Randall Terry greeted me Feb. 28 with a booming, "We won! We won! We won! Babies will live. Babies will live, yes, because of this decision!"
Terry — who is generally accorded the shorthand description of "founder of Operation Rescue," but is oh so much more — was being a little over the top. But being over the top is what Terry is all about.
The event that ignited his boisterous greeting emanated from the U.S. Supreme Court. After a 20-year legal battle, the justices unanimously agreed that racketeering laws couldn't be used to stop protests at abortion clinics. It was a win on technicalities — whether protests constituted theft or extortion — and in no way addressed the legality of abortion.
Moreover, the lawsuit, National Organization for Women vs. Scheidler, wasn't wildly popular at either end of America's political spectrum. Groups ranging from the religious right to labor unions to civil liberties organizations feared their protests would be the next to be targeted with racketeering litigation.
As Terry effused, "It's a slap at NOW, a massive vindication. We won for all protest groups, all groups that follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr." Whether MLK flinched at being enlisted in Terry's crusade has not been reported from the Pearly Gates.
To understand Randall Terry, you have to parse his proclamation a little. The truth is, Terry didn't win. Shortly before a 1998 trial — which NOW won, only to be undone by last month's Supreme Court ruling — Terry settled with the feminist group and agreed to a sweeping injunction against further protests. Terry next declared bankruptcy — he owed $1.6 million to NOW for fines, legal fees and damages. He said at the time that he wanted to duck paying "those who would use my money to promote the killing of the unborn."
The reason Terry can interpret his personal defeat in the case as a smashing victory is that he is quite clearly a revolutionary. His goals aren't personal. He sees a new, rigidly religious society just over the horizon.
Terry told me 13 years ago that he envisioned replacing our secular government with a "Christian republic," a chilling echo of the call for Islamic republics on the other side of the world.
During his heyday, he was arrested more than 40 times. Among his more memorable escapades, he delivered a fetus to Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic Convention. That earned him five months in the slammer. His most famous quote, uttered in 1993 during the peak of his protests, is a blunt demand for theocracy: "I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good. ... If a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country."
Terry had a rough decade following his humiliation by NOW. He was ousted from Operation Rescue. The group's new leader, Flip Benham, said in 2004 that Terry had "women problems and was not at all repentant." Terry had divorced his wife of 19 years and married his current spouse, Andrea. Two daughters from his first marriage gave birth to children out of wedlock, and one of the young women converted to Islam.
Perhaps the biggest slap came from Terry's adopted son, Jamiel, who in 2004 announced he was gay and proclaimed his homosexuality in Out magazine. Terry, who has said gays should be executed, disowned Jamiel. "Repugnant," Terry says of his son's sexual orientation.
The irrepressible activist got his first taste of electoral politics in 1998, running for a New York congressional seat. Although he raised considerable funds, his platform of abolishing Social Security and outlawing gays and abortion earned him a landslide defeat.
And, if all of that wasn't sufficient tribulation for God's self-appointed champion, there were more money problems. He garnered criticism for soliciting donations, ostensibly to fund the Lord's work, and then buying a $432,000 home near Jacksonville. His ex-wife claimed he was a deadbeat when it came to child support.
But things are perking up for Terry. A few days before the Supreme Court decision, there had been another victory for the religious right. South Dakota's Legislature had passed the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation. The law, which would ban abortion except in cases where the mother's life is in danger, was crafted expressly to challenge the 33-year-old Roe vs. Wade.
"The South Dakota Legislature had the brains and the backbone to do the right thing," Terry says. "Let the defenders of life stand calm and firm. Let the advocates of death howl and wail. In the end, the truth will prevail."
Georgia's Legislature has joined the anti-abortion frenzy, pushing along its own abortion restrictions, which seem destined to pass before the General Assembly session ends this month.
If the South Dakota and Supreme Court events weren't enough to brighten his day, Terry was buoyant about a campaign to win a seat in the Florida Senate.
"I just can't tell you how good we feel about" polling results, he said. "They are better than I could have ever believed. God is with us on this one."
God was hanging around — at least, according to Terry — the last time I spoke to the firebrand. That was in Melbourne in 1993, and he was flush with the excitement of a series of nationwide anti-abortion protests.
During the long drought of setbacks, Terry said he never lost that optimism, that he was being "toughened" for the next round. While waiting for his next epiphany, he cut a country music album, Dark Sunglasses Day.
His second climb to religious super-stardom began haltingly in 2003 after the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws — or, as Terry put it, the "twisted six" justices in the court's majority "said that homosexual perversions are a liberty." Terry formed a new group dubbed the Society for Truth and Justice and called for rallies against the decision. Few heeded the call.
But then came manna from heaven, in the form of the sorta-kinda dead Terri Schiavo. Her parents hired Terry as their spokesman. He became the always-in-front-of-the-cameras ringmaster at the Pinellas Park circus outside the nursing home where, almost a year ago, Schiavo completely, totally died.
The celebrity status prompted a new attempt to win elected office. Jim King, the Republican state Senate incumbent where Terry lives near Jacksonville, is the definition of "moderate." He led opposition to "Terri's Law," which would have kept Schiavo on life support. King, a former Senate president, appointed Democrats to chairmanships, opposed the GOP gospel of tort reform, and — worst of all — is pro-choice. "He's a Republican in name only, a RINO," Terry sneers.
Now, at 46, Terry is less prickly than when he was throwing himself in front of women entering abortion clinics. He's trying to tone down the theocracy lingo. "When people call us theocrats, well, that's a paranoid group that has tried to portray the religious right as some sort of bizarre phenomenon, a threat to America," he says. "In reality, the religious right is the political heir to the people who founded this country."
Terry pauses, assessing that line of thought, and adds: "We're winning. There's no doubt of that. The nation is drifting, sometimes stumbling to the right. But the direction we're going is clear. Heck, the people of the 1960s who led the sexual revolution are now telling their kids to keep their clothes on."
Senior Editor John Sugg — who didn't keep his clothes on during the 1960s — can be reached at [email protected]. His blog is at www.johnsugg.com.
