Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry wears a grim reaper costume as he leads a protest against the House health care reform bill.

Randall Terry is giving a tour of his office, a small room on the ground floor of the $1.3 million home he rents in northern Virginia. The room is packed. Every inch of wall space is taken up by books or personal treasures–stones “liberated from places where Muslim armies destroyed Christian churches,” the complete works of Winston Churchill, the complete works of Theodore Roosevelt, small metal busts of the men themselves. Terry reaches to a top shelf and grabs one volume of Muhammad al-Tabari’s history of Islam. “It’s one of the definitive histories,” says Terry. “I believe that Islam is a threat to the world, and I want to address it.”

Getting ready to leave the room — he has to finish a paper he’s writing about “Augustinian realism” — Terry grabs for something else. It’s a small plastic shark with a flashlight attached to its head, a gift from Terry’s daughter. He flips on the light and tries out his best impression of Dr. Evil from the “Austin Powers” trilogy of slapstick comedies.

“C’mon, people!” he says. “Gotta have the data! Can I please have a shark with a frickin’ laser beam?”

The man who personified the anti-abortion rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s loves to kid around. It disarms reporters, and it wins over the activists who use the lower level of Terry’s home as the base for Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex. (In Latin, it roughly means “Insurrection Until Death.”) In May, People for the American Way released video of Terry closing a press conference on the murdered abortionist George Tiller — Tiller “reaped what he sowed,” said Terry. In response, Terry convened a new press conference where he served Guinness and chicken wings.

For several years, especially after Terry served as the spokesman for the parents of the late Terri Schiavo in 2005, his personality and his antics, as well as his financial and legal decisions, led him to be ostracized from the movement. That’s fine by him — he’s suing the current leadership of Operation Rescue, his original organization, and without much prompting he’ll call leaders of groups like Americans United for Life “a bunch of harlots.” While they deride him or distance themselves from him, Terry is capitalizing on the conservative uprising against President Obama and congressional Democrats. When cameras show up to cover a Tea Party or a health care protest, Terry and his activists are there. If reporters pretend his protests don’t exist, Terry’s small staff churn out their own video and post it on YouTube.

“I think there is a certain element of the media that does not want us to be seen,” said Terry. According to him, the current and unexpected political trouble that pro-abortion rights activists have found themselves in — chiefly the Stupak Amendment that prohibits abortion funding in a public health care plan — is the result of ostentatious and unyielding pressure from activists like him. The newfound political role of Catholic bishops? That’s their attempt to undo the damage they did themselves by not opposing Barack Obama in 2008. “We’re not here for a place at the table. We’re here to take the table and smash it, turn it into firewood.”

Sometimes, rhetoric like that gets Terry in front of the camera. The office walls of Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex are decorated with newspaper clippings–mostly front pages–about Terry and his successes. More files of newspaper and magazine covers are stacked on bookshelves. Terry and his activists draw a clean line between that kind of coverage and coverage in “the ghetto press,” the Catholic and anti-abortion rights media, whose readers presumably made up their minds about this kind of activism years ago. Their strategy–a combination of slapstick skits, counter-protests, and sit-ins–has increasingly won the attention of liberal blogs hungry for images of conservatives gone wild. On August 25, Terry and three other members of Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex attended an town hall meeting in Reston, Va. The media coverage went almost exactly the way they wanted. Before the event began, Terry and the others acted out a skit in which Terry, playing a doctor, teamed up with a Barack Obama impersonator to “murder” babies and an old woman. Once inside, Terry shouted down Howard Dean before being forcibly removed from the venue.

“Our goal was to keep Dean from talking,” said Terry. “And it worked! He didn’t talk!”

Missy Smith, a longtime activist who has taken a large role in Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex, recreated the slogans that got them kicked out. “‘Obama! Abortion is murder!’” said Smith. “They said they heard it in the back of the room. It was very cool.”

After that, the skits got wilder. Terry would dress up as the grim reaper, pleading with passersby to have abortions. Joshua Reading, a 28-year-old seminary graduate who recently joined the flock, recorded a Halloween-themed YouTube video asking activists to create effigies of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “burning in hell.” It was so successful that it was condemned by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It even won respect from Jill Stanek, a prominent anti-abortion rights activist and Terry critic. “While the other side scoffs at Terry,” she wrote, “and we pro-lifers back away in embarrassment, the day may actually come when Pelosi and Reid find themselves in hell and remember this. Then it won’t be so funny.”

