Dr. Tiller

Back in DC, I volunteered as an escort at Planned Parenthood on weekends for a couple of years before I went to Taiwan. I have avoided discussing that on here because I know some of my friends disagree quite strongly with me on that particular issue. But not now.

When I heard the news this morning, it was entirely too easy to believe. Some - not all, but some - of those folks are just gonzo. Take it from someone who has stood three feet away and listened to them chant and pray and compare me to Hitler, what happened in Wichita was sad, but it just wasn't that big of a surprise.

I have to admit that I do have some positive memories of those confrontations. When the weather was nasty, some of us on both sides had a sense of humor about the whole thing..."God must be on one of our sides, to make the weather this nasty for the other side," that sort of thing. Some of us on both sides also recognized that we were more or less cut from the same cloth, just opposite sides of it. It really does take commitment to turn up anyplace you don't really need to be at 7:00 on Saturday morning.

But still. The ones who said things like "Here come the SS!" when we went to shield patients from them, and then told us in the next breath about the love of Christ; the ones who told crying patients that "you should be crying because you're about to kill your baby," the ones who greeted young families entering the clinic by telling the kids "They're gonna kill your little brother!"; the ones who accosted black patients with their bizarre (not entirely off-base, but still bizarre) theories about Margaret Sanger and her racism...as Jerry Falwell said about people like me after 9/11, "I point the finger in their face and say, You helped this happen."