ARTICLES

They Don't Have to Like Me

Martin Luther King Wasn't Subtle, Either

By Robert Kumpel

At 6:15 a.m. in an industrial park near the center of Los Angeles County, a plain-looking warehouse is unlocked. Beyond the iron gates and surveillance camera, another iron gate leads to a truck yard, which leads to the giant doors. Inside, the trucks are warmed up. A few more people show up. Some are staff, some are volunteers, and two of them are off-duty police officers that will escort the trucks. The reason for all the security is apparent when you look at the trucks. Photographs of aborted fetuses are blown up to billboard size on each side of every truck bed. Over the photos is the word 'choice' in quotation marks and a web address. Some of the 8-10-week unborn babies are juxtaposed with a dime. Every working day, five days a week, since June, drivers of these trucks have plied the freeways of Los Angeles for three hours of morning traffic. The organizer plans to bring the trucks to the Bay Area the first two weeks in November.

A project planned for years, the trucks are the latest weapon used by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a nonprofit pro-life group. Its founder and director, Greg Cunningham, briefs the crew before leaving on today's run. On large map, he describes his plan for what freeways they will cover. Today is a loop that begins on the 605 North to 60 East to 57 North, to 210 West to 134 West, to 405 South to the 10 East to 5 South and back to 605 South. "We will drive this loop ad nauseum -- that is, until every driver that has seen us is nauseated!" The session ends with a brief prayer. At 6:40, everyone boards the trucks. Everyone who rides wears a 50 pound bullet-proof SWAT vest with steel panels on all four sides of the torso. Each vest has pepper spray in its pocket. Helmets are located under the seats. Cunningham explains, "The California Highway Patrol turned down our application to armor-plate the cabs. Yet you can buy a bulletproof Mercedes or BMW just by placing the order. We are being victimized by content-based discrimination. That's a case we could win in court if we ever get around to filing a lawsuit. The windows are not bulletproof, but they are coated with mylar film, which can stop a brick. Nobody is every going to pull us out of a truck and do to us what Reginald Denny had done to him by Damien Williams. We don't put our people in harm's way for the purpose of getting beaten up."

As the trip begins, the police car follows the truck convoy, keeping lanes clear behind them and making sure no one can stalk the convoy upon return to the warehouse. The security car and the trucks are equipped with video cameras that document activity on each trip. Each member of the convoy communicates by radio. "Violence against pro-lifers is under-reported because a lot of pro-life activists just don't think the police will do anything about it. And frequently they won't do anything about it. It's harder to get district attorneys to prosecute it and it's harder to get judges to find people guilty for it or penalize them significantly. A judge is more likely to shrug off an assault against a pro-lifer, but a bogus allegation of an assault against a pro-abort is likely to land a pro-lifer in jail."

During the early part of the trip, the trucks are going against the commute. Stalled traffic on the other side of Highway 60 cannot miss the message on each truck. The trucks move at 45 mph, the minimum legal speed on California's highways. As he drives, Cunningham explains their mission. "The truck campaign is an outgrowth of the Genocide Awareness Project, which involves the display of large photo murals out of doors on large university campuses. We've now been on 33 public campuses all over the country, setting up the murals outside of student unions and what have you. Probably three quarters of a million students have seen these pictures now. That project was the result of a fairly sophisticated analysis we've done on the history of social reform, looking for the unchanging principles of social reform, going back 150 years or more. We've examined every movement from the abolition of child labor, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, etc. "Successful social reformers invariably used horrifying pictures to dramatize injustice. Those pictures were then used to confront the culture and prick the collective conscience. But since the reformers were social liberals, they found sympathetic allies in the press, who would publish and broadcast these photos. If we were to apply these principles to pro-life activism, we could only do so up to the point that we had to rely on the press. Clearly, the press, if not hostile, is certainly not sympathetic to our point of view. So we had to come up with a new mass medium, a way of putting these pictures into the heads of people who are never going to see them on television or in newspapers or magazines or billboards. It occurred to us that the freeway system is this multi-billion dollar complex designed and built for transportation, but could be appropriated for educational purposes. Commutes are getting longer and freeways are getting more crowded each year and you basically have a captive audience of people who can't change the channel and can't turn the page when they see us."