On October 29, TalkingPointsMemo posted four and a half minutes of footage featuring Terry and other protesters acting out a skit mocking Reid and Pelosi. On November 5, after joining the “Super Bowl of Freedom” held on the Capitol steps to rally opposition to the Democrats’ health care reform bill, the activists marched over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office and tore up pages from the bill. Capitol police arrested them one by one; it was all captured for their YouTube account.

“We told security that we were going to deliver the bills to [Rep.] Ron Paul [R-Tex],” laughed Missy Smith. “It’s incredible that we got them through.”

Smith admitted, with some regret, that the protest got little media attention after the tragedy at Fort Hood took over the headlines. But with every media hit they get, Terry’s activists are absolutely convinced that their approach, an aggressive approach, is working.

“We make the national news, outside of the ghetto press,” said Reading. “Our message reaches everyone.”

Andrew Beacham, a young, bearded activist who has been ejected from four of President Obama’s speeches–including his University of Notre Dame commencement speech and a health care event in Maryland–was just as adamant. He came into Terry’s fold after a disappointing stint as a Republican activist and a Tea Party organizer in Indiana. Suiting up and heckling the president of the United States, he said, made him aware of how “in history, there are always people who are willing to step up and be the tip of the spear.” Shouting down the president of the United States is more effective than nearly any form of public protest, said Beacham, especially when the president is hesitant about how to respond.

“The teleprompter doesn’t tell him how to respond to heckler,” laughed George Offerman, an activist who’d brought his home-brewed beer to Terry’s home.

The media savvy among Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex activists comes across immediately. They talk about Gallup polls that show support for legal abortion dropping, Politico stories about Democratic infighting, and Onion videos that make President Obama look like a fool. Near the end of their meeting with TWI, they watched episode nine of Terry’s self-produced television series “Insurrecta Nex.” Filmed in a small Ohio studio before an audience of Terry’s supporters–Offerman, Reading, and Terry’s wife Andrea all make appearances–the episodes are stylistic echoes of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show. Terry tells jokes and tries on funny voices as he moves around the camera, retelling American history for lessons on how to “stomp out legalized child-killing.” One episode about the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party closes with Terry literally “dancing on the grave” of “Roe v. Wade.”

All of the media training, and all of the new interest from reporters and liberal blogs, will play a part in Terry’s next project. In 2010, Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex activists will run for federal office in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Terry ran for Congress in 1998, mounting an anti-tax, economic conservative campaign with almost no talk of abortion. “Everyone in the district knew me as Mr. Pro-Life,” Terry told TWI. “I wanted them to know that I could represent them in Washington on something more than dead babies.” The plan for 2010 is just the opposite: It’s to get TV ads running in the beltway, with brutal imagery of aborted fetuses beaming into voters’ homes.

“We’re going to re-define the pro-life debate in the 2010 election,” said Terry. “If we spend $500,000 or $3 million dollars on media in these races, the media will be apoplectic. They will not be able to ignore us.”

Anti-abortion protesters in front of the U.S. Capitol (Flickr: John Stephen Dwyer)

On Saturday, 64 Democrats backed Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) amendment to prevent abortions from being funded with taxpayer money in the comprehensive House health care bill. On Wednesday morning, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) attempted to soothe the jangled nerves of pro-abortion rights activists who were lighting up switchboards and issuing not-another-dime fund-raising threats against the party for letting it happen.

“It was not 40 votes that we were trying to get with this amendment,” Clyburn said in an interview with MSNBC. “It was 10 votes. And that’s the fact.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

In interviews with TWI, Republicans and activists explained their theory behind a contentious–and in the end, rewarding–heat-of-the-moment decision to back an amendment to a bill that all of them want to see go down in flames. The move to back Stupak’s amendment came after lobbying from a bevy of anti-abortion rights groups, including–perhaps most importantly–the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And while some conservatives are still critical of the party for not killing the amendment and trying to sink the bill with it, most are coming around to the view that the alliance with conservative Democrats had, in the words of one long-time conservative activist, “dropped a bomb” in the Democratic conference.

