from pro-abortion organizations. This research included searching the web sites of: NARAL, Center for Reproductive Rights, National Organization for Women (NOW), Catholics for a Free Choice, National Abortion Federation (NAF), Feminist Majority Foundation and Planned Parenthood.

Furthermore, the author checked the same web sites for a condemnation of the murders committed by Byron Looper and Eileen Orstein Janezic mentioned above. Not finding the slightest reference to either, he proceeded to write to each of these groups.

NAF responded immediately that, due to the “volume of inquiries” they receive, they are unable to answer questions. NOW sent him a membership form and neither NARAL, Center for Reproductive Rights nor Feminist Majority Foundation returned his email.

Shockingly, Catholics for a Free Choice and Planned Parenthood wrote back stating they had no knowledge of the murders and asked for more details. Catholics for a Free Choice never responded after receiving more information and Planned Parenthood Media Relations Specialist, Elizabeth Clark admitted: “I’ve had a couple of people in the National office check for statements, but there’s nothing in our records. It doesn’t look like we commented on these incidents.”²⁶

The Emperor Has No Clothes
Despite everything, the media continue their biased emphasis on anti-abortion violence while underreporting the violent acts committed by abortionists. It is time for this to stop.

It is time for pro-lifers to raise their voices and point out that violence is the inevitable inheritance of those who favor the killing of mankind’s most innocent and defenseless. This message should be repeated at every chance, in all their publications and republished until the message sticks.

Only then will America view the issue without the blinders crafted by media intent on promoting a cause rather than reporting news. With the help of Divine Providence and a clear outlook this nation can overturn Roe v. Wade and once again defend the right to life of its most vulnerable citizens.

Footnotes

1. http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16029/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=pr0NrgwF [back]
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/05/abortion-america-george-tiller [back]
3. http://www.now.org/press/06-09/06-01.html [back]
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH6kxUJNlC8&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eprochoice%2Eorg%2F&feature=player_embedded [back]
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/05/abortion-america-george-tiller [back]
6. http://michellemalkin.com/2009/06/03/mapping-the-climate-of-hate/ [back]
7. http://www.prochoice.org/pubs_research/publications/downloads/about_abortion/violence_stats.pdf [back]
8. http://www.geocities.com/kekogut/miscellaneous/Jan1995.pdf [back]
9. Ibid. p. 46. [back]
10. Ibid. p. 50. [back]
11. Ibid. p. 70. [back]
12. The author has spoken to literally hundreds of pro-lifers who have experienced this violent form of intimidation, including his own sister. [back]
13. http://tree-in-the-sea.blogspot.com/2008/05/pro-abortion-violence.html [back]
14. Glenn Ellen Duncan. "The Shocking Violence Against Prolifers." Catholic Twin Circle, September 11, 1994, p. 11; "Pro-Abortion Violence: A Growing National Phenomenon." Life Advocate, July 1993, p. 10-15; "Pro-Choice, Anti-Child." ALL About Issues, July-August 1993, p. 26; "Second Special Prosecutor Appointed To Investigate Kicking Of Seven-Year-Old." The Wanderer, June 3, 1993, p. 6; Human Life Internationally ... News from the Branches Worldwide. "Milwaukee, Wisconsin." HLI Reports, August 1993, p. 10. Sources and story can be found at: http://tree-in-the-sea.blogspot.com/2008/05/pro-abortion-violence.html [back]
15. Ibid. [back]
16. "Pro-Life Democrat State Senator Killed in Shooting." Steven Ertelt's Pro-Life Infonet at http://www.prolifeinfo.org/infonet.html, October 23, 1998; The Tennessean, October 27, 1998; Mary Jo Denton. "Looper Enters Not Guilty Plea." Tennessee Herald-Citizen, February 6, 1999; Mary Jo Denton. "Looper Quoted: "I Killed that Dude"." Tennessee Herald-Citizen, November 24, 1998; Court TV's Crime Library at http://www.crimelibrary.com has a complete 17-part series on Looper's murder of Burks. Sources and story can be found at: http://abortionviolence.com/TN.HTM. [back]
17. World Magazine, September 18, 1993; "Pro-Life Leader, Pastor Murdered by Avowed Satanist." Life Advocate, November 1993, p. 7. Sources and story can be found at: http://abortionviolence.com/AL.HTM. [back]
18. Readers interested in seeing more examples are directed to: http://abortionviolence.com/ and http://tree-in-the-sea.blogspot.com/2008/05/pro-abortion-violence.html [back]
19. http://hli.org/index.php?option=com_acajoom&act=mailing&task=view&listid=2&mailingid=578 [back]
20. http://all.org/article.php?id=11966 [back]
21. http://prolifeaction.org/press/2009/0601.htm [back]
22. http://www.frc.org/pressrelease/frc-condemns-the-murder-of-george-tiller [back]
23. http://www2.focusonthefamily.com/press/pressreleases/A000001406.cfm [back]
24. http://www.operationrescue.org/category/press-releases/ [back]
25. For details on the assault of Ed Snell, see: http://www.tfp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=556&Itemid=28 [back]
26. Quoted from an email Elizabeth Clark sent the author. [back]

Last Updated on Wednesday, 08 July 2009 13:57