Cunningham continued, "When I've done talk radio and I am asked a question, two or three words into my answers, everyone starts shouting me down. When I was on the Leslie Marshall show, she got so angry with me that she hung up on me. When I was on the Brian Whittaker show, I was supposed to come on at six in the evening, he kept me on hold until six-thirty, just beating the heck out of us, criticizing, misstating facts and taking hostile calls, not letting me off of hold into the conversation, so I finally hung up. Without realizing it, these talk show hosts who are so vehemently opposed to the truck project are making our point, which is, you can't hang up on the trucks. You can't put them on hold and you can't shout them down. We're not going to get a fair shake from most talk-show hosts, the conservative ones tend to not want to deal with this issue, but the trucks are in your face. It's critical that they are in your face because another aspect of social reform that we identified was massive societal denial among people who had been complicity in injustice or who were complacent in response to the injustice, felt guilty about it, didn't want to feel any more guilt, and, as a consequence, didn't want to know more about the injustice than they already knew. So if you want to teach people who don't want to learn, you've got to develop non-consensual methodologies that don't rely on the consent of the person you are trying to educate in order to be effective. Once you look fleetingly at the pictures, they are in your head and you're never going to get them out. Every time you hear the word 'abortion' thereafter, instead of calling to mind an abstraction, you are going to see a dead baby, tortured to death, bloody, sickening. Over time, if you have a functioning conscience, these images will begin to change the way you feel, think and ultimately, behave. The residual effect remains operative long after you've left the physical presence of the signs."

At 54, Cunningham, has the background for any number of high-powered, high-paying careers. A former state legislator, justice department official and assistant U.S. attorney, something deeper keeps him doing this. "I sat in the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles and every week watched 25 or 30 resumes come across my desk from people at very good law firms and people from very good law schools who graduated high in their class, edited their law reviews, all kinds of academic honors ... day by day it became clearer to me that any one of these people could do my job at least as well as I was doing it and some of them better. But none of them would be willing to fight the greatest moral evil the world has ever seen. I thought to myself, 'I'm going to have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and explain what I was doing while the sewers of our cities were running red with the blood of our children."

"We have the more convincing argument. Those who shout me down are foils for me because they are demonstrating their fear of my answer when they won't let me give it. These trucks have created absolute pandemonium on the other side, because there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop this. If they respond violently, is just draws more attention to us and discredits them. If they take us to court, they just create a forum in which we can focus more attention on the project. It's like the dilemma of an animal caught in a leg-hold trap. The harder you pull when you get trapped, the deeper the teeth sink into your leg and that's exactly the dilemma being faced by the pro-aborts. They don't know whether to ignore this or resist it, so the only semi-coherent criticism we hear, besides 'You're upsetting children' is that the pictures aren't real. The liberals know that if the pictures are real, they're dead. There's no moral defense for their position that's in any way convincing, so they resort to the same tactics that neo-Nazi skinheads employ when confronted with evidence of the holocaust. They just say the pictures are fake and it never happened.... I'm not aiming this at the 20 percent of the population that is irremediably evil, but at the maybe 60 percent that's just confused about all of this or believes abortion is the lesser of two evils because they don't know how evil it actually is.

The unwanted nature of the message is what Cunningham believes gives it power. "That creates a great deal of anger, but Martin Luther King created a great deal of anger, the anti-Vietnam war movement created a great deal of anger. Earth First creates a great deal of anger. Social reformers are not trying to win a popularity contest. They don't care what people think of them. They care what people think of injustice. If I have to get people angry at me to get them angry at abortion, that's a price I'm willing to pay. The principal reason the pro-life movement has made so little progress over the last 30 years is because social reform is new to conservatives. They haven't done it before. Conservatives, to their discredit, are frequently defenders of an unjust status quo and it's political liberals who usually try to effect reform. Conservatives mistakenly imagine that in order to be effective, you have to be liked. At some level, they just can't deal with disapproval the way liberals can."

Cunningham spares no one in his prescription for ending abortion. "Conservatives have got to learn the art of social reform. They're dumb as a post about it because they've never done it before. And because they tend to be Christians -- Catholics, Evangelicals -- and as a result, they want to be like and tend to get beaten down by liberals who are very clever at this identity politics. 'If you're against abortion, you're against women. If you're against gay marriage, you hate homosexuals. If you're against affirmative action, you're against blacks. That's an intellectually dishonest way of changing the subject and going on the attack with ad hominems that are designed to discredit your opponent because you don't want to deal with his argument. I don't play that game, I won't let them play that game and none of those tactics work in the face of a dead baby picture in your windshield on the way to work. All of those liberal games are neutralized, because we cut to the chase. Is this a baby or isn't it? Is this an act of violence or isn't it? Should this be lawful or not? We can't have a meaningful dialogue about the implications of abortion until we understand the facts. The pro-life movement doesn't have a clue as to how to change people's understandings of the facts. They just want to shout conclusions and opinions at people. What's really bizarre is that mainstream pro-life organizations and the Church are working harder than Planned Parenthood top suppress the best evidence we have -- photo evidence -- that abortion is an act of violence and it does kill a baby."