“If defeating Stupak wouldn’t [have changed] the outcome on Saturday,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), “then it is clearly evident that having it in and sparking a civil war amongst the Democrats is the best way to stop the overall bill.”

The Republican rush to support Stupak’s amendment was controversial from the very moment it occurred. Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), who was in the end the only Republican to vote “present” on the amendment, scorched fellow members of the minority for not joining him and sinking it. National Right to Life Committee warned Republicans it would score a “present” vote as a “no.”

“The Stupak amendment gave political cover to Democrats who voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker,” Shadegg said in a statement. “If Republicans had voted ‘present’ as a group, since we are the party of Life, we would have defined the ‘present’ vote as the pro-life vote. Doing so would have denied the purported pro-life Democrats cover. Given the extremely narrow margin of victory for the bill, it’s highly likely that without the Stupak language, it would have been defeated.”

Several other conservatives made this same argument to TWI, and criticized anti-abortion rights groups like the Family Research Council, National Right to Life, and Americans United for Life for backing the amendment and counting “aye” votes as “pro-life” votes. But in a lengthy Monday blog post for The Weekly Standard, John McCormack captured much of the thinking of Republican staffers and strategists–that Democrats were going to win the vote no matter what, and that to vote down the Stupak amendment would have been hypocritical and cynical. “Bringing down Stupak,” wrote McCormack, “would have seriously hurt the effort to defeat Obamacare.”

Anti-abortion rights groups backed up that assessment. “If the pro-life members of the House suddenly, cynically, pulled out the rug from under Stupak,” said Doug Johnson, the legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, “they would have been asking for defeat. I mean, that would have been a terrific gift to the left. Pro-abortion groups–I’m including pro-Obama front groups who claim to be pro-life groups–would have shouted from the rooftops: ‘You see, they don’t really care about the abortion issue, and when they had a chance they torpedoed it!’ It would have been a train-wreck.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the anti-abortion rights Susan B. Anthony List, agreed with Johnson. Her group marshaled 300,000 emails and phone calls to Congress to back the amendment. “For every single Republican save one to insist on a vote on this, then kill it with ‘present’ votes, would have been cynical beyond words,” Dannenfelser said. The situation for Republicans now, she argued, is a “win-win,” as it forces Democrats to stiff dozens of key members. Only one Republican, Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.), voted for the bill, doing so after backing the Stupak amendment.

“Think about [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi looking at two letters on her desk,” said Dannenfelser. “I’ve got one letter saying if I don’t take it out, 41 Democrats will vote against it. I’ve got another letter saying keep it in or pro-life Democrats will vote against it. Either way you come up with coalition that can defeat it.”

The ripples of the Stupak vote are hitting the Senate before they can hit Pelosi. A major reason for Republican and conservative self-congratulation about the amendment is the puzzle it’s created for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). A semi-reliable vote against abortion rights until he became his party’s Senate leader in 2004, Reid is in the position of crafting language that can appeal to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.)–who has said he approves of the Stupak amendment–provide cover to Democrats like Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.), and avoid losing pro-abortion rights votes like that of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)

“They’re in a major bind,” said Michael Franc, director of government relations at the Heritage Foundation. “The only way to get out of it is for one of the two Democratic camps to go against something they believe deeply. There has to be intellectual flanking movement, somebody convincing them that the future of party at stake, they can’t let this 100-year achievement flounder over this one thing.”

For anti-abortion rights activists, the muddle is a victory nine months in the making. “If it hadn’t been for National Right to Life working in the trenches since January,” said Douglas Johnson, “this legislation would have passed sooner and by a larger margin. Remember, the president and the speaker and much of the mainstream media had been saying all year long that abortion wasn’t in the bill. If they had been able to pull off this smuggling operation, it would have moved faster and passed sooner.” It happened, said Johnson, because of “the tenacity of pro-life Democrats like Stupak.”

None of the anti-abortion rights groups that supported an “aye” vote on the Stupak amendment will support the final bill. Dannenfelser and Johnson pointed to so-called “rationing,” that Conservatives fear would empower bureaucrats to deny care to some patients, and the exclusion of conscience provisions in the health care bill as surefire reasons why “pro-life” activists would be unable to support it. At the same time, they and Republicans suggested that if the health care bill survived with much of the Stupak language intact, it would be a victory unthinkable just a few months ago.

