Anti-Gay Marriage Pro-Prop 8 Leader Called For Antiabortion Martyrs
Bruce Wilson printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Tue Jun 02, 2009 at 08:39:43 AM EST
On Sunday May 31, 2009 Kansas City late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down in the lobby of his church allegedly by a man, Scott Roeder, who had ties to the racist wing of the militia movement. The next morning CBS's Jeff Glor reported, "We did speak with the accused shooters' ex-wife yesterday. She said she was not surprised this happened and that she believed Roeder wanted to be a martyr for the cause." The antiabortion, pro-Christian martyrdom movement of TheCall founder Lou Engle, whose personal website still features a post attacking Tiller, has up until now received little scrutiny.

At Lou Engle's November 1, 2008 pro-Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage TheCall San Diego event Engle and his disciples called for acts of Christian martyrdom against legalized abortion. In the early 1980's, KKK and Aryan Nations strategist Louis Beam helped popularize a tactic known as "leaderless resistance" in which high profile propagandists would incite terrorist acts carried out by autonomous individuals and cell groups. Lou Engle's inflammatory TheCall antiabortion rhetoric conforms with Beam's tactic; Engle merely incites.

Lou Engle appeared in the Heidi Ewing / Rachel Grady runaway hit documentary Jesus Camp. The Official documentary website states that at Becky Fischer's "Jesus Camp" summer camp, "kids are taught to become dedicated soldiers in God's army and are schooled in how to take America back for Christ." In the film, Fischer states her desire to indoctrinate the children at her camp so that they have the same level of dedication as Hamas suicide bombers. When Fischer's "Jesus Camp" children become young adults, they will gravitate toward Lou Engle's slickly marketed TheCall events, which draw between 20 and 80 thousand people per event and are held in the US and also internationally, in Kansas, San Diego, and Washington DC but also in Australia, Germany, the Philippines, Norway, England, Jerusalem and Brazil [Top, Left: Becky Fischer admires the dedication of Hamas' young suicide bombers. Top, Right: Lou Engle predicts legalized abortion will lead to a second American civil war, TheCall Kansas City, December 31, 2007. Bottom, Left: Lou Engle calls for martyrs, at TheCall San Diego, November 1, 2008. Bottom, Right: Lou Engle, at Jesus Camp, indoctrinates children as future antiabortion movement warriors.].

As Talk To Action co-founder Frederick Clarkson observes in Inflammatory Rhetoric as the Context of Assassination,
inflammatory antiabortion rhetoric that contributes to the threat and climate of violence is not limited to professional sound bite provocateurs like Randall Terry. Such rhetoric and the underlying ideology it expresses is so ingrained in the culture of the antiabortion movement, that someone like Rick Warren busily packaging himself as a moderate thinks nothing of calling abortion a Holocaust and prochoice pols as holocaust deniers. And hardly a media ripple results.
Rick Warren and Randall Terry are not the only high-profile leaders on the religious right who employ inflammatory antiabortion rhetoric. Footage from TheCall San Diego, taken November 1, 2008 by video documentarist Michael W. Wilson [author of Silhouette City] shows Engle and his disciples exhorting a Qualcomm stadium crowd to acts of Christian martyrdom against legalized abortion: rhetoric that serve as thinly veiled exhortation towards violent acts of terrorism against abortion clinics and abortion providers.

[video, below: calls for acts of martyrdom to stop legal abortion, from stage at November 1, 2008