A Death in Wichita by Stephen Singular Read Free Book Online Page A

called “combat pay.” He gave pep talks and passed around buttons that read, “Attitude Is Everything.” He created plaques for the “Freedom Fighters” who worked at WHCS.
    “The only requirement for evil to triumph,” he told them, “is for good people to do nothing.”
    The protesters sent pregnant women into Tiller’s office “under cover.” Their job was to look for and find evidence that WHCS had violated some procedure or law—anything that could be used against Tiller in court and cause him to lose his medical license. When that failed, they harassed and boycotted the vendors who showed up at the office—an effective ploy, because these businesses didn’t want to end up on an anti-abortion flyer or, in later years, on a Web site. Tiller’s employees could no longer get a pizza or a bouquet of flowers delivered at work, and even one garbage pick-up service refused to come to WHCS.
    In spite of the constant verbal abuse and almost a thousand clinic bombings that occurred throughout the United States in the 1980s and early ’90s, somehow no human beings were physically harmed. Animals were a different matter.
    Dr. LeRoy Carhart, a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a Republican like Tiller, was one of three abortion providers in Nebraska. On September 6, 1991, the state legislature passed the Nebraska Parental Notification Law, making it mandatory for minors to tell parents or guardians if they intended to get an abortion. That same day arsonists set fire to Carhart’s home, barn, two other buildings, and his vehicles, killing a pair of family pets and seventeen horses. No one was ever prosecuted for the fire, but the next morning Carhart received a note claiming responsibility for the destruction and comparing the deaths of the animals to the “murder of children.” Like Tiller and Hern, Carhart was not easily intimidated. Before the fire, his surgical practice had not focused on abortion—now he began doing them full-time. He’d eventually travel to Wichita and work every third week in Tiller’s clinic.
    If the doctors themselves escaped physical harm, it may have been because of a sense, among abortion opponents, that legal abortion’s days were numbered. In 1988, Randall Terry had started Operation Rescue, an innovative and aggressive anti-abortion group which conducted a number of successful demonstrations at that summer’s Democratic Convention in Atlanta. These helped bolster their fund-raising, giving hope to pro-lifers. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, they assumed, would work to overturn Roe v. Wade . And finally, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, about to be succeeded by another anti-abortion Republican: George H.W. Bush.
    The best days for the anti-abortion movement were just ahead.

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    By the start of the 1990s, Scott Roeder and his anti-government friends in Kansas City were one piece of a growing ideological rebellion in America that still remained on the fringes. Some opposed abortion, others vilified homosexuality, and still others were against the mixing of the races. Many evangelicals believed that the human race was in its “Last Days,” the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and when He arrived, the nations of the world would be swept away in a cleansing fire. Those who’d already achieved salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus would ascend to heaven, while everyone else would be left behind in the mass destruction of earth. These rebellious segments touched one another and shared certain views, and that closeness would only increase with the arrival of the Internet.
    The apocalyptic visionaries and prophets of doom usually had several beliefs in common: America had gone tragically awry with the sexual and racial liberation movements of the 1960s; our state and federal governments not only couldn’t be trusted to fix the country, but were major problems themselves; evil had been