“If the Stupak amendment is in there, I would definitely define it as one of most important life votes in more than a decade,” said Johnson. “You’d have to go back to 1993. Clinton comes in. Everyone thinks the Hyde amendment [former Rep. Henry Hyde's (R-Ill.) legislation that banned federal funds paying for abortions] is gone, and they are absolutely shocked the day we renew Hyde on the floor of the House.”

This article has been updated for clarity.

While the state is coming down from its second temporary shut down in two years, ever increasing unemployment and unresolved budget issues, Michigan House Republicans this week introduced legislation to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at fertilization.

The resolution to amend the constitution was introduced by Democratic Rep. Jim Slezak of Davison and Republican Rep. Paul Scott of Grand Blanc. There were a total of 23 co-sponsors for the bill.

This base of support for Palin — maybe not that large, but very passionate, and very powerful in places like the Iowa Republican Caucuses — isn’t going to abandon her just because the Serious People in the GOP laugh her off in favor of blow-dried flip-flopping pols like Mitt Romney or blandly “electable” figures like Tim Pawlenty. To her supporters, mockery is like nectar.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty and Hugh Hewitt provided some proof of this today:

My first thought was that it tied heavily to her appearance; in liberals’ minds, conservatives are supposed to look like the couple from the painting American Gothic: Dour and joyless, aged, spartan and frail. Political leaders aren’t supposed to be young, really good looking women, full of energy, smiles and winks.

Hugh suggested it tied to the contrast between her lifestyle and her critics: “She is the embodiment of the anti-choice, the opposite of every choice that lefty elites have ever made — as to going back home instead of moving to the west coast, having children, having a child with Downs, staying married to one man the whole time, choosing rural or suburban over urban and living a generally conservative lifestyle, working with her hands… That everything she is is the antithesis of everything that liberal urban elites are, so it’s not just enough to say, ‘I disagree with you,’; she has to be repudiated and crushed.”

The argument that liberals despise Palin because she had a child with Down syndrome probably makes less sense outside of the talk radio sphere than anything else said about her.

–

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“The ethical heirs of slavery are the child-killers and their proponents here today,” Terry said, and anti-abortion activists will succeed if they follow the same strategy pursued by abolitionists after Nat Turner’s Rebellion.

At this moment in time the abolitionists did not blink.  They did not blink.  They said, “Slavery is kidnapping. It is a crime against God and man.”  They said, “It is an abomination.”  They said the slave owners were kidnappers and man-stealers.  They railed against the slave power.  They railed against the politicians of the deep south and in the U.S. Congress that sustained slavery.  They did not flinch. And if we in the pro-life movement are going to prevail, we have got to take the lesson of the abolitionists.

Before the event was over, Terry managed to plug his book, CD, upcoming TV show and training sessions, to be held this weekend in Arlington, Va., to teach “a new generation of heroes to bring child-killing to an end.”

Photo by: SMN, Flickr Creative Common

The threats started in 1995. It was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the American Coalition of Life Activists decided to create a poster for their annual meeting listing the names and address of a group of doctors who performed abortions. They called them “the Deadly Dozen,” and declared each guilty of “crimes against humanity.” They offered $5,000 for information leading to their arrest, conviction, or revocation of their medical licenses. ACLA members distributed the poster at the group’s events and published it in an affiliated magazine.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Then later that year, ACLA unveiled a second poster, this time targeting Dr. Robert Crist, an abortion provider in Kansas City. The poster listed his home and work addresses and featured his photograph. It offered $500 to “any ACLA organization that successfully persuades Crist to turn from his child killing through activities within ACLA guidelines,” which prohibited violence.

The following January, ACLA created the “Nuremberg Files” — a series of dossiers it had compiled on doctors, clinic employees, politicians, judges and other abortion rights supporters. Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kans., who was killed Sunday, was among them. They would be prosecuted, ACLA wrote, “once the tide of this nation’s opinion turns against the wanton slaughter of God’s children.” ACLA sent copies of the dossiers to an anti-abortion activist who posted the information on a Website. There, the names of those who had been attacked by “anti-abortion terrorists” — as the court called them — were listed, with a strike through the names of those who had been murdered. The names of those wounded were grayed.

Although neither the posters nor the Website contained explicit threats against the doctors, similar posters had previously been made of other doctors shortly before they were violently attacked; one was murdered. Abortion providers soon took to wearing bulletproof vests, drew the curtains of their home windows and received protection from U.S. Marshals. The strategy had worked.

