BATTLE CRY

part 1 of 2
It’s early Saturday, just after 7 a.m. on a crisp autumn day. The ash and locust trees that line the sidewalks around 20th Avenue and Vine Street are bright with change.

The elderly bungalows behind the trees look no different from those in many older, well-kept Denver neighborhoods. Although there’s a modest, low-rent apartment complex and a scattering of small businesses along the block, for the most part these are the houses of longtime residents who raised their kids here and of young couples who hope to do the same. The neighborhood looks peaceful. It looks like home.

But look closer. No children play in the tidy front yards, ride their bikes down the street. If residents do venture out to fetch the newspaper or hurry to a car, they avoid making eye contact with strangers…for fear a stranger might be “one of them.”

This is a neighborhood under siege.
Through no fault or choice of their own, the people who live here have become the civilian casualties–collateral damage, in military parlance–of America’s nastiest ideological war: the fight over abortion rights.

Instead of the happy sounds of kids playing, the cool air rings with anger.
“Mommy, mommy, don’t kill me!” a woman shrieks.
“Murderers!” shouts a man.
“You’ll go to hell!” screams another.

A few of the voices belong to children–but they don’t live here. They come with their parents who, wearing horrific posters of aborted fetuses, patrol the perimeter of the low-slung gray building on the southwest corner of 20th and Vine.

Above its bullet-proof security doors are the words that explain what has brought this small, hostile army here five mornings a week, Tuesday through Saturday, spring, summer, winter and fall, come snow, heat, hell or high water, for nearly a decade.

Over the door is this sign: Planned Parenthood.

Two blocks to the south, at the corner of 18th Avenue and Vine, Ken Scott waves a photograph of a dead fetus with the caption “Abortion Kills Children.” He is standing atop a rock formation that the owner of the nearby rental properties erected in a futile attempt to prevent such antics.

Scott was banished to this spot, which his anti-abortion friends call “the outpost,” after the court issued a restraining order against him when he vowed to get a Planned Parenthood employee who’d signed a trespassing complaint against him.

But Scott doesn’t mind his exile. There’s more traffic at this corner than there is by the Planned Parenthood clinic–more publicity for the cause.

Scott has his own following here, including a thin, angular man dressed up like Abraham Lincoln whose picket sign reads “Emancipate the Babies.” Anti-abortion signs are everywhere; Scott’s van, parked down the block in front of a flower shop, is covered with them. And the rock formation has actually proved useful for propping up more signs and graphic photographs.

Scott doesn’t limit himself to nonverbal communication. Neighbors who try to speak with him quickly learn that there is no room for debate–only dogma. Conversations soon turn to screaming or spontaneous–and loud–prayers to “save this sinner.”

Now Scott launches into a diatribe about the true meaning of the increase in erupting volcanoes, killer earthquakes and other natural disasters. God is angry over abortion, he says: “Why else are there so many hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico this year?”

Scott is blowing hard himself. “The end is near,” he says, looking east at the oncoming traffic as though he expects the Second Coming to arrive from the direction of City Park. He waves to the passing cars. Some drivers wave back. Some ignore him. Others give him the finger.

Although the end is near for most sinners, it’s right around the corner for Dr. Warren Hern, according to Scott. The Boulder physician gained unwanted national attention in January when he was listed as one of the “Dirty Dozen” by an anti-abortion faction that claims to not advocate violence but coyly refuses to condemn the use of it against abortion doctors, clinic personnel and the clinics themselves. Scott divides his time between this corner and Hern’s clinic; he recently got out of jail after disturbing the peace outside Hern’s office.

“Hern has less than a year to live,” Scott says, waving to another motorist. “That’s not a threat,” he adds. “But the Lord has shown me that Hern has less than 365 more days.”

Scott had a Bible delivered to Hern, along with a personal note urging him to repent so that he could be saved. “We don’t hate abortionists,” Scott explains. “We hate the sin.”

Which reminds him. “They don’t appreciate us very much– they’re homosexuals,” he confides, nodding toward the pink stucco cottage that’s the building closest to the protesters. “But there again, we don’t hate the sinners, just the sin.”

