A Book of American Martyrs(33)

Yet now, it was clear that God had been guiding me then. Like one who is blindfolded, led by another’s hand in utter trust and faithfulness.

I would feel a thrill of pride, I thought, that one day the distinguished Professor Wohlman would project a photograph of Luther Dunphy up on a screen, and speak admiringly of me to a large audience as a martyr in the cause.

I had not the slightest doubt that I would be arrested, and tried for murder, if I was successful in my mission. As others before me had done, most recently Terence Mitchell who’d been tried and found guilty, sentenced to prison in northern Wisconsin without the possibility of parole.

Pray for our brave martyrs, and pray for ourselves, that we have the strength to act as we must, when we must.

I was not a brave or courageous soldier for the cause. At meetings of Operation Rescue, I sat silent and downlooking while others spoke with passion. At all times since Stockard had confided in me I was very frightened and could not cease hoping that the Lord would change His plans for me and release me back into my ordinary life.

Your own daughter, the murderer would strike in her mother’s womb if he had been able.

Sometimes it seemed, when my mind was tired and confused, in the worst hours of the night, that our beloved Daphne had been struck down on the highway by the abortionist-murderers and not by an unknown driver of a pickup truck. (And in my mind it had come to seem that the pickup truck had struck my car, or that my car had slammed into the pickup.) And so it seemed, executing the abortionist-murderer Voorhees was intended by God as a way of exacting justice for our daughter.

Another time it seemed to me, I felt the touch of the Little Hand on my arm; and when I opened my eyes to see—(for I was half-asleep with tiredness)—it was but a memory of Daphne as a little girl, clutching at my arm—Dad-dee!

Many days had passed as in a trance. Since Stockard had confided in me that the abortion doctor had now the custom of arriving early at the Center, before the police guards. For there seemed no refutation of that—why otherwise would God have sent me such information? Other signs had been sent to me, I could not equally deny. Three nights ago on The Tom McCarthy Hour which Edna Mae and I sometimes watch together there was a fierce discussion of “the shame and outrage” of abortion and pictures of “abortionist-murderers” were displayed on the screen—six faces and names known to me from the WANTED: BABY KILLERS AMONG US list, and among these Augustus Voorhees.

It was a surprise to see this. On the TV screen Voorhees looked like any other man. It was shocking to me, you would not pick him out in the street to be an emissary of Satan.

In the set of his features Voorhees reminded me of one of the roofers in our crew who was always cheerful, or tried to give that impression. Always he called to me—Luth! How’s it going, man?—as if he did not expect an answer beyond a smile and a shrug, that was enough for him. Voorhees was somewhat older than Sam, at age forty-six. In the picture Voorhees was frowning, and serious, and had a look (it seemed to me) of sadness, and guilt.

I felt a stir of excitement, and terrible unease. Recalling my reluctance as a boy to pull the trigger, sighting a deer in the scope of my rifle, while my uncle and others chided me for my slowness.

On TV Tom McCarthy was furious. His uplifted voice seemed to be aimed at me. Baby killers he was saying. Outrage, slaughter of innocents. Abortion-mill clinics, Planned Parenthood spreading promiscuity . . . It was not surprising, he said, that Christians were beginning to rise up to strike at the enemy, not just to picket and protest outside the abortion clinics but to take more courageous means.

Carefully, Tom McCarthy did not utter the words assassination, execution. He did not utter the words soldier, Army of God, Operation Rescue.

With mock mourning Tom McCarthy spoke of an abortion provider who’d been shot down in Kentucky six weeks before, by a man named Shaun Harris—“Think of it this way: the doctor wasn’t killed, only just terminated in the third trimester.”

Now a picture of Shaun Harris appeared on the screen. He was a solid-bodied man of about forty with a rifle gripped in his right hand, the stock resting on his thigh and the barrel aimed upward.

Then, in quick succession photographs of Michael Griffin, Lionel Greene, and Terence Mitchell.

Each of the photographs had been taken outdoors. The men were unsmiling, grim, squinting into the sun. Griffin was bare-headed, the others wore work hats. Tom McCarthy reported that all were serving life sentences in maximum security prisons.

He went on to speak of Harris, Griffin, Greene, and Mitchell as soldiers in an undeclared war. While he did not openly condone their civil disobedience (he said) yet it was clear that he admired them, very much.

“It’s a pathetic, cowardly pseudo-socialist country in which the heroic men who take the moral law into their own hands are ‘murderers’ while cold-blooded ‘murderers’ are—your friendly local ‘abortion-providers.’”

Tom McCarthy spoke with a sneer. I felt a thrill of hope, that McCarthy might one day approve of me.

But now there came onto the screen a picture of a rose-colored gravestone that had been purchased by the Pro-Life Action League of Simcoe, Illinois, and placed in a cemetery there, to commemorate the deaths of more than seven hundred babies “made to perish” by abortion in a single year—

HOLY INNOCENTS

PREBORN CHILDREN OF GOD

Jan. 1–Dec. 31, 1997

When the TV shifted to an advertisement I felt great relief. Edna Mae had been staring at the screen, and at the gravestone, with a quivering intensity.