Randall Terry, Abortion Troubadour

I really don't like this guy.

[Content note: this piece contains discussion about some of the more awful members and tactics from the anti-abortion movement]

Direct action gets the goods. I've heard that saying a lot, in organizing meetings, on picket lines, and at mass rallies. When institutions fail you, sometimes it's not enough to write a letter to your Congressman or share something on social media. Sometimes the only way to get what you need is to walk off of the job, or shut the streets down, or camp outside your mayor's house. I've been lucky to witness several great direct action campaigns here in Chicago, and see marginalized people fighting successfully for justice. But every once in a while, the wrong person picks up on the idea of direct action and uses it for something terrible. Randall Terry is the wrong person.

You're probably familiar with the kind of work Randall Terry did; if you've seen Christian people protesting abortion at some sort of rally or event, or outside of a clinic, and specifically if you've seen the really vile people getting in the faces of women they don't know and calling them murderers, or waving around giant graphic banners of aborted fetal tissue, those are the people who learned their stuff from Terry's organization Operation Rescue. Terry has been a very vocal member of the anti-abortion movement for as long as I've been alive, and because he's had such a long and active career, we can learn a lot from him about the more noxious side of religious activism. He converted to Catholicism as an adult, but even before his conversion, working with the Catholic church was always a critical part of his strategy for ending abortion in America.

So who is Randall Terry? Is he:

• A fearless moral voice in the model of Dr. King, willing to put his body on the line to protect the unborn, whose seismic impact on the American moral landscape is undeniable? OR,

• A hack and a fraud who started Operation Rescue as a for-profit organization benefiting only himself, who calls Dr. King a mentor even though King was killed before Terry’s tenth birthday, who redirected money from a fundraising push to buy himself a $400,000 house, who has directly inspired actual murderers, who is loathed by the anti-abortion movement he tried to steer, who is desperate for notoriety at any cost, who cheated his court-ordered settlements, who destroyed his relationships with his wife and children, and who once tried unsuccessfully and hilariously to rebrand himself as a country musician?

You'll never guess which one he is.

CHAPTER ONE - A DIZZY DAME LIKE HISTORY

“You’re thinkin you’re wanting something to eat
So you’re shakin’, you’re bakin’, some cookies for me
Girl, I got an appetite for you”

Terry’s coming-out party was at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, when the group he had founded two years earlier, Operation Rescue, began to gain the attention of national media. Rolling Stone wrote a profile of Terry in 1989, written in the standard Rolling Stone editorial voice of “fawning to the point of being weirdly misogynist”:

“That’s just the kind of guy Randall Terry is. Epic, strictly big screen, a doer; the kind of guy who can take hold of a dizzy dame like History and slap her around until that lazy, meandering, good-for-nothin’ brain of hers slips back into line. ‘Til she gets it straight with Truth. With Justice. With God. With Randall Terry.”

Sure, why not. That one of Terry's earliest national press hits came from Rolling Stone tells us a great deal about how Terry saw himself: as an almost literal rock star in his field, albeit one who openly called for the executions of women seeking reproductive care. Operation Rescue, started in Terry’s then-home of Binghamton, New York, represented a significant change in the tactics used by the anti-abortion movement. Before Terry and Operation Rescue came around, "opposing abortion" meant calling your state senator or organizing a group of old Catholic ladies to quietly pray the rosary (non-combat version) outside a clinic. What Terry brought to the abortion debate was a complete absence of shame or self-control; he would get in the faces of women heading into clinics, wave crosses, scream "murderer!" and "mommy!", block entrances, and get his friends to do the same. In the first two years of Operation Rescue, over 30,000 members were arrested for trespassing and harassment at various providers across the country. Jerry Falwell - the one who's dead now, not his dumbass son - called Terry “the Martin Luther King of the pro-life movement” while donating tens of thousands of dollars to him.