Eventually, some of the doctors, represented by Planned Parenthood, sued ACLA, twelve activists and an affiliated organization, claiming that their actions violated the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE act, among other laws. At trial, a jury found that the statements were “true threats” and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The doctors won $107 million in damages and an injunction barring the anti-abortion activists from distributing similar information in the future.

Although the anti-abortion protesters appealed, a majority of judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict. Such “WANTED”- style posters, the court ruled, in the context of previous similar threats and subsequent violence, and the lines drawn through the names of doctors who’d been murdered, were not protected by the First Amendment: “ACLA’s conduct amounted to a true threat and is not protected speech.” The Supreme Court declined to review the case, and it remains good law.

Much of the discussion in the wake of Tiller’s slaying has been about criminal prosecution of those who murder abortion doctors. But there’s a growing concern about the anti-abortion extremists — some call them domestic terrorists — who enable and encourage such murders by labeling abortion providers “mass murderers”, Nazis and worse, and implying that violent attacks against them are not only justified, but honorable.

As Rachel Maddow revealed in chilling detail in her MSNBC news show on Monday night, groups such as Rescue America, Prayer and Action News, Army of God and Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry all appeared to be celebrating Tiller’s murder on Monday. And while extremists who promote violence against abortion providers could be prosecuted under state and federal law — and particularly under the federal FACE Act — the federal government in recent years has hardly prosecuted any such cases.

According to statistics provided by the Department of Justice, the Bush administration brought only about two criminal prosecutions per year in the entire country under the FACE Act , and never more than four in any single year. The Clinton administration, in contrast, prosecuted 17 defendants for violations of the FACE Act in 1997 alone, and an average of about 10 per year since the law was enacted in 1994. Those cases included one against a woman in 1996 who yelled through a bullhorn to a doctor, “Robert, remember Dr. Gunn. This could happen to you …”, referring to Dr. David Gunn, the first abortion doctor ever murdered, in 1993. In another case, a man who parked a Ryder truck outside a clinic shortly after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, where a Ryder truck had been used to carry explosives, was found to have threatened force. Stalking, arson and bomb threats are also illegal.

Whether the dropoff in prosecutions is because the FACE Act successfully deterred crimes after its enactment or because the Bush administration wasn’t interested in prosecuting them is not clear. “The amount of activity really did drop a lot after FACE was enacted and it was beginning to be enforced,” said Cathleen Mahoney, Executive Vice President of the National Abortion Federation who was an attorney in the Justice Department until 2006. “Certainly the political will wasn’t there.”

That’s disappointed Janet Crepps, deputy director of the legal program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I don’t think that the government has done enough,” she said, noting that while the Clinton administration had created a task force in the Department of Justice to coordinate responses to clinic threats and violence, during the Bush years, “we’ve heard that providers during that time would call DOJ for help and get no response.”

Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar said Tuesday that the task force still exists, and in a statement released after the fatal shooting of Dr. Tiller, Attorney General Eric Holder said that “[f]ederal law enforcement is coordinating with local law enforcement officials in Kansas on the investigation of this crime.” It remains to be seen, however, whether the government will also investigate the anti-abortion activists who threaten abortion providers and may have worked with the actual murderer.

But as the Planned Parenthood case illustrates, the doctors and clinic workers who are targets of violent threats don’t have to wait for the government to act. The FACE act allows doctors or clinic workers to privately sue the individuals and groups making the threat. And although that’s been challenged on First Amendment grounds, its use has been upheld by the courts in cases where the intent to threaten or intimidate was clear.

The lawyer who represented Planned Parenthood in that case declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the sensitivity surrounding the issues, lack of knowledge of the circumstances of Dr. Tiller’s death and respect for his family. But several lawyers confirmed that the case, last litigated in 2006 when the anti-abortion groups tried to appeal to the Supreme Court, could serve as a model for others.

“It’s very fact-intensive,” said Mahoney, from the National Abortion Foundation. “It really depends on the particular circumstances. We would say that people should not be allowed to threaten anyone for providing legal medical services.” In addition to a private right to sue, state attorneys general can also enforce the law within their states.

