Abortion under siege in Mississippi
Preaching that abortion is as evil as Islam, Nazism and homosexuality, dozens of activists have descended on Jackson, determined to shut down the state's last abortion clinic.
By Michelle Goldberg
Read more: Abortion, Politics, Michelle Goldberg, Mississippi, News
Aug. 1, 2006 | JACKSON, Miss. -- Flip Benham was going to burn a Koran at Mississippi's state Capitol on July 18 but he couldn't get a fire permit. The blaze was to be the culmination of an antiabortion rally that Benham, director of Operation Save America, billed as an "ecclesiastical court." His attack on Islam might seem like a non sequitur, but to Benham, it made perfect sense. "Islam is the same thing as abortion and homosexuality," he said. "It's the black-colored glove covering the same fist, which is the fist of the devil." Benham had T-shirts made up, black with white lettering, proclaiming, "Homosexuality Is Sin! Islam Is a Lie! Abortion Is Murder! Some Issues Are Just Black and White!"
About 100 people gathered for the rally in the vicious heat, many of them, from huge-bellied men to toddlers, wearing Benham's T-shirts. It was three days into Operation Save America's weeklong siege of the Jackson Women's Health Organization, the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. From July 15 to July 22, protesters -- sometimes a few dozen, sometimes more than 100 -- surrounded the clinic, an off-white stucco building ringed by a metal gate, hoisting photos of aborted fetuses blown up to the size of 4-year-olds. The clinic brought in McCoy Faulkner, a security expert who specializes in violence against abortion providers. It changed its hours to deal with the onslaught, scheduling some appointments before 6 a.m. so patients could dodge the horde of demonstrators who converged a few hours later. Still, even at dawn, women had to brave a gantlet of shouting people.
At the Capitol, demonstrators formed two makeshift walls with huge signs that juxtaposed photos of aborted fetuses with lynching victims and corpses piled up at Nazi death camps. Behind them rose a statue -- a monument honoring Confederate women -- of garlanded ladies succoring a fallen man. Organizers set up speakers and played the kind of celestial music that signifies heaven in Hollywood movies, lending the proceedings a kitschy intensity. Standing before the assembly, Benham, a sturdy Texan with sun-cured skin, short brown hair, and the hearty manner of a high school football coach, cried out, "What is happening in Jackson today is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany!"
To Benham, waiting for a new Supreme Court justice to overturn Roe v. Wade is like being a German who heard and saw nothing. Impatient for change, he and his followers are determined to make Roe functionally irrelevant -- the right to an abortion doesn't mean much if women can't exercise it. In their struggle, they've made the Jackson Women's Health Organization their ground zero. Theyre convinced that if they can close down the last abortion clinic in the state, where abortion rights already hang by a political thread, their crusade will gain momentum across the country. On July 30, another antiabortion group, Oh Saratoga, based in upstate New York, commenced its own seven days of protests in Jackson. Its Web site promises to bring a "summer tsunami against that states final 'abortuary.'"
"We're not waiting for the president, we're not waiting for the Congress, we're not waiting for the Supreme Court," Benham told me a few days before the rally. "This issue can't be won from the top down." At Benham's side for much of the week was Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, who since 1995 has been an evangelical antiabortion activist. "It would really please the Lord God if Mississippi becomes the first abortion-free state," she said, as she stood in front of the Jackson Women's Health Organization one scorched morning. "Then all he'd have to worry about are the other 49." She happily reeled off the names of states where abortion bans have been introduced or passed: "South Dakota, Ohio, Louisiana"
Benham's "ecclesiastical court," a ritualized indictment of the Supreme Court for breaching God's law, dramatized his contempt for the current legal regime. Before him sat a small grill like the kind football fans use at tailgate parties; he asked the two dozen or so children in attendance to gather around it.
One by one, as Elysian hymns poured from the speakers, Benham produced the texts of objectionable Supreme Court decisions. He started with 1947's Everson v. Board of Education, the case where Justice Hugo Black wrote, "In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between Church and State." He went on to decisions outlawing school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. As each decision was introduced, a man sounded a shofar. Benham shouted denunciations and asked the kids to rip up the pages and throw them onto the grill. Someone pounded a bass drum.
"There's coming a time when it might cost you your life to stand up for King Jesus," Benham told the children. "It is our prayer that if you go down, you go down standing up in the name of Jesus."
When Benham got to Roe v. Wade, he summoned McCorvey, a short woman with curly brown hair, dressed in a violet T-shirt and shorts. She and Benham go way back. He opened Operation Rescue's national headquarters next to the abortion clinic where she worked; he gradually won her over during her smoking breaks. In 1995, Benham baptized her in a backyard swimming pool in Dallas. At the Capitol, he handed her the pages of the decision bearing her alias and she ripped it up, telling the crowd, "You're so beautiful. I'm so sorry for what I did."
"We love you, Miss Norma," Benham said. He continued with his excoriations, condemning 1993's Planned Parenthood v. Casey and 2003's Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down the state's anti-sodomy law. "Lawrence versus Texas did away with all 4,000 years of historical law," he said. "It does away with everything the Bible says!"
Benham then produced a rainbow gay flag. As he lamented the way homosexuals "stole the colors of the rainbow," several men in attendance grabbed pieces of it and ripped it to shreds. Then he held up a paperback copy of the Koran and said, "We have one more issue that we must deal with. With this issue we have three choices. We can either kill them, be killed by them, or we can convert them to Christ." Several cheers went up in the crowd, and then, after several more minutes of preaching, Benham began to tear the Koran apart. He offered pieces of the book to the men in the crowd -- hands seemed to reach out from all directions to take them -- and they destroyed the pages further, throwing the scraps onto the grill.
Rows of cops were standing behind him, ready to move the moment they saw an illegal spark. Evidently, Benham didn't want to go to jail that day, so he waited until the evening, when the group held its regular meeting at the Making Jesus Real Church in the nearby town of Pearl. The Operation Save America members put the grill in the church parking lot. McCorvey struck the match that burned the shredded symbols.
Next page: "You don't mess with a ghetto person and think they're going to back down"