Atlanta, however, was where Operation Rescue really kicked out the jams, as Terry and his followers protested outside of the 1988 Democratic National Convention and took full advantage of all of the news crews there. Protestors stayed at clinics for weeks and took multiple arrests, getting national recognition and drawing more and more attention to a political issue where the outrage just amplified itself. And, as Terry put it to Rolling Stone, he had his sights set on more than just banning abortion. He claimed to want to reweave the entire moral fabric of America:

"Terry has a kind of domino theory about the product of his labors. He fully expects to achieve a comprehensive ban on abortion within the next decade. ”Child killing will fall, child pornography and pornography will follow, euthanasia, infanticide–we’ll totally reform the public-education system,” he says, his mind racing ahead of his fingers as he taps the death knell of each travesty. Eradicating legal abortion will set in motion a political and cultural reformation in which, he says, ”we will take back the culture.”

He was extremely ambitious, or pretended to be, but we can't say that Terry was successful, at least in the short term. He didn't get his comprehensive abortion ban within the decade, for reasons that will later become very clear. Pornography appears to still be around, and I suppose there have been a lot of attempts to reform the public education system since 1989 but it probably wasn't what Terry was picturing. Also, Terry was not a Catholic yet; that's going to be very important. He was practicing in a fundamentalist Protestant tradition and would convert to Catholicism later. However, he had support from plenty of Catholics looking to take more militant action against what they saw as the world’s greatest evil, and even got some support from Catholic bishops, as the LA Times reported in 1989:

“Catholic bishops, though opposed to abortion, have taken no official stand on Operation Rescue and its tactics. Still, Auxiliary Bishop Austin Vaughn of New York became the first U.S. Catholic bishop in memory to spend time in jail after he refused to pay a fine for demonstrating with Operation Rescue in Paoli, Pa. Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony has offered “prayerful” support, and Diocese of Orange Bishop Norman F. McFarland has offered to stand in at Mass and confession for any priest arrested.” 

Fun fact - two of the three men named in that block quote have since been outed as having covered up widespread child sexual abuse within their diocese, so congrats to Bishop Vaughn I guess. 

We also have to understand these bishops' actions through the lens of where we were in Catholicism and abortion politics in the late 80s. Reagan's presidency was ending, and the religious right coalition that had congealed around him included conservative Catholics who prioritized abortion as their top political issue. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro was on the Dem ticket as a vice presidential candidate and the first Catholic candidate on a national ballot since Roe v. Wade; several Catholic bishops, notably John O'Connor of New York, were very critical of Ferraro, and conservative Catholic voters would birddog her at campaign events before, presumably, meeting to discuss how excited they were for another four years of Reagan's policies. This was one of the first times bishops spoke out against a particular Catholic candidate and reflected a major split between groups of Catholic voters; especially before Roe, it was rare for bishops to publicly weigh in on elections like that. Pro-choice Catholic voters organized Catholics For Choice and defended Ferraro's positions publicly; several of them were excommunicated by their bishops as a result. 

This is all to say that any discussion or arguments you see today from bishops regarding elected officials and their views on abortion, what merits being denied communion, what merits telling Catholics not to vote for someone in the homily the Sunday before election day - all of that was just getting started right around the time Randall Terry showed up. And Terry had a blueprint for how to talk about it obnoxiously, and in a way that targeted and humiliated disproportionately poor and marginalized women, but also in a way that could generate a lot of attention very quickly. And some bishops wanted nothing to do with him, but some vocal bishops were happy to jump on what he was doing.

Obviously Terry is going to be polarizing; he’s taking on an issue that everybody feels strongly about, and he’s doing so in the loudest and most disruptive way possible. What you have to remember is that, besides his obvious ideological opponents, almost everyone outside of Operation Rescue, and everyone who wasn’t close to Randall Terry, hated Randall Terry, because he was seen as counterproductive to the anti-abortion movement. As it turns out, the people within Operation Rescue and who were close to Randall Terry also hated Randall Terry, because he’s a dick and he kept all of the money for himself.

