ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 26, 1990                   TAG: 9005290192
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium


OPERATION RESCUE AND CIVIL RIGHTS

I READ your touching editorial deploring the decision of the Supreme Court that is such a violation of Operation Rescue's civil rights. The following hypothetical situation occurs to me:

A woman decides to stop in at the Roanoke Memorial Center For Women to take a pregnancy test. When she arrives, the entrance is blocked by a "pro-life rescuer."

When she asks him to step aside, he furiously screams in her face, "Abortion is murder! Abortion is murder!"

Then he pulls out a gun and lets her have it, right between the eyes.

As she lies dead, he takes out a knife and slices open her abdomen. He removes her uterus and rushes to the hospital. He bursts into the emergency room and cries out, "Save my baby! Save my baby!"

How would the Roanoke community react to this event? This is my best guess, based on what I have read in the Roanoke Times & World-News the last few months: If he were brought to trial, he would declare that he answered to "a higher law," that he was trying to "preserve the human life."

Then the judge would give him a stern warning: "You are a fine citizen and a credit to the community. However, I must warn you that you are misguided. You are almost a criminal and if you continue in this direction you may become one."

Then he would fine the clinic for littering because they didn't remove the remains "in a timely fashion."

Or maybe he would get a judge like one of those misguided Georgia judges. He might be ordered to stay 50 feet away from the clinic from then on. What a miscarriage of justice!

Then the Roanoke Times & World-News would print an editorial praising the man's "heroic attempt to save a precious unborn human life" and condemning the clinic for "not removing the trash." ROBIN A. RUEGG GOODVIEW



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