Thursday 29 March 2012

Turning the tables on the Fetus Lobby.

From here - it means to reverse a situation and gain the upper hand.

Read and rejoice:
[Todd] Stave is the landlord of a medical clinic in Germantown that offers abortions. Reproductive Health Services Clinic became a big focus of anti-abortion protesters when it was leased to LeRoy Carhart, one of the few doctors in the nation who acknowledges performing late-term abortions.

There are always protesters outside the office park property quietly praying or holding a vigil, with signs, rosaries, statues of Mary and bloody, gory posters of mangled fetuses.

“Totally appropriate. It’s their right. They are protected by the First Amendment. And outside the clinic is probably the most appropriate place for them to express their views,” he told me this week.

This has been a way of life for Stave. He’s not just a landlord. That office was his father’s clinic. Then his sister ran it.

“I’ve been a member of this fight since Roe v. Wade. Since I was 5 years old,” he said. The office was firebombed when he was kid, and protesters gathered outside his father’s home as he was growing up. So he’s no stranger to the harassment and bullying of doctors and their families.

It’s become routine for protesters to distribute fliers, posters and create Web sites with all of a doctor’s personal information and urge others to target them. Kansas doctor George Tiller was killed in 2009 and his protegé, Carhart, had his farm burned to the ground. [...]

But his harassers crossed the line last fall, when a big group showed up at his daughter’s middle school on the first day of classes and again at back-to-school night. They had signs with his name and contact information as well as those awful images of the fetuses.

Soon after that, the harassing calls from protesters started coming to his home. By the dozens, at all hours. Friends asked him how they could help. He began to take the names and phone numbers down of anyone who contacted him with an unwanted call. And he gave those lists to his friends and asked them to call these folks back.

“In a very calm, very respectful voice, they said that the Stave family thanks you for your prayers,” he said. “They cannot terminate the lease, and they do not want to. They support women’s rights.”

This started with a dozen or so friends, then grew. Soon, there were more than a thousand volunteers dialing.

If they could find the information, Stave’s callers would even ask the family how their children were doing, and mention their names and the name of their school. “And then we’d tell them that we bless their home on such and such street,” giving them their address.

In some cases, the family of a protester who called Stave’s home could get up to 5,000 calls in return.
Hmm ... I know a couple of women in their sixties, wonderful grandes dames who belonged to Les filles d'Isabelle (the Knights of Columbus Ladies' Auxiliary) until they couldn't stand the sight of their peers being told to suffer silently while their ostentatiously pious businessmen husbands abused them, beat their children and eventually dumped their families for young trophy girlfriends.

How difficult could it be for them to infiltrate the local Fetus Lobby group that organizes 40 days of Harassment©™ and vigils outside the Women's Clinic - to get their hands on a database of all the shrieeeking abortion-criminalizing wingnuts?

To paraphrase the Golden Rule: Do unto others as they would do unto you.

And also: remember when Blob Blogging Wingnut suggested, in HER typical passive-aggressive manner, that "abortionists" (and their supporters) in Canada should be documented?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I dream about protesting in front of a church, but then that would be called 'persecution' and wouldn't be right, would it?

the regina mom said...

Caught Con MP Royal Galipeau congratulating his Knights of Columbus brothers on an anniversary of some sort during the Members Statements preceding Question Period today. The KoC pointman, I figure.

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