CHAPTER TWO - SADISTIC WOMB ENVY

“Baby, you know you’re my favorite treat
Let’s try out a new recipe
Girl, I got an appetite for you”

It would be tough to put together a comprehensive list of everyone who hated Randall Terry at one time or another, and the list kept growing as time went on, but I can at least start with the most obvious people and go from there. Of course, the clinics and health centers that Terry protested at were no fans of his illegal, borderline-violent tactics. One of his most dedicated early followers, James Kopp, was once part of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and was eventually convicted of the 1998 murder of an Amherst doctor who performed abortions. Terry himself publicly celebrated when Dr. George Tiller was murdered at church. A police sergeant in Atlanta during the DNC succinctly compared Operation Rescue to “the Jim Jones deal”. Terry was hit with multiple civil and criminal lawsuits from the clinics he protested at and the women he terrorized, including one RICO lawsuit (the RICO suit was later dismissed, but I still think it’s funny). By 1998, he was found liable for $1.7 million in damages across 27 different lawsuits, and eventually declared personal bankruptcy as a way to weasel out of paying anyone (NOW did take away his frequent flier miles as a partial settlement, which I also think is funny).

There were also plenty of religious leaders that, although they shared Terry’s stated goal of ending abortion in America, thought Operation Rescue was a joke and would do more to harm their movement than help it, particularly since Terry kept breaking the law and norms of human decency. Christian churches from whom Terry was trying to recruit more followers would urge churchgoers not to listen. Because he was usually the loudest voice in the room, Terry was also a reliable media contact for news organizations looking for someone to represent the anti-abortion side of an argument, carrying himself with the smugness and moral certainty of a preacher in the Westboro Baptist Church. A 2009 piece by an anti-abortion activist at Rewire News did a very thorough job explaining how he should be avoided by the media at all costs, for the reasons already listed above, and then for additional reasons:

“But when the activist in question is Randall Terry, I would feel irresponsible, as a prolifer, if I did not raise the issue of rotten-to-the-core character...it is anything but valid for Terry to threaten violence against abortion providers as an inevitable, even salvific, result of disobeying his commands...If abortion arises in so many cases from a cultural failure to genuinely, fully support and respect women’s power of life creation, then Terry is fully complicit in its root causes. In talk of prolife, he veils, but not very well, a sadistic womb envy...Please do not cite him as a prolife leader, let alone a hero. Challenge anyone who does that. Do not give him money. Challenge anybody who does that.”

I had never read the term “sadistic womb envy” before, and sincerely hope it becomes more common in discussions of feminist theory. It also doesn’t seem like Operation Rescue was a great organization to be a part of in the 80s and 90s. Terry was a big fan of keeping women out of leadership roles and enforcing a patriarchal structure in his organization, telling Rolling Stone that “It takes leadership that can inspire confidence, and women can do this. But most people, men and women included, are more comfortable following men into a highly volatile situation. It’s just human nature. It’s history.” It isn’t too surprising that Terry thinks and talks like this - it was clear from his first interviews that he was an asshole - but the financial structure of Operation Rescue, as reported by multiple sources and confirmed by Terry decades ago, is a little more surprising. Operation Rescue wasn’t a nonprofit, or a corporation or organization at all. It was just Randall Terry; he deposited the checks into his personal bank account and filed the donations on his personal tax returns, which aren’t public. At one point, he redirected the money from a direct mail fundraising push he did with politician Alan Keyes to buy himself a $400,000 home and eventually a 119-acre farm, which understandably put off some of his followers. This financial structure was in place ostensibly to shield Operation Rescue from civil lawsuits, and it kind of worked when he declared bankruptcy to get out of his payments, but it certainly didn’t prevent people from suing him. And the main takeaway is that Terry didn’t create an organization that included anything outside of himself; I would also argue, based on everything I’ve read about him, that Terry doesn’t conceive of any reality outside of himself.

That said, Operation Rescue continued to exist after Terry left the organization in the 90s, although Terry really was unhappy with that idea, and actually sued the organization years later to try and claw back the trademark to the name. The court ruled against him “with prejudice” in 2013, and according to Operation Rescue’s website when they announced the decision: 

“Operation Rescue has transformed from a group characterized by acts of peaceful civil disobedience to a nationally-recognized organization that successfully works through the legal system to expose abortion abuses and bring abortionists to justice, while honoring the sacrifice of that early heritage.”