Another motorist honks. Then another. Of all the signs on the rock formation, the largest reads: Honk for Life.

Five days a week, Luther Symons and his companion in the pink stucco cottage don’t need an alarm clock to wake them. The honking generally starts about 6:30 a.m. In every wave of traffic released by the stoplight a block away, three or four drivers will hit their horns at the sight of Scott’s sign.

Saturdays are worse, because the crowd of protesters is larger. Louder. And every half hour or so, Scott leads his group in a round of prayer.

“How loud they pray depends on whether they’re trying to make a point,” Symons says. “If they just got into a confrontation with someone, then they pray real loud. Other times they get into screaming matches. Or fistfights on the front lawn. Then the cops come and…well, it’s a very weird way to have to live.

“`Honk for Life,'” he adds with disdain. “They certainly don’t give a damn about my life.”

Symons has AIDS. Although the disease nearly killed him this past summer, he came back home–a 150-pound, 6-foot-4 skeleton–to the battleground. When Symons moved in three years ago, this part of the neighborhood was still at peace. But that was before Scott took up his post on the corner.

Symons needs to conserve his energy, but because of the vagaries of AIDS and the medications he must take to survive, sleep is a rare and precious commodity. “Sometimes I can’t fall asleep until four or five in the morning,” he says. “Two hours later, the honking starts. I think I could live with the rest of it–in fact, I respect their right to protest and exercise the First Amendment–if they’d just remove that particular sign.

“I tried to appeal to them. I said, `I’m very ill. I need sleep.’ But they just said, `We don’t care. We’re saving babies.'”

At times their remarks are more personal. “They’ve told me that AIDS is God’s way of curing homosexuals,” Symons says.

Try as they might, residents of the neighborhood can’t avoid the protesters. “There’s a pregnant woman in the building behind mine who is about a month from delivering,” Symons notes. “Five days a week, she has to look at photographs of dead fetuses in her yard. They obviously don’t respect the choice she made, either.

“The neighborhood is afraid of strangers,” he continues. “You never know when you’re going to be hit with pamphlets, confronted with rhetoric or maybe worse. Last summer, one of my neighbors was out watering his lawn when he’d had enough of Ken Scott. I looked out to see him hosing Ken down, who stood there screaming about the indignity of it all.”

While he was out painting his house recently, Symons watched as another neighbor got into a shouting match with Scott. Soon half a dozen police cars converged on the scene. “I couldn’t resist asking Ken, `So how many abortions did you stop with all the honking today?'” Symons says. “His answer was, `We’re trying to get God’s attention.’ So I guess God is listening for car horns now.”

For the most part, Symons does his best to ignore the protesters. Although the cottage’s front bedroom is the largest, it is also closest to Scott’s corner. “So we have to sleep in the small room farther back,” Symons says. But even back there, the classical music on the stereo doesn’t drown out the honking horns or shouts. And two blocks from the clinic, Symons still can hear the woman screaming, “Mommy, mommy, don’t kill me!”

“We live for Sunday and Monday, when the clinic is closed,” he sighs.
“The people in this neighborhood did not sign on to live in Beirut. This is a lovely neighborhood with a diverse and tolerant group of people living in it. I can respect the protesters’ First Amendment rights, but at what point do my rights kick in?”

Saturday morning, two blocks from Scott and Symons, the main battle is joined outside the Planned Parenthood clinic. A wall of cinderblocks and metal bars surrounds the building and its parking lot; a line of blue sheets hangs between the parking lot entrance and the clinic door, to obscure the view of the protesters.

“No Trespassing” notices abound. There are also signs that read: “Audio monitoring device in use. Conversations may be subject to recording.” Those audiotapes, as well as videotapes of the protesters that the clinic makes, often are used as weapons when the battle shifts to another front: the courtroom.

On the clinic side of the wall, off-duty Denver police officers hover near the door, moonlighting as security guards. They shoot the breeze with volunteers who have the word “Escort” printed on the backs of their blue T-shirts.