Some civil libertarians, however, have concerns. On “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley cautioned against prosecution or lawsuits against even those who promote violence. “We have this difficult line to walk between free speech and preventative law enforcement,” he said. “The Supreme Court has said that violent speech is protected … and it is in fact protected to say all abortion doctors should be killed.”

That’s not necessarily true under the FACE Act, however. The law specifically targets whoever “by force or threat of force … intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with …” anyone who is a provider of abortion services or a patient trying to access them.

That’s not to say that FACE is sufficient or its enforcement is easy. “It’s penalties are significantly lower than many other federal criminal statutes,” said Mahoney, who was involved in criminal prosecutions under FACE in the justice department. The other difficulty, she acknowledged, is the “delicate balance” between protected speech and incitement to violence. While the law does make it a crime to “intimidate or interfere” with provision of abortion services, “there’s a lot of law about what’s a criminally actionable threat” that makes intimidating statements difficult to prosecute. “It’s not so much FACE as that whole body of law that’s the difficulty,” said Mahoney.

Avoiding such politically charged difficulties may be why the federal government appears in recent years to have avoided enforcing the law altogether. The murder of George Tiller, apparently by a known anti-abortion zealot, may begin to change the political equation.

Steve Deace, who hosts a drive-time show on WHO-AM, said society helped create Scott Roeder, the man in custody for the killing of Tiller Sunday morning, by refusing to stop abortion by legal methods.

“Maybe the fact that we have a lawless society that has not protected these babies from infanticide created the Scott Roeders of the world, who in very John Brown-like fashion, illegally took matters into his own hands,” Deace said. “Saying that if the system will not deal with an evil, then to Hell with the system.”

A radical abolitionist, Brown led a gang that brutally killed several pro-slavery figures in Kansas and later led a violent attack upon the United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. He was eventually arrested, charged with treason, and executed. [...]

Deace danced the line throughout his program between celebrating the fact that Tiller is dead and condemning murder. At one point he discussed vengeance, and how the Bible says vengeance “doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to [God.]”  But he admitted being conflicted, saying he is happy that “babies in Kansas are safer today than they were yesterday while George Tiller was still taking in oxygen.”

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

Within hours of the news that President Barack Obama would give the commencement address to this year’s graduates of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., angry opponents of the decision founded a new Website, NotreDameScandal.com, where they could register their complaints and sign a petition asking the school to “halt this travesty.”

“Notre Dame has chosen prestige over principles, popularity over morality,” reads the petition. “Whatever may be President Obama’s admirable qualities, this honor comes on the heels of some of the most anti-life actions of any American president, including expanding federal funding for abortions and inviting taxpayer-funded research on stem cells from human embryos.” Within days, tens of thousands of people had signed on.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“Virtually every media story for the first few weeks of this scandal cited our site and our petition,” said Patrick Reilly, the president and founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, in an interview with TWI. “There’s tremendous outpouring of support for the students who are opposing this outrage at Notre Dame. Some of them have said they’ll have nothing to do with Notre Dame if this goes forward.”

After eight years of only occasional disagreements with a Republican president, conservative Catholic activists have moved into the trenches to oppose Obama. They cite his repeal of the Mexico City rule, or “global gag rule” that banned providing federal money to international groups that promote or provide abortions, his stem cell compromise, and his cabinet nominees like Kathleen Sebelius, the pro-choice governor of Kansas, to argue that he is the most pro-abortion rights politician ever to ascend to the job. They are bolstered by new media outlets and organizations that did not exist at their current strength in 2000, the last time Catholics had to contend with a pro-choice president. At the same time, they’re encouraged by a series of high-profile statements from church leaders on political morality–including the 2004 declarations by bishops that they would deny communion to then-presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Pope Benedict XIV’s 2005 speech attacking the “dictatorship of relativism.” A small number of conservative groups, and a more newsworthy group of conservative bishops — 42 so far — are turning the Notre Dame speech into a watershed moment, while obscuring the fact that the president enjoys majority support from Catholics.

