Having lived in the rural Midwest as much as I have, I've had my fair share of run-ins with professional Christian protesters. I remember one time in college, this guy came on campus carrying two signs about repentance and started yelling at everyone passing by the student union about how they were all going to hell, presumably for fucking outside of marriage. Predictably enough, some girl with cropped hair showed up maybe 20 minutes later with a handmade sign bearing some quote from Charles Bukowski about how he doesn't like God, and the two of them screamed at each other for a while. I read later in the school paper that this guy apparently travels all over Missouri to do this, and he pretty much hits every college campus in the state over the course of a given year.
On Friday, James Poullion, an anti-abortion protester in Oswesso, MI was killed in a drive-by shooting while waving placards outside the local high school. Predictably enough, anti-abortion rights groups were quick to issue press releases declaring his martyrdom for the cause and some commentators are noting the lack of outrage in the media in comparison to the response to the murder of Dr. George Tiller in May. I'm sure that somebody soon will point out that before yesterday, approximately nobody had ever heard of the town of Oswesso, MI, much less the name James Poullion, whereas Tiller was a nationally known figure who was a frequent target of vitriol on Bill O'Reilly's highly rated nightly TV commentary show and had already survived a previous shooting.
Nobody's going to care about that, though. The narrative is going to be pro and anti-abortion rights groups dropping bodies in a national turf war. Expect the typical hyperventilation (op-eds from representatives of NARAL and Operation Rescue in the Times, Post, and Wall Street Journal, cable-TV shouting matches galore, an episode of Law and Order) that permeates every aspect of the Kabuki theater we know as "the abortion issue." Every aspect of this has become ridiculous, from the abortion rights crowd's insistence on labeling themselves "pro-choice" (as if the other side wants to revoke your right to take the Pepsi Challenge) and the anti-abortion rights crowd's adoption of "pro-life" (like abortion rights activists are advocating mass slaughter of the nation's grandmothers, the fulminations of Sarah Palin aside).
James Poullion didn't deserve to die for his beliefs or for exercising his First Amendment rights to express them, nor does anybody else in the anti-abortion rights movement. That disclaimer aside, let's not beat around the bush here: based on the facts of his life as they're being reported right now, James Poullion wasn't a holy warrior doing the Lord's work; he was a crusty old asshole who lived to piss people off. For the last 20 years, he's been camped out on various sidewalks in Oswesso on a daily basis, waving pictures of bloody fetuses and screaming at people. He spent so much time outside the high school doing this that the students nicknamed him "Sign Man," which I take as an indicator that Oswesso High School isn't likely to produce the next H.L. Mencken anytime soon. He also apparently hung out in front of the local Cadillac dealer waving his signs around for years, as if people were going to stop in to cop the car note on an Escalade before heading to the clinic. The owner tried to have a restraining order taken out on him and lost. He even picketed a local church, presumably because they spent more time singing hymns and enjoying fellowship over coffee and donuts than raining fire and brimstone on the community.
He did all of this day after day, year after year in a town of just over 15,000 people. Let's estimate that about half of that population is female, and maybe two-thirds of the women are of childbearing age. That's about 3, 750 people. Poullion probably could have fucked around and protested outside of T.J. Maxx on Saturday mornings and reached as many of them as he did by treating protesting like a full-time job. There's other stuff he could have done instead. He could have started a blog or a newsletter. He could have gotten an AM radio show. He could have even set up one of those phony crisis pregnancy centers that people of his ideological persuasion are so high on.
The fact that he chose a method of protest that is arguably the least effective and certainly the most irritating isn't a coincidence. In fact, if Poullion becomes a national figurehead for the anti-abortion rights movement, as he probably will for at least the next three months or so, it'll only be fitting. You see, the anti-abortion movement isn't really interested in formulating cultural or policy changes regarding human reproduction. What these junior Ceauşescus care about is getting all up in your shit about things that are your own personal business and using your reaction as the sum total of your moral worth. And if you pissed off at them for it, so much the better for them. Nothing is more appealing to a these people than the opportunity to feed their ravenous persecution complex. I'd hazard a guess that if there is an afterlife, Jim Poullion is looking down on us completely delighted that his violent death will nab free national airtime for the likes of Randall Terry in the coming days.
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