When told that officials from the California Catholic Conference believe that trying to convince people confrontationally only turns them off and creates an aura of being "mean-spirited", Cunningham counters: "The fact that I disagree with you doesn't make me mean. That's an ad hominem. You're trying to change the subject because you don't want to defend abortion, you're trying to make me defend my demeanor or manner. It's not my manner that's the issue here."

Cunningham is very disappointed with the efforts -- or lack thereof -- of Catholic Bishops to fight abortion. "The U.S. bishops just bought an ad campaign whose operating principle is subtlety. Well, Martin Luther King didn't win equality for African Americans with subtle pictures. He used pictures of black people being torn limb from limb by police dogs, knocked down by water cannons and hampered down by night sticks. Those were ugly, ugly pictures and the people who were making America look at those pictures invited a great deal of persecution, because people didn't want to see those pictures. During the Vietnam War, the working press had historically low approval ratings because people were angry that night after night they would turn on the television and see the police chief of Saigon blowing out the brains of a Vietcong suspect or naked children whose clothing was burned off by napalm running toward the camera. Those photos lodged in the public mind and gradually eroded public support for U.S. involvement in the war. The press was willing to take the hit. The protesters were willing to accept persecution. They had their eyes focused on a public policy objective and you can't win this on the cheap. But the bishops want to win this on the cheap. They are laboring under the misconceptionn that to be effective you have to be liked. They need to go back and read the prophets of the Old Testament and note the consistency with which they were persecuted and even martyred. Jesus said, 'If they persecute me, they will persecute you.' Well, they're not persecuting the bishops because the bishops have been very careful to avoid any behavior that invites persecution. That's why people aren't horrified by abortion. We're covering up the horrifying evidence."

As we turn on the 210 and enter the San Gabriel Valley, traffic gets heavier. As we get closer to Pasadena, the cars start getting more expensive. Although no one is making obscene gestures at us today -- a frequent occurrence -- many people are glaring or staring at the trucks. Cars with more than one passenger point and seem to be having animated discussions. "When we are in Orange County and the Inland Empire, we get looks of stunned disbelief. Some people will attempt to cut us off or break into the convoy. They'll do that when they haven't seen the police car behind us. We have the police behind us because we drive at a speed that forces people to overtake us and we want their first visual impression to be of the police to deter misconduct. We'll see more aggressive driving the closer we get to West L.A. That's where the cultural elites are."

"Sometimes we'll go into Malibu and Topanga Canyon and that's where the studio bigwigs are. You'll start really seeing the obscene gestures and scowls and frowns. They're scandalized because they regard these areas as their domain and we're violating the sanctity of their liberal environs by bringing the truth of abortion to Malibu."

To prevent legal harassment, the project keeps two public interest law firms on retainer: The Life Legal Defense Foundation and The Thomas More Center. "In the eleven year that the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has been doing its work, we have not been sued one single time. We are easily the most aggressive pro-life organization in the country. We've only sued someone else once and we've just emerged as the prevailing party. We brought a federal lawsuit against Indiana University last year and forced a settlement on them that allows us to display our Genocide Awareness Project at a very prominent location on their campus." The entire operation is funded by donations. "Ironically, much of our work is being funded by people in the Southeastern United States. There are some enlightened donors there who believe the best way to fight abortion in Kentucky is by funding pro-life activism in Southern California because California is such a trend-setting state.... Now there's no doubt that some people out there are so enraged by us that they write big checks to Planned Parenthood, but nothing Planned Parenthood does can change with more money. They're already rolling in money. Everything we do will change with more money." What is Cunningham's goal should the funding continue to increase? "Expansion. More and more expansion to more cities."

As we enter a bumper-to-bumper 405 South at the Sepulveda pass, we are in what Cunningham describes as one of the most intense areas, where the offense taken at the photos is greatest. He is able to generalize reactions according to car models. "Porsches aren't that bad and Mercedes aren't that bad, but there's something about a BMW that attracts serious pro-aborts. I saw a lady who almost had a wreck on the 405 North, she got off at one of the Hollywood exits and she was leaning out of her window, wobbling and swerving, trying to shout backward at us, while she tried to exit. I was afraid she would get cut in half. If abortion is O.K., then why do these pictures upset them so?"

As we move south of Westwood, we turn east on 10 and traffic thins out. Gawkers continue to slow down and stare as they pass us, but the ride back to the warehouse is uneventful. As we pull into the lot, a pickup following us takes down the building's address, then flees before the police stop him.

Those who would like to contribute to the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform can visit their website at www.abortionNO.org

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