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289 pages

English

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Joseph M. Scheidler has fought for the unborn since the Supreme Court allowed abortion on demand with its 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton rulings. He was the target of a lawsuit brought by the National Organization for Women under federal racketeering laws. Found guilty in 1998, Scheidler triumphed twice in appeals before the Supreme Court in 2003 and again in 2006. Racketeer for Life explains how a former Benedictine monk and journalism professor was drawn into pro-life activism and describes his part in the history of the pro-life movement in the United States. Conversations, protests, and battles with clinic directors, doctors, politicians, judges, media personalities, and even other pro-lifers are woven together in this engaging account of the efforts of Scheidler and other activists to publicize the horrors of abortion, influence legislation, and, ultimately, to save lives.

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Philosophie et théologie

Catholic Church

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	24 avril 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781618908513
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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RACKETEER FOR LIFE
Fighting the Culture of Death from the Sidewalk to the Supreme Court
A MEMOIR BY JOSEPH M. SCHEIDLER WITH PETER M. SCHEIDLER

EDITED BY JOHN F. BRICK
TAN Books
Charlotte, North Carolina
© 2016 Joseph M. Scheidler
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The following is a memoir. To protect the privacy of certain nonpublic figures, in some cases, names have been changed, slightly altered, or surnames not given.
Cover design by Caroline Kiser
ISBN: 978-1-61890-850-6
e-ISBN: 978-1-61890-851-3
Published in the United States by
TAN Books
PO Box 410487
Charlotte, North Carolina
www.TANBooks.com Printed and bound in the United States of America -->
To my wife, Ann, who led me into the pro-life movement, and for Monica, who gave me hope in the darkest hours of the battle
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations
Author’s Note
1. Sorry I Missed You
2. A Calling
3. Raw Judicial Power
4. Going Full Time
5. God So Loved the World
6. Give Us Barabbas
7. Principles and Protests
8. Ten Thousand Words
9. Right-Wing Bigots
10. Your Name’s a Lie
11. The Abortionists
12. The Plank
13. Nominations
14. The Machine
15. The Tribunals
16. Hail to the Chiefs
17. Have a Blast
18. The House Hearings on Clinic Violence
19. Rescue Those Being Led to Slaughter
20. Extradition
21. Go Forth and Teach
22. These Tactics of Yours
23. A Global Cause
24. Sacrilege
25. The Pro-Life Mafia
26. The Seamless Garment
27. To Bury the Dead
28. Vengeance Is Not Ours
29. The Road to Damascus
30. Ora et Labora
31. Tidings of Great Joy
32. The Pro-Life Family
33. Decisions, Decisions
34. Conspiracy Theory
35. Perjury
36. Defense
37. Judgment
38. Passing the Torch
Timeline
Acknowledgments
Index
Photos
ABBREVIATIONS

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
American Law Institute (ALI)
Americans United for Life (AUL)
Chicago Transit Authority (CTA)
Clergy Consultation Service (CCS)
Delaware Women’s Health Organization (DWHO)
Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE)
Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA)
Friends for Life (FFL)
Illinois Right to Life Committee (IRLC)
Indiana University (IU)
Knights of Columbus (K of C)
Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
National Abortion Federation (NAF)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL)
National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB)
National Organization for Women (NOW)
National Right to Life Committee (NRLC)
Officer of the Day (OD)
People Expressing a Concern for Everyone (PEACE)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
Pro-Life Action Network (PLAN)
Pro-Life Nonviolent Action Project (PNAP)
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO)
Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights (RCAR)
Single European Act (SEA)
Society for the Preservation of the Unborn Child (SPUC)
Southern Illinois University (SIU)
United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
US Catholic Conference (USCC)
Women Exploited By Abortion (WEBA)
AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the way I remember it—the more than four decades of legal abortion and the fifty years of moral decay that led to the January 22, 1973, disasters known as Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton . This is the way I remember the early years that prepared me for the raging battle to save the lives of the unborn. It is, of course, an abridged history, but it is filled with my memories of the fight against abortion and the effort to turn our national culture away from the ugly, violent narcissism that makes legalized abortion possible. This is the way I remember the people I worked with and planned with and went to jail with. This is the way I remember the enemy we are still fighting.
Our office in Chicago is filled with files upon files from decades of work—old newspapers, flyers, news bulletins, press releases, court transcripts, and photographs. I used all the tools at my disposal to check, double-check, and recheck my facts to tell the most accurate story I could. I read through more than forty of my personal diaries. I reviewed more than six thousand transcripts of my hotlines—daily recorded phone messages each a few minutes long. I pored over back issues of our Action News monthly, reread old newspapers and magazines, studied volumes of court documents, interviewed scores of activists and friends, and viewed miles of taped news reports and video footage of our activities. I gave a dozen drafts of my manuscripts to people who were also there, to find out what they remembered.
But memory is a funny thing. It takes impressions of the stories we find ourselves a part of, like metal in soft wax. Our memories hold the shape of things that were, but they can’t capture the things themselves. While researching my own past for this book, I’ve often been surprised at what I’d forgotten, or that what happened wasn’t quite the way I remembered it. Everything in this book is as accurate as I could make it, with the help and dedicated diligence of my wife, Ann, and my son Peter.
But this is still a memoir. It is my memoir: my recollections, my reflections, my impressions, my own story in a vast and intricate history.
Now I invite you to join me on my journey.
Yours for life,
Joseph M. Scheidler
National Director
Pro-Life Action League
C HAPTER 1
Sorry I Missed You

