Randall Terry: Faux-Life Leader

December 15, 2009 - 8:00am (Print)

In the abortion debate, ad hominem arguments run rampant, even against the decent people who do exist on both “sides.” So I believe it is generally better to refrain from critique of individual characters as a form of political protest. Better to give others the benefit of the doubt, to be forgiving, to listen patiently, to not pass judgment.

But when the activist in question is Randall Terry, I would feel irresponsible, as a prolifer, if I did not raise the issue of rotten-to-the-core character. Most recently, in an interview with the Belleville [IL] News-Democrat, Terry warned against the passage of a health reform bill that included federal funding for abortions. He said it would “trigger violence” in the same manner that slavery triggered violence.

It is valid to discuss whether abortion does or does not resemble various offenses against the already born. It is valid to debate whether abortion does or does not have a role in health reform. But it is anything but valid for Terry to threaten violence against abortion providers as an inevitable, even salvific, result of disobeying his commands.

If he truly merited the term “prolifer,” Terry would instead thoroughly, unequivocally condemn violence against providers as an act of immense disrespect for life. He would pledge to take action against it. While disagreeing with prochoicers, he would refuse to demonize them.

Terry has never really done this. And in fact this is not the first or only time Terry has invoked a view of violence as inevitable and just. After the shooting of abortion provider George Tiller earlier this year, Terry claimed that the slain doctor “reaped what he sowed.” By this “logic,” should peace advocates like myself inveigh that the 15 people shot down in cold blood at Fort Hood also “reaped what they sowed”?

Terry’s publicly expressed self-image points directly to a belief in “salvation” through bloodshed and an egomaniacal conviction of himself as its righteous arbiter. Recalling his previous leadership of Operation Rescue, he boasts, “I was the tip of the spear.” He has repeatedly bragged that he is a slayer of dragons, even making t-shirts that picture him as one.

In contrast to Terry the dragon slayer, there is the beautifully healing presence of the dragon in the extraordinary 2002 book Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, by Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock. Parker, a prochoice feminist theologian, writes movingly and courageously of her intense suffering after an abortion she had in unmet hopes of saving her troubled marriage. She finds restoration through her vivid dream about a dying, weeping dragon who falls to Earth and needs nursing back to life and health. As Parker notes, “In many cultures, the dragon is the mother creator, the source of all life.”

So is this what Terry really seeks to annihilate? If abortion arises in so many cases from a cultural failure to genuinely, fully support and respect women’s power of life creation, then Terry is fully complicit in its root causes. In talk of prolife, he veils, but not very well, a sadistic womb envy.

Terry’s none-too-prolife behaviors towards his own family are a matter of public record, more disputed than atoned for on his part, while confirmed by his children and others who would know. About a decade ago, amidst rumors of several extramarital relationships, he abandoned his first wife and their children to marry a much younger woman. After the divorce he failed on child support payments, even as he misappropriated funds raised in the name of his activism to bankroll a lavish lifestyle. Never mind that men’s refusals of responsibility and accountability towards women and children, along with being unjust in their own right, are a major cause of abortion.

Terry had long before then boasted of persuading a woman not to abort her baby. He boasted of then adopting this biracial baby, Tila, and her siblings, Jamiel and Ebony, minimizing his first wife’s role in care of these children. But when Tila and Ebony experienced nonmarital pregnancies in their teens, he barred them from his home, a genuinely cruel response in their hour of need. Never mind that parental rejection or the quite rational fear of it brings many young women into the abortion clinic. Never mind that if prolife means anything, it means offering the utmost help with abortion alternatives to pregnant girls and women—and doesn’t charity begin at home?

Although his father fulminated and campaigned against gay rights, Jamiel found the courage as a young man to publicly come out as gay. Randall Terry swiftly ejected him, too, condemning him as sick and immoral. Never mind that LGBT phobia maims and kills because it denies people their right to be, and be themselves. Never mind that it leads to hate crimes, the tossing out of kids into the brutalities of the street, suicide, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS. LGBT phobia is also the opposite of prolife because it pressures youth who are conflicted about their sexual identities to experiment and take risks with heterosexual sex, often leading to unintended pregnancies and abortions. LGBT phobia also unjustly rules out a large population of caring foster and adoptive families.

Prolifers with all kinds of beliefs about “family values” have long since repudiated Randall Terry—that is, if they ever regarded him as a leader at all. Long ago, the now defunct consistent life ethic print zine Harmony criticized Terry’s intolerant and hostile attitudes towards women, LGBT people, and others. Terry’s sexual and financial misconduct first became widespread public knowledge through Lynn Vincent’s report “Appalling Appeal?” in the ultraconservative magazine World of June 14, 2003.

Despite his public sanctioning of violence against abortion providers and his continued personal life hypocrisies, some abortion opponents and media still turn to Randall Terry as if he were the true voice of prolife. It is far past time to accord this man any credibility as a prolifer. Please do not cite him as a prolife leader, let alone a hero. Challenge anyone who does that. Do not give him money. Challenge anybody who does that. To anyone who may be swayed by his manipulative charisma, including yourself: resist. Distribute copies of this article at Terry’s appearances.

And please, if you are not there already, get yourselves behind prolife organizations that engage in respectful and peaceful activism, such as Consistent Life (www.consistent-life.org), the Pro Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians (www.plagal.org), and the very new All Our Lives (www.allourlives.org). If you are a journalist working on an abortion story, please go to organizations like these instead of Randall Terry. And if you are prochoice, please don’t assume that Terry represents all antiabortionists--realize how many of us share your criticisms of him. The less that both “sides” demonize one another, the more that Randall Terry’s damage gets undone.

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