In other words, “the Randall Terry stuff is over, please don't associate us with him anymore, we’re good now”. That is, coincidentally, also something you can hear from members of Randall Terry’s family, as well as his old church in Binghamton. In talking about his background and upbringing, the LA Times noted that as “an avid musician, Terry even harbored ambitions of becoming a rock star, which he now dismisses as a youthful fantasy...His aunt calls Terry “an egomaniac” and says he found God after his dreams of becoming a rock singer were dashed.” That’s an interesting window into his motivation, but we’ll put a pin in that. His first wife, to whom he was married for 19 years, was also not a fan of Randall Terry, as he eventually left her and married an Operation Rescue employee who was 16 years his junior; he also refused to pay court-ordered child support to the children from his first marriage.

The divorce and remarriage also wasn’t a big hit with Terry’s old fundamentalist church in Binghamton. They published an official letter of censure, which alleged that Terry had engaged in “a pattern of repeated sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women”, which Terry denied, and which read in part:

“We are concerned that Randall's personal and theological transformation over the last three years has left him altogether a different Randall Terry than the one who now solicits funds from his donors. For example, in sending out a recent fund raising letter he wrote, "I know that you believe what I believe." This lacks integrity since the vast majority of his donors have no idea what he now believes nor the liberties and license in which he now walks, and in our opinion would hardly agree to support him if they did. For this we admonish him to cease soliciting funds until such time as his public persona and his true manner of living are known to be the same.”

A fundamentalist church censuring their most ardent anti-abortion activist for being too much of an asshole is some king shit, but then Operation Rescue, which at the time had been renamed Operation Save America, posted the letter in its entirety, on the website Terry used to run before he left the organization, and echoed the censure, adding:

“Randall’s new-found “liberties” in speech and action have caused the consternation of many and stumbling of more than a few. He is in desperate need right now of hearing and receiving the rebuke of our Lord into his life. His wife Cindy, his children, his pastor, his friends, and most importantly Jesus Himself love Randall Terry. We are all praying for his repentance and return to the Church of Jesus Christ. Therefore we will in no way finance his continued waywardness nor will we enable him to continue in his willful separation from his Lord, his family, his church, and the children he has been called to protect.”

It was the ultimate passive-aggressive “bless your heart”, from the community that Terry came up in and the organization he helped start. The New York Times ran a detailed piece in 2001 on Terry’s attempts to rehabilitate his image and brought up the Operation Save America post specifically:

“Shortly after the posting on the Internet, Mr. Benham said, he received his last call from Mr. Terry. Both men agree that Mr. Terry made just one comment: ''Is that you, Judas?''...The Internet posting was devastating, Mr. Terry said, recalling that he was flooded with calls and letters from people demanding to be taken off his mailing list.”

It brings me so much joy to see, as early as 2001, the New York Times printing the sentence "the Internet posting was devastating". As we’ve seen with each subject of Grift of the Holy Spirit so far, a once-proud man was undone by posting; Monaghan by a disgruntled conservative blogger blowing the whistle on his land deal, Heilman by self-posting into incoherence, and now Terry getting owned by his old church. He was washed up and out of money, and tried to keep a radio show going, broadcasting out of a trailer “with the burly host of a Christian-rock program called ''Rippin' Richie's Radical Revolution.''” He raised funds again from the few supporters who stuck with him, and used the money to take some time off. As reported in the Times: “''I went on a sabbatical, bought Guinevere, and started writing music, man,'' he said. Guinevere is the name of his new Gibson guitar...a yearlong break included time spent in a Nashville studio, recording country-western and gospel music.” Interesting, he wrote songs in his spare time; let’s put another pin in that. Overall, by the late 1990s, Terry had gotten almost everyone he knew to hate him, and had developed a pretty streamlined fundraising infrastructure. The natural next step after those two accomplishments was to run for Congress.

CHAPTER THREE - I BE THAT

“I like cinnamon, I like clove
Why don’t you step away from that stove
Let me untie that apron string
With what I got, you don’t need that thing”

David Corn, writing for The Nation, rode along with Randall Terry during part of his 1998 Republican primary campaign for the Congressional seat in what was then New York’s 26th district. He did not waste any time getting to the good stuff:

“Over the next few hours, Terry, the charismatic and in-your-face founder of Operation Rescue, which targeted and harassed abortion clinics across the country, will argue that without biblical law one cannot "absolutely" condemn the Nazis; that secular law should be based on the Bible; that the total tax burden on a citizen should not surpass 10 percent of income; that a government that forces people to pay income tax is a "tyrant" that must be defeated; that adultery should be prosecuted; that the Bible commands patriarchy ("in every house there has to be a tie-breaker, and I be that").”