On the other side of the wall, picketers wearing and carrying their signs walk up and down the sidewalk, stopping occasionally to talk. Many are white and male and describe themselves as fundamentalist Christians. But not all. Today there are almost as many women, including three black women who stroll together. Sometimes the protesters are joined by Catholic priests and nuns, even a rabbi.

Cliff Powell, a thin, wild-eyed young man in a gray ski mask that covers most of his facial features, leans over the perimeter wall and rants. His roommate is not here today; David Lane sits in Denver County Jail, charged with breaking into the clinic last spring.

Powell’s voice, shrill and repetitious, carries up and down the block and over to other streets. Inside the building, neither the piped-in music nor the television can drown him out.

“Human life begins at conception,” Powell screams at the women he can’t see but knows are there. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out…That’s a baby in you. Have you ever heard a woman say that she was having a fetus?”

Mike Martin, who wears a picture of a fetus, announces that he is “probably the only father in town who can say that he is proud that his son, Patrick, has been convicted of disturbing the peace.” The Martins, along with two other protesters, had gone to trial just the week before; all but Patrick were found not guilty.

Martin, the proud father, points to another boy standing nearby. “Aaron here will probably be the youngest person ever arrested for disturbing the peace outside an abortion clinic,” he says. Aaron, age twelve, smiles shyly.

“My parents brought me the first time,” Aaron says. “Now I come because I want to. It’s fun, I guess, trying to save babies’ lives.”

A carload of teenagers cruises down the street, slowing in front of the protesters. One of its occupants rolls down her window and shouts, “Go home!”

But the protesters aren’t going anywhere. In one form or another, they have been here since 1987. And they say they’ll stay as long as the clinic performs abortions.

Suddenly the picketers perk up: A car is coming down the street, and sentries have identified it as a possible clinic client. While some protesters race to the parking lot entrance, others line up facing the blue sheets. On the other side, the security guards and escorts are getting ready.

The car keeps coming, slowing as it turns and wheels past the protesters at the entrance. The driver, a man, appears angry, confused; the woman on the passenger side shrinks into her seat and looks away from the window as the protesters lean toward her.

“Don’t do it,” a man shouts. “Don’t kill your baby!”
“Adoption is an option,” says another.
Aaron runs up to the fence and yells at the sheets. “Don’t kill your baby!”

“Mommy, mommy, please,” a woman shrieks closer to the clinic door. “Mommy, they’re tearing my arms and legs off. Mommy, mommy, I love youuuuuu!”

Beyond the curtain, the escorts motion the driver to pull up as close to the clinic as possible. The woman climbs out as the escorts rush to support her, urging her not to listen to the protesters as they hustle her inside. The driver parks the car and, now that his female companion is in the building, the protestors focus on him.

“Be a man. Love her. Don’t let them kill your baby!”
“You’re going to hell.”
The escorts finally get him inside. And as suddenly as the scene erupted, it subsides. The protesters resume their slow march and watch for more cars. Soon they’ll pack up their signs and baby carriages, remove the white crosses. They will take their pamphlets, their voices and their cause and go home until Tuesday morning, when the clinic reopens. Their purpose is to stop the women before they have abortions, the protesters say; there’s no need to harass the women after the deed is done.

But right now, there’s still a little time left. “POW!” Powell screams at the wall. “The trap slams shut…the cold steel has your leg…the trap of your sin. POW!…dragging you…dragging you down to the pits of hell!”

Ellen Brilliant was twenty, a student at the University of Northern Colorado majoring in women’s issues and performing arts, when she saw an abortion protest on television three years ago. The news showed a woman surrounded by pro-choice supporters who were trying to force their way into a clinic through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters.

Intellectually, Brilliant had been on the side of a woman’s right to choose ever since a high school teacher arrived in class one day wearing a pro-choice button. The teacher had explained what it meant, and Brilliant knew where she stood. Still, she hadn’t done much to act on her beliefs. She had been born after the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which gave women the legal right to abortion. By the early Nineties, a woman’s right to determine her own reproductive health seemed as much a given as the sun rising in the East.

