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The Washington Post published a big profile of anti-choice leader Randall Terry today, and it's positively sickening in its whitewashing of his history. The first part of the article languidly dwells on what a theatrical maestro of the antiabortion movement Terry is, spends three paragraphs on his personal life, a few paragraphs on how modern antiabortion leaders consider him a hasbeen, and then dedicates an extended portion to his big comeback, describing Terry's physique, his clothes, his home work-out space, the projects he's pitching, and his media strategy, and finishes with eight paragraphs describing the inaugural meeting of the new iteration of his Operation Rescue, "Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex." Terry's intimate association with the exhortation of violence against abortion doctors and his extended history of harassment are all but absent from the article, and the years during which Operation Rescue was most active—when members "chained themselves to the actual medical equipment used to perform abortions" and "shoved themselves into the faces of pregnant women on their way into [clinics], screaming 'Mommy, Mommy, don't kill me!'"—are described as "Operation Rescue's glory days." I am truly appalled that the WaPo would run what is essentially a fluff piece on Randall Terry, actively helping resurrect his career. The man is a fucking terrorist. Are the editors over there worried there won't be anything left to write about if there isn't an incessant and constantly escalating abortion battle in this country? Are the lives of the people hurt—the doctors murdered, the clinic staff endangered, the patients harassed and threatened—by people like and/or associated with Terry so insignificant, their value totally contingent on their newsworthiness as targets, that the WaPo would actually aid Terry in a comeback? Gobsmackingly irresponsible.
 Contact the Washington Post's ombudsman.
Melissa McEwan writes and edits the blog Shakespeare's Sister. |
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