Reilly’s efforts have served as a window into the movement. The Cardinal Newman Society is recognized as the key advocate for conservative values at Catholic universities, but it is a relatively small organization. Reilly is one of seven employees of the group, loosely affiliated with the conservative Media Research Center, whose president L. Brent Bozell III serves on the Cardinal Newman Society’s board of directors. According to tax records filed in 2007, the organization runs on less than $1 million per year. The NotreDameScandal site itself is a modest project, using the exact same design, and same stock photos, as the Cardinal Newman Society’s own page. Nonetheless, the effort has put the group in the news and garnered more than 350,000 signatures. It’s bolstered claims that the group represents ersatz Catholic opinion, which wants Obama to cancel his speech and Father John Jenkins, president of the university, to apologize or step aside.

“I haven’t seen polling on this issue,” Reilly said, “but if you see them you have to do some parsing and ask: Are these faithful Catholics who are attending mass and living faithful to Catholic teachings? Among faithful, church-going Catholics there’s been tremendous support for our efforts. A lot of Catholic groups are dealing with the fact that Catholics across the United States have drifted and they need to take a stand.”

By defining the stakes in the Notre Dame fight, conservative Catholics are able to overcome two hurdles–the president’s popularity with Catholics nationally and Notre Dame students in particular. The piece of evidence most often cited to prove the president’s “Catholic problem” is a March 2009 Pew Research poll that revealed a steep drop in the president’s approval numbers among self-identified Catholics since the inauguration. But the poll gave the president a 59-28 favorable rating among all Catholics and a 47-41 rating among white, non-Hispanic Catholics. An April Pew poll gave the president high marks from Catholics on his handling of stem cell research, a decision that involved Catholic advisers. Obama carried Indiana in 2008 by a slim margin that included a win in St. Joseph County — which contains Notre Dame — and a win among Notre Dame students, who also picked Obama over McCain in a pre-election poll .

“Catholics are a diverse group of people,” said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Center for Religion and the Press, explaining the poll. “There’s been a decline in Obama’s numbers that’s not too far out of step with his decline overall. The rest of this, a lot of this, is internal politics between conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics.”

For Deal Hudson, the president of InsideCatholic.com, and a political guru who directed Catholic outreach for President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, that analysis missed the mark. “When you are trying to get the Catholic vote,” he said, “the first thing on the table is getting a speaking engagement at Notre Dame. I know. I’ve been there! The Obama political team did this and, I’m sure, expected some kind of backlash, but nothing like the watershed moment that this has turned into.”

The “watershed moment” has been heavily debated in Catholic magazines and web sites–World, Inside the Vatican, Catholic World News, LifeNews.net, the New Oxford Review–which have flowered over the last few years and which have aggressively covered the Obama decisions that have most upset conservative Catholics. The minor story of Georgetown covering up the monogram “IHS,” meaning “Jesus,” to make room for the staging of an Obama speech, has been aggressively covered. CNSNews.com–which, like the Cardinal Newman Center, is directed by L. Brent Bozell–published an enterprise piece asking whether the president would agree to wear the official robes at Notre Dame, since they are threaded with a prayer.

“Blogs can keep issues alive in a way that wasn’t possible before,” said George Neumayr, the editor of Catholic World Report, a conservative weekly. “The bishops are bombarded with complaints because of of the activity level of blogs and the ease with which people can contact the chancery. A bishop who’s receiving 1,000 messages is more likely to come out and at least make a statement about the most anti-Catholic president in modern history.”

The biggest problem for conservative Catholics has not been getting the Obama speech portrayed in the press as a scandal, but in distancing from some of the people trying to take ownership of the outrage. Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist who converted to Catholicism in 2006, has moved temporarily to South Bend to mount protests against the school. Reilly, Neumayr and others accused Terry of being a trouble-maker and self-promoter whose effort–more than 30 full-time agitators, 50,000 letters to alumni that include postcards depicting dead fetuses, bringing fringe political candidate Alan Keyes to speak, and planning a rumored “alternate commencement for Notre Dame Heroes”–makes them look fringe. In an interview Terry said that American bishops were “directly responsible for Obama’s election” because they hadn’t spoken out against him politically. “The fabric of Notre Dame’s treachery was woven by American bishops,” said Terry, who also called Georgetown University “a house of political harlotry” for allowing Obama and Vice President Biden to speak there.

Terry laughs when the worries of other conservative Catholics are read back to him. “How can they delude themselves to think this war can be won in cyberspace?” he asked. “I always tell people that petitions are no more than a fundraising mechanism to gather your name and raise money from you. They’re scams. For them to say I shouldn’t be on the ground shows they are not culture warriors. If Martin Luther King had taken the advice of the Cardinal Newman Society, black people still be riding in the back of the bus.”