Watching TV, Brilliant couldn’t believe the cruel things the anti-abortion protesters were saying to the woman trying to reach the clinic. Strangers were shrieking, screaming about God and hell and murder.

The next day Brilliant called the Colorado chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League. She said she wanted to start a student chapter on the UNC campus. She also wanted to volunteer as an escort at an abortion clinic. For that, NARAL told her, she needed to call Planned Parenthood.

Brilliant was surprised when a hundred people, rather than the ten or so she’d expected, showed up for the first meeting of her campus NARAL chapter. A month later she reported for work as an escort at the Planned Parenthood clinic at 20th and Vine.

It was the summer of the Pope’s visit to Denver. The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue was coming to town, and Planned Parenthood officials expected an escalation in confrontations. All volunteer escorts were given crash courses in how to deal with the impending mayhem.

When Brilliant arrived at the clinic, she saw that the police were out in force, dressed in riot gear. The pretty little neighborhood turned into a war zone as pro-choice and anti-abortion activists clashed. Screams and yells reverberated up and down the street, and the arrival of another client, whether for an abortion or just a medical checkup, pumped up the volume. Brilliant grew increasingly outraged as she hurried to meet the cars. The bullying and rhetoric only solidified her resolve.

After the Pope left town, only the local picketers remained at 20th and Vine. At first they tried to woo Brilliant to their side. They called her “angel” and asked if she believed in Jesus. But when it became clear that she was not to be converted, they began treating her like they treated the other escorts, including a trio of elderly women they refer to as “three blind mice.” They called her murderer, Nazi, baby killer.

Brilliant worked as a volunteer escort for a year and a half. Today she is the assistant director of public affairs for Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood.

Although an estimated 1.5 million women in this country have abortions each year, the procedure accounts for just 8 percent of Planned Parenthood’s business, according to Brilliant. The rest of its work involves women’s–and even men’s–health and reproductive issues, including birth control. Through birth control, Brilliant points out, Planned Parenthood hopes to do away with unwanted pregnancies and, therefore, the need for abortions. “We’re not brainwashing anyone,” she says. “We offer counseling that includes adoption, parenting and abortion.

“We do more each day to prevent abortions than the other side will ever do for all their yelling and bullying.”

Brilliant staunchly maintains that abortion is a medical procedure, not a political issue. No amount of debate will alter her view (including the argument that Planned Parenthood allows pro-choice groups to demonstrate on its property while keeping the other side at bay). In this, she is as dogmatic and unyielding as any anti-abortion protester. Nor does she see a difference between the protester who quietly walks a picket line and the most vehement of the screamers. “They’re all contributing to a movement that advocates violence and murder,” Brilliant says.

Anti-abortion protesters, however, point to the number of abortions and ask: Which side is more violent?

Since 1993, five abortion clinic doctors or staffers in the U.S. have been murdered by anti-abortionists, and attempts have been made on the lives of a dozen others. Doctors routinely face death threats, and their homes are often picketed; their families live in fear. (Planned Parenthood declined to let its doctors be interviewed for this story. “The doctors already feel like they’re hanging out there on a limb,” says spokeswoman Katie Reinisch. “And who can blame them?”). Over 100 clinics have been bombed or burned; nearly 600 have been vandalized. Tens of thousands of anti-abortion protesters have been arrested for blockading clinics, disturbing the peace or assault.

One of them is David Lane.

David Lane enters the tiny visiting cubicle at Denver County Jail carrying his dog-eared Bible and dressed in a jail jumpsuit. His narrow face is pale, made more narrow still by the neat mutton-chop sideburns he wears.

He speaks formally, carefully, with a curious blend of Maine Yankee and Southern drawl. His light green eyes are expressionless as he states that he is 25 years old and quite prepared to spend the next 25 years in jail if that’s what the Lord requires of him.

He is, in a word, a martyr, ready to give his life to his cause. And that, his enemies know, is what makes him dangerous.

Raised in the tiny burg of Bradford, Maine, population 500, Lane describes his childhood as a happy one, “although I was something of a hell-raiser. Stayed out late, got into minor trouble…nothing dangerous.”

