{"id":7924,"date":"2004-02-16T23:22:37","date_gmt":"2004-02-16T23:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/02\/protesting_in_wichita.html"},"modified":"2004-02-16T23:22:37","modified_gmt":"2004-02-16T23:22:37","slug":"protesting_in_wichita","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/02\/protesting_in_wichita.html","title":{"rendered":"Protesting in Wichita"},"content":{"rendered":"

An LATimes story on a group that has formed to protest third-trimester abortion specialist Tiller<\/a> <\/p>\n

(Link requires registration, but just do it.)<\/p>\n

\nOver the next 12 months, Newman and his followers will point their arrows at everyone who works for Women’s Health Care Services, from the chief physician to the armed security guards.<\/p>\n

Photos of the mangled heads of fetuses will greet the receptionist at her favorite restaurant. Protesters will point out the nurse as she walks into the mall, the office manager as she heads into church. Every clinic employee can expect pickets at home, yellow arrows pointed at their front doors.<\/p>\n

Newman will pick through clinic workers’ trash to figure out where they do business; he’ll trail them at a distance to learn their routines. His goal is not just to make their lives uncomfortable. He wants to unsettle and disgust their friends and associates, so their hairstylists and their pharmacists, even their neighbors, make it clear they’re not welcome in Wichita.<\/p>\n

“If Josef Mengele came into a bank saying, ‘Here are a few gold teeth I ripped out of the Jews before I gassed them,’ the bank would be horrified. They’d say, ‘I’m not taking your blood money.’ That’s the picture of abortionists that we have to paint,” Newman said.<\/p>\n

“This is a personal campaign. It’s letting people know, abortion is not abstract,” he said. “There’s a real person who holds the scalpel, and he lives next door to you.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Any tactic, as long as it’s peaceful, strikes him as fair because the stakes as he sees them are terrifyingly high: “It’s not like we just want a tax cut, or school vouchers. It’s life and death for these children.”<\/p>\n

Whether he can persuade others to join him remains to be seen. Outside the nurse’s apartment late last month, one couple came by to volunteer for future pickets. A few neighbors also expressed support.<\/p>\n

“I think they should harass her like this,” said Kat Pitzer, 22. “It’s kind of mean, but abortion is disgusting.”<\/p>\n

In clinic manager Klaege’s subdivision, however, residents are angry about Newman’s tactics. Even those opposed to abortion resent the constant pickets and “Truth Truck” patrols.<\/p>\n

“By coming into the neighborhood, all they’ve done is harden attitudes against them,” said Mike Sly, 69. “The way to stop abortion is to work through the political process. To try to terrorize a bunch of people … that’s just stupid.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An LATimes story on a group that has formed to protest third-trimester abortion specialist Tiller (Link requires registration, but just do it.) Over the next 12 months, Newman and his followers will point their arrows at everyone who works for Women’s Health Care Services, from the chief physician to the armed security guards. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}