Blood and Politics (57 page)

At that moment a well-dressed man in a brown sportscoat stepped up from behind and shot him three times in the back. One bullet entered his body in the back of the right shoulder, puncturing his lung. Another bullet entered between the left shoulder and the spinal column and lodged itself in the muscles on the left side of his neck. A third bullet also entered on the left side and left a gaping bloody exit wound on the right side of his chest.
¹

As the doctor crumpled to the ground in a pool of blood, the shooter dropped his chrome-plated .38 revolver to the ground, walked to the front of the clinic, and said, “I just shot a man in the back of the clinic.” A police officer observing the pickets immediately took the shooter into
custody.
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Three hours later Dr. David Gunn died at Sacred Heart Hospital, assassinated in cold blood and in broad daylight for the crime of providing safe and legal medical services to women.

Up until just a couple of months prior, the shooter, Michael Griffin, was a Joe Regular Guy. His father was a dentist, and Griffin passed through Pensacola’s best public high school without comment.
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He wed young, had children, and by mid-marriage had enlisted in the navy. In the military, Griffin repeatedly earned high marks from his superiors and was regarded as an excellent electrician.
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Upon return to civilian employment, Griffin scored well with supervisors at a chemical plant and at his annual work evaluation rated “excellent” on “cooperation with others.”
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His cooperation apparently did not extend to his family, and his wife won a restraining order after he had (repeatedly) physically abused her and their two daughters.
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After a reconciliation, the couple started volunteering at a local home for “troubled” women, and it was there, under the tutelage of John Burt, the home’s founder, that Griffin became a soldier in the pro-life crusade.

Unlike Griffin, Burt had a long association with racially and religiously motivated violence. After a stint in the Marine Corps, Burt enlisted in the Klan and spent two years during the early sixties as a Kluxer in St. Augustine and Jacksonville. When questioned, Burt admitted that he was “very active” as a Klansman. “I thought that the race problem was a communist conspiracy to disrupt America,” he said. “I was in St. Augustine when they had race riots there. We moved to Jacksonville and we continued our work.”
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In fact, a drive to integrate St. Augustine in 1964 was met by significant Klan violence.
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When asked if he had broken the law during those years, Burt replied, “Oh, yeah, sure.”

Burt claimed that after he left the Klan and became a born-again Christian, he dropped any animosities based on skin color. “You can’t be a bigot and be a Christian,” he claimed. Nevertheless, in the years following, Burt replaced his battle against civil rights for black people with an attack on the constitutional rights of women. He began regular pickets at a Pensacola health clinic that performed abortions, and on Christmas Day 1984 that clinic and two associated doctors’ offices were firebombed. No one was arrested for that first arson, but Burt reportedly told followers that he had “no qualms” about such attacks.
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(Four people, none of them Burt, were arrested after the same clinic was bombed a second time several months later.) In February 1985, Burt barged into one of the doctors’ offices, and was convicted of trespass. In another incident thirteen months later, Burt along with three others again broke into a Pensacola clinic, while it was operating. He was arrested and placed on probation. Then, still on probation, Burt was arrested once
more for allegedly showing a would-be bomber the location of the clinic in Pensacola. He was sentenced to two years of house arrest, ending until 1991 his crusade to intimidate medical professionals and their patients.
¹⁰

After Burt’s house arrest ended, he rejoined the irregular armies attacking clinics and doctors as if they were infidels at the gates of holy cities. In 1991 and 1992 he twice blocked the entrance to a clinic in nearby Fort Walton Beach and twice was convicted of criminal trespass. Apparently unrestrained by these multiple arrests and convictions, he zeroed back in on Pensacola, the women’s center clinic, and Dr. Gunn. Burt led repeated pickets at the clinic. He hung a bloodstained effigy of Dr. Gunn in the home for women, replete with a rope around its neck and a biblical verse attached. He also issued a wanted poster with Dr. Gunn’s photograph, address, and telephone numbers. He harassed, threatened, and intimidated the doctor and ensured that Michael Griffin was personally able to identify him. And when Burt took his troops to the front of the clinic on that fateful March 10, Griffin’s assassination of Dr. Gunn fell like the last step in a long march from mayhem to murder.