Catholic supporters of the president are trying to weather the storm and dispute the idea that Obama has a “Catholic problem.” Douglas Kmiec, a former Notre Dame professor and constitutional legal counsel to Ronald Reagan who endorsed Obama and published the election tract “Can A Catholic Support Him?” argued that Reagan had been met by protests when he gave his celebrated 1981 commencement speech. “No one thought,” said Kmiec, “that when Reagan came to accept his honorary degree he’d engage in a symposium where a bishop would give him the evangelium vitae on capital punishment, or the early draft of pastoral letter of American bishops on reducing nuclear weapons.”

Kmiec characterized much of the Notre Dame talk as politicized and unrepresentative of what Catholics think, especially the activity of Newt Gingrich, who became a Catholic this year.

“For Newt Gingrich to say, as a latter-day Catholic, that this president has ignored Catholic issues, means that he needs to go back to adult religious education class to learn more deeply about the social justice elements that he probably missed,” Kmiec said. “The notion that this president is not in line with those sentiments is not befitting of the former speaker, who was a former scholar, and who I admire as someone who normally has creative ideas.”

Ultra-conservative Christian talk-radio hosts are taking a new approach to get their message out — ambushing right-wing pundit Ann Coulter for supporting 2008 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Absolutist anti-abortion activists accuse Romney of being “willing to sacrifice children for your vote.”

The Denver-based American Right to Life Action (RTL) leads the charge against Coulter with a YouTube video that shows excerpts of Coulter’s on-air radio freak-outs and calls on the acid-tongued author to apologize and retract her support for Romney,

In typical Coulter fashion, she calls the critics “crazy Romney froofers,” “fanatics” and “on the order of 9-11 conspiracy theorists” before hanging up.

In the timeless words of Nelson Munz: “Ha, ha!”

Read Wendy’s full post here.

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“I’m worried about his views on abortion,” Jake Teshka, a 20-year old from South Bend, Indiana who carried a sign that asked President Obama not to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. “But I’m rooting for America.”

Teshka and three friends have driven straight from South Bend to watch Obama’s inauguration, although Savannah Herms, 15, was disappointed in the way that crowd booed former President Bush. “We were clapping respectfully and people laughed at us. I asked them why; they said because of Katrina. Who cares what the president did? You have to boo him?”

The attitude of Teshka and his friends was the norm: the tone of the March was gritty and beaten, reflecting the fact that, as Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) said, pro-life activists have “had it easy” since 1994. “For fourteen years we’ve either had control of the Congress, or, as over the last two years, a president who could veto pro-abortion legislation.”  Sensenbrenner pledged to stop “all this bad stuff,” like funding of NGOs that fund abortions, and asked the crowd to join a “24-month campaign” with the implied goal of cutting down the Democratic majority.

There were a few tokens of opposition to the president, the most striking of which was a sign that read “Hitler Killed Jews, Obama Kills Babies.” Mostly, there were attempts to co-opt Obama’s popularity. Students for Life passed out purple signs with the message “Yes We Can … Terminate Abortion.” One home-made sign: “Want CHANGE? Create a culture of life in America. Reject FOCA.” Another: “If Obama = CHANGE, Babies = INNOCENCE.” Dozens of marchers co-opted a quote from Pope John Paul II with signs that said that a nation with legal abortion was “a nation without HOPE.”

The religious organizers of the event addressed many of their comments to Obama, some as prayers, some as challenges. One demanded the president stop copying Lincoln by riding trains and instead “sign an Emancipation Proclamation to stop the killing of the babies.” The 24 members of Congress and two senators (Sam Brownback of Kansas and Louisiana’s David Vitter) who addressed the crowd were, generally, just as polite to the new president, with an air of we’ll-get-you-next-time. “We’ve lost an election,” said Brownback. “We haven’t lost the war!”

Or take the speech of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), the man who can’t stop obsessing over Obama’s middle name. “Know the answers to two questions,” he told the crowd. “Do you believe in the sanctity of all human life? Yes is the answer. The next question is, when does life begin?” The crowd shouted “conception,” and King smiled. “The next question is: President Obama, when did your life begin?” The crowd roared, and King passed the mic.