I n the spring of 1987, I was in northern California to meet with local and national pro-life leaders and to speak at a rally. Early one morning, before the meetings began, I visited the newest branch of the Feminist Women’s Health Centers, a clinic in Redding. I hoped to talk with the new administrator there, but the clinic was closed, its windows dark and the door locked. I flipped over one of my Pro-Life Action League business cards and wrote, “Sorry I missed you.” I signed my initials—JMS—and wedged it in the door.
I met with the leaders and spoke at the rally, but I wasn’t able to stop back at the clinic before I left town. But I did see that business card again—eleven years later in federal court. It was March 1998, and I was on trial in downtown Chicago for violating federal racketeering laws. In the first week of a seven-week trial, that card was displayed for jurors on a screen as big as a billboard, while Dido Hasper, founder of the Feminist Women’s Health Center, testified to being scared when she arrived at her Redding clinic and found my card. The plaintiffs alleged that my card constituted a death threat, part of a pattern of conspiracy and extortion against the nation’s abortion providers and their clients.
Early in my activist career, I regularly visited abortion clinics, asking to speak with the physician or the administrator, hoping to learn why they got into the business and to try to talk them out of it. Over time, I realized that many are not happy—abortion is a grisly line of work. Some abortion providers responded to an outsider’s concern. I tried to persuade them to use their talents to build up society, not add to its many miseries. Strange as it seems, I’ve seen people quit the business after a compassionate encounter with a pro-lifer, some even right on the spot.
As I sat in that courtroom, seeing my card on that screen and trying to puzzle out how my message could be read as a death threat, I found myself wondering how I wound up there. How did a guy from Hartford City, Indiana, population seven thousand, end up a defendant in a federal racketeering trial? Chicago has a long history of mob bosses. But me? I didn’t know the first thing about running a national crime syndicate. But here I was, sitting in the Dirksen Federal Building at the defendant’s table, watching a jury study my handwriting, and hearing my life’s work described as a wild, decades-long crime spree.
This is how it happened. In 1973, when the Supreme Court’s abortion rulings were announced, I was working as an account executive with a public relations firm in Chicago. Within a few months, I’d left that job to work full time on the pro-life cause, some on my own and some part-time with the Illinois Right to Life Committee (IRLC). By January 1974, I was working as the director of the IRLC.
In those early days, most pro-lifers thought lobbying and debating were the best place for the movement’s energies. I believed in direct action, and I eventually had to found my own group, the Pro-Life Action League, for like-minded activists. There was no manual for how to be a pro-life activist. We tried a variety of tactics to save lives and to keep the issue before the American public.
After more than a decade of trying different approaches, learning what worked and what didn’t, adjusting our strategies against stifling pro-abortion campaigns, other pro-life groups started asking how to implement some of our tactics. So in 1985, I published CLOSED: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion . Most of the 99 Ways were techniques I’d tried myself. Some I’d only heard of, and a few were ideas that nobody had tried yet. The title font looked like stencils, the sort of thing you might see spray painted on a shuttered storefront. The idea was to expose the macabre realities of the abortion industry, to educate readers about the lives of the unborn, and to offer tangible, practical alternatives for unplanned and unwanted children. If we could take away clinics’ customers, we would drive clinics out of business.
When CLOSED was published, my father-in-law, an attorney, recommended I place my home in a land trust in case I was sued. I took his advice. A year later, when I was picketing the National Abortion Federation (NAF) convention in Kansas City, a man emerged from the hotel, picked me out of the sma