A Book of American Martyrs(2)

Dear God I commend my soul to You. If it is Your will, I will be joined with you in Heaven this very hour.

Bowed my head with shut eyes, and eyes rimmed with tears. For I understood that my (mortal) life as Luther Dunphy had ended, in the asphalt driveway of the Women’s Center on this second day of November 1999. My life as a loving Christian husband and father and a private citizen of Muskegee Falls, Ohio. That I was born in Sandusky, Ohio, on March 6, 1960, and would die now, in this place, seemed to me clear for I had “read” this inscription on a grave marker but the night before. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

In deep prayer they would find me with my arms upraised in the posture of surrender and my hands visible, holding no weapon. Deep-immersed in prayer “as if entranced” but “cooperative” (as it would be reported) as Broome County police officers approached with drawn weapons.

And in my heart I pleaded with the Lord to give me sanctuary with Him in this hour. Pleaded with the Lord, let me make an end of this now. For I will be their captive, and I will be tried in their socialist atheist court of law, that has forsaken You. And I will be jeered at and ridiculed and in the end, in their atheist court I will be sentenced to death. But it will be their way of death which will not be speedy. Truly I understand it will be protracted and shameful and it may be, I will not be strong enough to withstand despair. For a sentence of Death Row will wear away at my soul, in the way that a great abyss is worn out of rock. Pleaded with the Lord in His mercy to allow me to make some threatening gesture to the police upon their arrival, that they would shoot me down where I knelt. That they would execute me in a barrage of bullets that there would be three of us laid lifeless on the asphalt driveway on that morning as a sign to all the world, the abortion butchery must stop.

But the Lord did not give this permission to me, in His inscrutable wisdom. Though the Lord had been close to me as the heart beating in my rib cage now the Lord had withdrawn from me to His mountain, to observe His servant and His soldier in the aftermath of His mission.

And so, I did not die that morning. Instead, the Lord caused a numbness to pass into me, of utter submission. I was handcuffed and taken into the custody of the State of Ohio from which, in my lifetime, I will never be released.





TURNS


A life is a matter of turns. As I call them.

A turn is a sudden surprise. As if your shoulders are gripped from behind and you are forcibly turned to see something hidden to you, until that moment.

A turn, and you are never the same again. “The scales fell from my eyes.” Though all who know you will swear that it is but you whom (they believe) they know.

Ten days before the execution of Voorhees it was “pure chance” that I’d arrived at the Women’s Center several minutes earlier than my usual time of arrival, which is approximately between 7:45 A.M. and 8:00 A.M. But this day, there was less traffic on the highway than usual, it seemed, and so when I arrived and parked in the street, there was but one other protester in front of the Center, who was a familiar face to me, a man of about ten years older than me (I was soon to become thirty-nine), but I did not know his full name only “Stockard”—which might have been his first name, or his surname. There was a look about this man of dignity and determination that made you think he was a man of God but (maybe) a Catholic priest not wearing his priest clothes. Or, as it happens sometimes, a former priest. As I am, not a former minister but a former lay minister in the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus. And we greeted each other like friends, but cautious friends, for I am not one to shake hands and am wary of the “glad-handed” (as they are called), and we fell to talking quietly (as others were arriving, singly and in pairs—we stood a little apart) and he told me that the abortion doctor Voorhees was already inside the Center. Voorhees had arrived before 7:30 A.M. being driven in a van by the “escort” (to his shame, this volunteer at the Broome County Women’s Center was retired U.S. Army Major Timothy Barron, fifty-eight years old) and taken to the rear of the building to park out of sight of the street. The staff (all of them women of whom several are “registered nurses”) employed or volunteering at the Center will arrive before 8:00 A.M. and it is at 8:00 A.M. when the first of the mothers begin to arrive and by then, the police security have arrived, usually between 7:30 A.M. and 7:45 A.M. But this day, the police security (which consists of two Muskegee Falls officers who remain in or near their vehicle unless there is cause for them to approach the Center) did not arrive until 7:51 A.M.

Carefully I asked of my comrade, “Did he mean that the abortion doctor will arrive here sometimes so many minutes before the police guards?”—and Stockard said yes, he believed that was more so lately than it had been.

He said, “Voorhees gets here early so that he can be safe inside before the doors open.”

There was a quiet sort of fury in his uttering of Voorhees.

Voorhees was the (new) director of the Center who had come here in July 1999 from his work as an abortion provider in Michigan. We knew of him that he had long been associated with Planned Parenthood and that he was a medical doctor whose specialty was obstetrics and gynecology. He had come to Muskegee Falls following the resignation of the previous (female) director who had headed the Center for just seven months.

For a brief while, it had seemed possible that the Broome County Women’s Center would be closed down. Our campaign was to discourage and discredit all who were associated with the Center. Some had suggested burning down the Center—(but I was not one of these, at the time). But there came “Augustus Voorhees” whose reputation was such, his name was prominent on the WANTED: BABY KILLERS AMONG US list posted in newsletters including the ARMY OF GOD Sentinel.