And we’re off! Randall Terry do be like that though! He continued to build out his platform to The Nation, and it’s worth including a large part of it here, just because of how wild it is to read this piece in 2019:

“On the campaign trail, Terry pushes proposals that would make Gingrich blush. He calls for a constitutional amendment to end all property taxes ("land taxes are inherently immoral because God forbids them") and a total phaseout of Social Security. (His campaign video claims the retirement system will be bankrupt by the year 2010--which is decades off the conventional estimates.) He does not shrink from discussing abortion, but the subject is not front and center in his public soundbites. He advocates repealing the federal income tax and slashing the government by about two-thirds. By his estimate, 62 percent of the federal government is devoted to "savior programs." That's his code for social spending. Since there is only one Savior--and He is not a government bureaucrat--all these functions of government are out of bounds and warrant the ax. Terry questions whether the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control are legitimate government agencies, since the Constitution does not specifically provide for their establishment. The Republican Party, no surprise, is not cheering for him.”

So, the central irony of that quote is probably obvious: Newt Gingrich is actually incapable of blushing, not because of an inability to feel shame, but because instead of blood, his heart pumps a thick toxic black ichor that fuels a hatred for poor people and ex-wives. The other irony worth mentioning is that Terry appears to have run in a Republican Congressional primary about twelve years too early. His 1998 economic platform is indistinguishable from the 2019 economic platforms of Senators Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, the latter of whom used his presidential campaign to propose abolishing the IRS and cutting five cabinet departments out of the executive branch. Every Tea Party or Freedom Caucus member in the past decade has run on the same platform Terry went with in 1998. Basically in any Congressional election from 2010 onward, it would be shocking if the Republican party didn't fully embrace him.

But in 1998, they were no fans of Terry, and really didn't want him as the nominee for what the party thought, incorrectly, was a flippable seat. He managed to pick up an endorsement from Focus On The Family, but that didn't seem to gain him any supporters who weren't already fans of his before the election, and his primary opponent picked up every other endorsement from New York state Republicans. A coalition of centrist Republican governors - and I still can't believe this in the context of today's Republican party - actually bought anti-Terry ads on local TV in the district and accused him, accurately, of promoting hate and intolerance. Terry was, amazingly, ahead of the curve on Republican politics, so much so that the party rejected him with a violent shudder when he tried to run in the primary.

Terry also had secured the ballot line for the Right To Life Party, so he was going to be in the general election regardless of the primary outcome, but this was more a question of whether he was going to receive institutional political support. The answer from the political institutions was “you don’t be that”. Terry lost the primary, and then Democrat Maurice Hinchey went on to win re-election anyways, keeping his seat until 2014. Terry’s staffers were also probably relieved, based on what I read in The Nation: “Terry returns to his campaign headquarters. Volunteers are listening to Elton John. "I am not a fringe candidate," he shouts, and heads to his office. "How many times today did he use the word `Beelzebub?'" an aide asks me. None, I say. "Good," he replies.”

Terry has tried to run for other state-level offices unsuccessfully since that campaign, but the least surprising thing about him is that he once also ran for president. More surprisingly, he ran in the Democratic primary in 2012. I’m not sure why he ran as a Democrat; maybe he still felt burned by the Republicans, or maybe it was cheaper to file the paperwork on the Democratic side. More importantly, the Democratic primary didn’t really happen in 2012, since there was an incumbent president running for re-election and there were no realistic primary challenges to Obama; four states ended up cancelling their primaries. I say “no realistic” challenges, but there were actually several candidates, including Terry, who were on the ballot in a few states; memorably, noted insane person Keith Russell Judd received over 40% of West Virginia Democratic primary votes in 2012, a feat made doubly impressive by the fact that he was in federal prison when the election happened. Meanwhile, Occupy activists tried to organize around the Iowa caucuses, and antitrust attorney John Wolfe Jr. had a surprisingly good showing in the Arkansas primary and actually had 23 pledged delegates at the DNC.

