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Courageously
continuing to speak
out: June Barrett
TALKING FEMINIST
Confronting the Antis
in Pensacola
Anti-abortion leader and former
Ku Klux Klan member John Burt
and two of his associates called a
press conference on the steps of the
Pensacola courthouse two days
after the July 29 murders of Dr.
John Bayard Britton and [ames
Barrett.The press conference didn't
go down as planned.
Members of Refuse & Resist!
from Atlanta, Minneapolis, New
Orleans, and New York City and
the San Francisco area's Bay Area
Coalition tor Our Reproductive
Rights (BACORR) flew to Pensacola
the day after the murders.
Both organizations have been on
the front lines of clinic defense for many years and
are founding members of the new national Fightback
Network of militant abortion-rights activists.
Burt has a long history of vicious attacks against
Pensacola's clinics and ongoing harassment of clinic
staff and women seeking abortions. He purchased a
small strip of land around The Ladies Center on
which he erected scaffolding. He and his crew
stand on the scaffolding and yell over the clinic's
fence at the arriving staff and clients. He also was
leading a demonstration outside the Pensacola
Medical Services Clinic when Dr. David Gunn was
shot outside the back entrance on March 10, 1993.
Gunn's killer. Michael Griffin, was a member of
By Mary Lou Qreenberg
Burt's kescue America organization, and Burt set
up a defense fund for him.
The day of Burt's press conference we appeared
at the courthouse first, holding a large banner that
read "No Fear! No Silence! Defend Abortion
Providers by Any Means Necessary!" No sooner
had Burt begun to read a statement than chants of
"John Burt and the KKK/Use the same tactics to
get their way!" drowned him out.
I was standing near a Pensacola woman who had
come to see what Burt was up to. She had had an
abortion herself and was furious at what he had
done through the years and how he was trying to
present himself now. "I'd like to shut him up," she
told me. "Do it," I encouraged her, and she began
shouting, "murderer, murderer!"
Burt and his cronies, visibly shaken at all this
opposition, began to leave, but the activist crew followed
him down the street, chanting "murderer"
right in his face and shaking their fists at him. The
action was prominently covered in the local media,
with one station reporting that Burt had been "run
out of town."
Later, I learned that this was the first time anyone
had directly confronted Burt. Pensacola is not the
only city where extreme reactionary violence has
been directed at abortion providers. But a combination
of circumstances, including a concentration
of backward bible-belt fundamentalists and a history
of KKK activity, has made it a particularly sharp
battleground. The city's abor- (continued on page >0)
Christ and their own salvation. The
fetuses are "innocent" and must be
protected at all costs against the barbarian
hordes who so casually annihilate
them. In this situation, these anti-abortion
"crusaders" are slashing and burning
their way to God's City on the
Hill, killing the infidels in their path.
God's word is the theory. Killing doctors,
bombing clinics, and harassing
women is the practice.
Holding the "moral" white banner
in defense of "innocent human life" as
a positive value in comparison with the
"pro-death" forces who allow women
the right to control their own bodies
has created an environment in which
people like the Rev. David C. Trosch
say to The New York Times (on August
24, 1994) that it would not trouble his
conscience if he learned that someone
had actually killed an abortion doctor:
"You're comparing the lives of morally
guilty persons against the lives of manifestly
innocent persons."
A few days after the murder of Dr.
Britton, Cardinal O'Connor of New
York, who had recently appeared on
the front page of the New York Post
threatening to go to jail in an act of
civil disobedience if abortion was
included in a national health-care
package, issued a passionate statement
to The New York Times on August 6. "If
anyone has an urge to kill an abortionist,
let him kill me instead. That's about
as clearly as I can renounce such madness,"
the cardinal proclaimed. The fact
that O'Connor had deflected a bullet
to himself rather than disarming his
anti-choice rhetoric was in character.
He was not condemning violence per
se, merely asking for a change of
venue!
Meanwhile, what we get from the
media is the kind of sports mentality
that views everything in neatly competitive
categories: Right to Life 2, Pro-
Choice 0. Cable channel New York 1,
for example, wanted me to "debate"
two right-to-lifers on the "issue" of
whether or not murdering doctors was
"justifiable homicide." I declined, telling
them that this was like asking the SS
guards at Auschwitz to debate the
inmates on the "issue" of the efficacy of
(continued on page 49)
ON THE ISSUES WINTER 1995