Despite Burt’s past Klan membership, he never couched his opposition to abortion in specifically racist or anti-Semitic terms. Most contemporary white nationalists, by contrast, regarded abortion as a secondary question, deriving its importance only because of its presumed connection to the demographic fate of white people. When William Pierce offered an opinion on the topic, it was only to lament the role of abortion in the declining birthrate of whites. He certainly preferred measures such as abortion and sterilization if aimed at nonwhites. Tom Metzger took a slightly different tack. “Almost all abortion doctors are Jews. Abortion makes money for Jews. Almost all abortion nurses are lesbians. Abortion gives thrills to lesbians,” Metzger reasoned. His concern on this issue was only for abortions among white people. It was a sentiment shared by mainstreamers and vanguardists alike, despite any other disagreements they might have. Ed Fields, who had opposed Metzger’s strategy at Fort Smith, for example, said much the same thing: “We favor abortion on demand [paid by the taxpayers] for any and all colored people . . . Abortion for White people should be totally banned.”
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If that day should ever come, Metzger proposed a sanguinary conclusion to the whole phenomenon: “When abortion is declared to be murder they [Jewish doctors and lesbian nurses should] be hung by piano wires for the holocaust of twenty million white babies.”
¹²

While Metzger’s call for killing doctors and nurses in the future might seem farfetched, the level of actually existing violence was disturbingly high nonetheless. The National Abortion Federation recorded 155 instances
of vandalism directed at clinics during the two-year period of 1993–1994, as well as 29 arsons, another 20 attempted arsons, and a total of 5 murders and 9 attempted murders.
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The campaign of intimidation and harassment of women’s clinics had initially grown out of a movement to change public policy on abortion. In the 1970s broad coalitions sponsored by the Catholic Church and Protestant fundamentalists sought to elect politicians who would stop abortion through state or federal legislation, or a constitutional amendment, or even a change in the Supreme Court’s composition. This so-called right-to-life movement helped elect President Reagan in 1980. But Reagan was unable to end reproductive freedom of choice, and a more militant wing of the movement began a clandestine crusade, bombing clinics and committing other acts of violence. Another wing of antichoicers began mass civil disobedience campaigns to shut down clinics by blockading their doors. These were the so-called rescue operations that the Gun Owners of America executive Larry Pratt had supported.

The turn to murderous violence began in earnest after all these other avenues for changing policy had been exhausted, according to a persuasive argument by James Risen and Judy L. Thomas in their comprehensive book on antichoice killers,
Wrath of Angels
. Both mass militance and political lobbying reached their limit when the Supreme Court decided in 1992 in
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey
to uphold the core of the
Roe
decision endorsing abortion rights. “With Clinton’s election, anti-abortion militants now felt disenfranchised and increasingly were willing to follow extremists . . . into radical fringe groups,” Risen and Thomas wrote.
¹⁴

The election of President Clinton and Democratic Party majorities in both the House and Senate precluded any immediate ban on freedom of choice. And the Christian right fought the Clinton presidency from day one, turning the president into the preeminent symbol of the dope-smoking, antiwar, sexual revolution of the 1960s, everything that conservatives of all types abjured. After Clinton proposed normalizing the presence of gay men and lesbians serving in the military, religious and cultural conservatives used the opportunity to ratchet up their profile as an opposition force. Organizations whose financial fortunes had sagged during the Reagan-Bush presidency now experienced a rapid surge of growth and money. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, who had been operating at a deficit since the midyears of President Reagan’s administrations, installed a 900 phone line, which charged callers to express their views on the issue. According to
The Washington Post
, more than twenty-four thousand people paid the cost of calling within the line’s first hours, and the antigay crescendo grew from there.