Terry’s strategy was a little bit different; he was pooling all of his money into big ad buys, specifically during the Super Bowl, to generate buzz and word-of-mouth messaging. So far, this is just a season six episode of The West Wing, but as always, Terry took it way too far. As you can see from the screenshot above, his campaign slogan was "To Bring America Face To Face With Aborted Babies"; Terry was back on message, since the social safety net thing didn’t really work in 1998. His plans for the ad buys, in a true throwback to Operation Rescue's style, were to run graphic videos of abortions being performed and fetal tissue being mutilated, during the 2012 Super Bowl. Shockingly, the networks declined Terry's ad buy. He appears to have slightly outperformed expectations in the Oklahoma primary, but as his objective seems to have been to draw attention to himself and his work, and as I didn't know he was running until I started putting this piece together seven years after the fact, he was likely disappointed with the outcome. Fortunately, he also had plenty of side projects to keep him busy.

CHAPTER FOUR - YOU HAVE TO CALL ME DRAGON

“Sizzlin’, steamin’, whistlin’, screamin’,
Let those cookies burn, girl
Something else is cookin’ here
This fire needs to burn out of control”

Terry was no longer head of Operation Rescue in the 2000s and 2010s, but he still had a very productive two decades. As was the case with many political candidates coming off of multiple embarrassing failures, Terry was starting to find a more comfortable career in right-wing media. He started his own show on the internet called Voice of Resistance Radio, which is still running today. Where he could, he traveled to find the next big controversy in American Christian morality. He moved to Florida in 2005 to run media strategy for Terry Schiavo's parents; in 2009, he brought his schtick to Indiana to protest the commencement at Notre Dame, where the speaker was Barack Obama (fun fact, that was my commencement, and the first time I learned who Randall Terry was. I did not know that protesting my commencement was only the twelfth worst thing Terry had done). Terry fancied himself a sort of Christian "dragon-slayer"; I'm using that term because he self-published a book called Dragon Slayers in 2013, and because a profile from National Catholic Register in 2006 described him in the headline as "still slaying dragons", and because of this from the New York Times:

"His reality includes no intention of backing off from organizing opposition to abortion and homosexual marriage, and every intention of reclaiming the spotlight to which he was once so accustomed. He still fancies himself a dragon slayer: he recently had T-shirts made in this motif, and the sculpture of a dragon slayer that he commissioned sits on his piano.”

The sculpture is also mentioned in the Register piece, which means Terry sat down with multiple interviewers and kept pointing to the dragon statue and going "get it? Get it? That's me right there. I'm the dragon slayer. Also you have to call me Dragon." Kudos to him for saying that a full decade before Step Brothers came out. 

His family life was also keeping him busy, although not as busy at it could have, because Terry is a piece of shit who has basically disowned three of his children, in addition to the ones he didn't pay child support for. Terry has fostered and adopted three children; he claims to have fostered the first boy from a mother who was originally planning to terminate her pregnancy, and then eventually adopted the child's two sisters. All three children are biracial; in the nineties, Terry would circulate a resume in his professional circles that read "Children: One by birth and three black foster children," the famous phrase that all cool and normal dads use. He kicked one of those daughters out of the house after she became pregnant out of wedlock, and kicked another one out after she got pregnant and converted to Islam. In the years since, Terry has released increasingly Islamophobic pamphlets and videos on his website, spewing the same "religion of murderers" bile that you can find in the darkest corners of the Internet.

His son, Jamiel, was gay (Jamiel is now deceased, after being killed in a car accident), and came out publicly in Out magazine in 2004, in an effort to help other gay children in Christian households come to terms with their sexuality. Terry responded by calling the article a betrayal, accusing Jamiel of "prostituting" the Terry family name, offering to send him to conversion therapy, threatening to kick him out of the house, and eventually posting a miserable open letter on his website titled "My Prodigal Son, The Homosexual", claiming that Jamiel was just confused and his life was in shambles because of his criminal addict biological mother. 