His father was a truck driver; his mother stayed home with the children. “But there was no religious upbringing,” Lane says, “except a few times I went to church with friends.”

He dropped out of school in the ninth grade and left home at eighteen for sunnier climes. Life on the streets of Savannah, Georgia, was a nonstop party: Lane was smoking marijuana and drinking, supporting his habits through petty crime. His first arrest was for snatching a woman’s purse. That was quickly followed by shoplifting and vandalism charges.

Lane eventually found a construction job that paid for his partying. But one morning he woke up, hung over and repentant.

That, he says, “is when I decided to give my life to the Lord.” It was May 1993; he was 22 years old.

“I felt a growing hunger for peace in my life,” he says. “I knew there had to be something more to it than what I was doing…Of course, I was thinking more along the lines of being a missionary to some foreign country. I had no idea that my mission would be here in America.”

Lane bought a bicycle, a backpack and a sleeping bag and set out to discover what the Lord had in mind for him. A stranger he met along the road gave him a Bible, the same Bible he now carries in jail.

In Birmingham, Alabama, Lane joined the conservative Third Presbyterian Church. It was through its members that he discovered the anti-abortion movement. “I was shocked,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that people were killing babies in America. I thought we cherished children in this country. I couldn’t help but think about that little girl who fell down the well in Texas and how the whole country was behind the attempts to rescue her.

“That was just one little girl. Meanwhile, thousands of babies are being killed at abortion clinics. I sat down that night and cried. Then I decided I had to do something about it.”

He made a sign. One side read, “Adoption is an option”; the other, “Mommy, please don’t kill your baby.” And the next day, he marched down to what he had been told was a private abortion clinic. Every morning for a week, he paraded back and forth with his sign. He was beginning to wonder why he never saw much activity at the building, when a man told him the clinic had been closed for some time.

“It was just as well,” Lane says. “I wouldn’t have known what to do if I had come face to face with a pro-choice person and I was all by myself. I might have been scared off.”

The man invited Lane to join protesters at another clinic. Over the next few months he became increasingly active, participating in “rescues” (anti-abortion jargon for physically attempting to block clinic entrances) and “saves” (convincing women to change their minds about having abortions). “I was overjoyed,” Lane recalls. “I knew that this is what the Lord had saved me for.”

Lane and his cohorts crisscrossed the country to attend rallies and clinic protests in Buffalo, Chicago and Jackson, Mississippi. There were always people in the anti-abortion network willing to open their homes, cook a warm meal, even give a few bucks to the soldiers of the movement.

Lane was awaiting trial in Little Rock for “parading without a permit” when he heard about Paul Hill, the former minister who’d gunned down an abortion doctor and his 74-year-old escort in Pensacola, Florida.

“I felt sad because an abortionist would now no longer have the opportunity to repent,” Lane says. “But I could not condemn Paul Hill for what he did. If you saw a man walk up to a schoolyard and start shooting children–even if he had the permission of their parents–wouldn’t you stop him if you could?”

Lane arrived in Denver in September 1994. Within days he was picketing outside the Planned Parenthood clinic at 20th and Vine. At first he seemed content to follow the dictates of Terry Sullivan, leader of the protesters, who preached nonviolent confrontation and openly opposed groups that advocated otherwise.

Then one day in October, Lane was standing by the parking lot in a surgeon’s green smock, holding a decapitated baby doll. Both the smock and the doll were smeared with fake blood; Lane held a sign reading “Thanks for your baby.” The police arrived and demanded to see his identification. He was new to the scene, and they said they wanted to know who he was. When Lane refused, he was arrested. And although the charges were dropped, he was soon in trouble again.

A few days after the arrest, Lane saw clinic security guard Mike Newell taking down anti-abortion signs and the small white crosses that protesters place outside the wall. Lane grabbed a video camera, but before he could turn it on, Newell was advancing on him.