Broadcasters on both radio and television urged their audiences to let their representatives know they opposed gay men and lesbians in uniform. Headlines on the Reverend Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition monthly tabloid screamed about “Homosexual Soldiers.” And Falwell’s and Robertson’s weren’t the only operations to benefit by opposing the new president. Other sectors of the conservative movement also gained from the growing opposition to the new Democratic administration. William Buckley’s mainline
National Review
magazine, for example, enjoyed a jump in paid circulation figures. In the end, Clinton was forced to abandon his initial proposal and adopt a much-ridiculed “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military.

The forces unleashed by Pat Buchanan’s run through the 1992 primaries had not abated. Buchanan’s fierce invocation of a culture war during the Republican convention had struck a chord among a distinct stratum of voters. On that November’s ballot in Oregon a proposed amendment to the state constitution had lumped in homosexuality with “pedophilia, sadism and masochism” as behaviors that were “wrong, unnatural and perverse.” Known as Measure 9, it forbade state funding for educational programs regarding homosexuality and denied civil rights protection to gay men and lesbians. Proponents of the referendum produced clever propaganda, including a videotape of gay pride marches featuring provocative public displays of sexualized behavior.
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By conventional standards the measure lost badly, 44 percent to 56 percent; nevertheless, it took one point more than Clinton, who won the state.
¹⁶

A similar initiative in Colorado that year, known as Amendment 2, proposed changing the state constitution to ban any local or statewide civil rights legislation: “No protected status based on homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation” was to be legal. Municipal statutes protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination in housing and employment would become unconstitutional.
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This measure passed with 53 percent of the vote—thirteen points more than Clinton took while winning the state. Amendment 2’s foes brought suit after it passed, and the United States Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional on the ground that it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:
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“We cannot accept the view that Amendment 2’s prohibition on specific legal protections does no more than deprive homosexuals of special rights. To the contrary, the amendment imposes a special disability upon those persons alone.”
¹⁹

Although ultimately unsuccessful, these campaigns shifted away from purely a theological opposition to gay rights toward propaganda that claimed that homosexuals wanted “special rights” not available to
others. It was an argument similar to the one David Duke had popularized in Louisiana regarding racial equality for black people. And focus group studies showed that the antigay sentiment expressed by ordinary nonideological white people was similar to their objection to policies such as affirmative action.
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The high levels of opposition to abortion and civil rights for gay people demonstrated that the proponents of culture warfare did not lie down after the 1992 election; rather, the prospect of a Democratic presidency turned them into a highly energetic mass base for the new forms of white Christian nationalism being born in the early 1990s.

While men such as Pat Buchanan aimed to turn these warriors into a vigorous, more broadly defined force for America first nationalism, the Christian Coalition executive Ralph Reed tried to tie this growing constituency firmly to the Republican Party establishment during Clinton’s first year. Convinced that so-called family issues were too narrowly defined a platform for electoral success, Reed hoped to graduate from abortion, gay rights, and prayer in public school to issues such as free trade and health insurance.

In the Heritage Foundation’s monthly journal,
Policy Review
, Reed wrote: “The most urgent challenge for pro-family conservatives is to develop a broader issues agenda. The pro-family movement has limited its effectiveness by concentrating disproportionately on issues such as abortion and homosexuality . . . To win at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion, however, the pro-family movement must speak to the concerns of average voters in the areas of taxes, crime, government waste, health care and financial security.”
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The Heritage Foundation had been the preeminent think tank supporting President Reagan’s administration, and it was a logical place for Reed to discuss strategy. Much of the Republican leadership, following former President George Bush and Senator Bob Dole, was then pressing Congress for the NAFTA treaty’s passage, despite the fact that President Clinton was leading the effort to sign it into law. It was therefore natural for Reed to announce his support for NAFTA at a Heritage Foundation luncheon, and he planned to have the assembly at the September Christian Coalition conference officially endorse the free trade agreement.