Rutherford speech draws parallels between abortion, mass murder

Dr. George Tiller, the recently murdered doctor who performed late-term abortions, will be remembered with the same contempt held for the Nazis, pro-life activist Randall Terry said in a speech to about 30 interns and staff at the Rutherford Institute.

“George Tiller was a mass murderer,” Terry said. “[He] horrifically reaped what he sowed.”

In his speech titled “Obama, Abortion and the Notre Dame Protests,” Terry also compared himself with abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. The speech was the first of the Charlottesville institute’s 2009 Summer Speaker Series. British attorney John Beckett spoke about hate-crime laws to a crowd of about 40, with 10 or so people arriving after Terry’s speech.

Terry, who became famous by chaining himself to hospital beds and displaying pictures of dead fetuses as founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, most recently gained national media attention by calling Tiller a mass murderer the day he was shot to death in his church. Terry has been arrested nearly 50 times by his count, most recently during his protest of President Barack Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame University. Terry also said he has made two albums in Nashville.

During his speech, Terry likened Tiller’s killer to Nat Turner, a slave who led the deadliest rebellion in the antebellum South.

Terry went on to say that doctors who perform abortions and women who get them are “cut from the same cloth as the mass murderers of history.” He spoke out against diversity and multicultural programs at colleges, saying the programs teach students what to think rather than how to think.

Some in the audience thought that Terry was putting himself in an unassailable position by aligning himself with people such as Garrison and Martin Luther King Jr. – whom he considers a mentor – while likening his opponents to slave owners and Nazis.

Sean Petterson, an intern at the Rutherford Institute, considered this a political and rhetorical ploy.

“[Terry] knows what he’s doing,” Petterson said. “[But] it’s unfair to judge a movement by its radical fringe.”

During the question-and-answer portion of his talk, Terry compared the pro-life movement to the Boston Tea Party, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the end of child labor and the end of segregation. Using this historical backdrop, Terry went on to say that he used these movements to justify his methods of using incendiary rhetoric and shocking images.

Terry did, however, express regret that Tiller did not have time to “prepare his soul to meet his maker.”

Beckett discussed hate-crime law and what he thinks is the law’s inherent problem. Beckett said that hate-crime laws levy a greater penalty for the same crime based solely on the purported idea behind it. A motive is often difficult to ascertain and the law defining what makes a crime a hate crime is vague, he said.

The other problem with hate-crime laws, Beckett said, is that politicians promote the laws and create new ones after incidents to increase their popularity with the electorate without upsetting lobbyists or their constituents.

Terry’s question-and-answer session was interrupted by a sudden commotion. It was later learned that the wife of John W. Whitehead, the conservative institute’s founder, had collapsed upstairs from where the speech was taking place and subsequently died. Further information was unavailable late Wednesday.

Jason Bacaj is a staff writer for the Daily Progress in Charlottesville.