“He walked right into me and then said, `Get eight feet away from me,'” Lane says. (The “bubble” law requires protesters to stay at least eight feet away from clinic personnel and clients.) “I backed up, but he kept walking toward me, saying, `Get back eight feet.’ A lady stepped between us…I was still trying to get the camera to work when I heard something and turned around and saw that Newell and (clinic assistant director) Gary Jamieson had Terry Sullivan on the ground and were hitting him.

“I tried to jump in between, and that’s when Newell pulled a collapsible baton out and hit me on the left side of my head. I went blind in that eye and tried to back away, but he hit me again.

“I thought then that I was going to die. But I wasn’t afraid, just wondering what it was going to be like to meet Jesus.”

Jamieson handcuffed Lane to a rail. Then, Lane says, Newell hit Cliff Powell “even though Cliff was carrying an armload of crosses and couldn’t defend himself.”

Lane and Powell were taken to Denver General, where Lane was treated for a concussion and both men had wounds stitched. When Lane returned to the picket line two days later, both he and Powell were arrested for assault. A few hours later they were released without explanation. Jamieson, too, was charged with assault on Sullivan. Newell was never charged. All criminal charges were later dropped.

But the Rocky Mountain chapter of Operation Rescue contacted the American Family Association Law Center, a right-wing legal firm that represents anti-abortion interests, and lawyers there agreed to file a lawsuit on behalf of Lane, Powell and Sullivan. The suit claims that the protesters’ civil rights had been violated by the Denver Police Department and Planned Parenthood and alleged that the City of Denver, through the police, was conspiring against the protesters.

In January Lane went to Washington, D.C., to participate in the annual March for Life that coincides with the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. This year’s event also marked the release of the “Dirty Dozen” that includes Warren Hern. Lane returned to Denver in late February, convinced that picketing and sidewalk counseling were no longer enough.

Lane pauses at this point in the story, then offers a rare smile before repeating his schoolyard analogy: “If that man was going to shoot children, I asked myself, what would I do? Write my congressman? Picket and say `Naughty, naughty?’ No! I would have to try to stop that person.”

Lane decided to break into the Planned Parenthood clinic. He went there early one morning and first tried to get in through the roof, then through the front door, but the security glass resisted his crowbar. “My heart was beating a million miles an hour,” he recalls. “I was just about to give up when I decided to try a side window. I got in and fell right on top of one of the suction machines they use for abortions. I said, `Thank you, Lord, for leading me right to what I was looking for,’ then I smashed it.”

Lane smashed not only abortion equipment but everything else he could find, even the toilets. Then he left and went on to a private clinic, where he broke in and smashed an ultrasound machine.

His night’s work finished, he took a nap. When he woke up, he picked up his last check from a temporary employment agency, bought himself a good meal, went home, showered, and then asked his roommate to drive him to the police station.

“I didn’t want other people to get in trouble for what I had done,” Lane says, denying that he turned himself in because he wanted the publicity. “I was thinking about the sacrifices the patriots had made in the past and decided that my freedom was being bought with the blood of unborn children.”

Soon after his arrest, Lane agreed to an interview with the Rocky Mountain News. He told a reporter that he would shoot an abortion doctor “if the Lord calls me to.”

The statement made headlines but cost Lane his lawyers. The American Family Association Law Center withdrew from his case, saying Lane had violated an agreement to conduct himself in a lawful manner.

“They didn’t sell me out,” Lane says of his former lawyers. “They sold out the babies.”

Lane was charged with two counts of burglary, two counts of criminal mischief and, as a habitual criminal, for two unrelated felony convictions in Georgia and Florida. His bail is set at $50,000; his next hearing is scheduled for January 1996. But Lane has another mission right now: preaching to his fellow inmates. “They respect what I did,” he says. Lane runs a daily prayer meeting which he claims is attended by nearly half of the 46 prisoners in his section.

He receives a dozen letters a day from friends and strangers, he says. The inside covers of his Bible are filled with the names and numbers of supporters who remind Lane that he is a “prisoner for Christ.”

“I don’t believe the Lord would ever ask me to kill someone,” Lane says as he picks up that Bible. “But as that wonderful president, John F. Kennedy, once said, `Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.'”

end of part 1