So, if it's not clear yet, fuck Randall Terry forever. The Washington Post covered Terry and his collapsing relationship with Jamiel in 2004. It gives Jamiel the last word: "I still fight the thought that I'm committing a mortal sin…God knows my heart. Randall Terry doesn't know my heart.” The Post piece is filled with many heartbreaking sentences on their relationship just like that one, and then it also has one hilarious one: "Sometimes [Jamiel would] sneak into his father's library late at night and look at his collection of books on gays and gay life (Terry maintained the collection so he could speak with authority on such questions).”

The National Catholic Register, in their 2006 profile of Terry, also made reference to his falling out with Jamiel, and Terry's horrifying response:

“I have to be honest with him…Would you tell a drug addict, ‘I accept you. This is your choice, this is your life and I will stand by you’? The average death age of a male homosexual is 42 years old because of disease, because of suicide, because of alcoholism, because of drugs, because of violence. It’s just not a good world. It’s a self-abusive, self-destructive sexual addiction.”

The reason that the Register was writing a profile of him was that Terry had just converted to Catholicism in 2006. The author of the piece speaks of Terry's "sacrifice" in the anti-abortion movement, and "sacrifice" in selflessly adopting and fostering these kids he hates. Overall, it’s a pretty friendly profile from a conservative-leaning publication, and it also included a passing reference to his favorite hobby:

"As a child, Terry dreamed of attending Julliard and becoming a musician. While he never realized the first portion of that dream, in recent years he has realized the second. During a year in Nashville, Terry worked with professional musicians to produce two high-quality music CDs. Reviewers say his voice is reminiscent of contemporary Christian musician Michael W. Smith."

Ok that's interesting, but we'll put another pin in that. Overall, though, the Catholic church, or at least some of its more conservative members, were happy to welcome Dragon, hoping that he would bring his street-brawling tactics to the church's ongoing fight against abortion. Now, I can't speak to Terry's interior spiritual life and the real reason for his conversion. Maybe he legitimately thought he could find peace in the Catholic church after such a turbulent life. Maybe he was really moved by the sacraments. Or maybe he converted to Catholicism for tactical reasons, believing that he could leverage the church to vault himself back to the front of the anti-abortion movement and "reclaim the spotlight". I don't know how true each of those could be, but the third reason is the only one he wrote a book about.

CHAPTER FIVE - WELCOME ABOARD

“Let those cookies burn, girl
‘Cause love is on fire here
It’s been a-smokin’ and a-heatin’ and a-makin’ a bit of noise
So let those cookies burn”

If we want to get to the heart of Terry’s theories on direct action and exactly how he hopes to achieve all of his goals, we can just read them, because he wrote them down in one of his several books. 2008’s A Humble Plea to Bishops, Clergy, and Laymen: Ending the Abortion Holocaust is remarkable in how much information it provides on Terry’s strategy within the context of his membership in the Catholic church, and Terry’s understanding of his faith. Since I didn’t want Terry to get any royalties from me, I was glad to see that A Humble Plea was also available for free as a PDF on his website, and was only about 110 pages with very large font, making it a quick read. This will be the last time I compliment the book.

Otherwise, A Humble Plea is a miserable slog, given that Terry’s writing has all of the rhetorical finesse of a Doberman dry-humping your leg. He has essentially no understanding of metaphor or what would be inspiring to a reader, but rather prefers to beat his audience over the head with the same idea over and over until they stop objecting out of mental exhaustion. Inevitably and painfully, he quotes King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on page 47. The opening allegorical story he tells is amazing, in the sense that you will be amazed that this is what he went with after presumably at least one round of drafting and revising.

Picture this: Catholic bishops are being rounded up and murdered in the streets. It’s a horrifying epidemic of bishop-murdering, just bloody corpses lying around wearing miters and stuff. One lone activist tries to get the word out about starting to fight, physically fight, to stop their bishops from being murdered, but he’s dismissed as too divisive. Rather than take drastic and potentially violent action to defend their bishops, Catholics are content to give to pro-bishop foundations, put an “I’m pro-bishop and I vote” bumper sticker on their car, and pray an extra Hail Mary on Respect For Bishops Sunday. That won’t be enough to stop the killing, though, and bishops keep getting slaughtered. DO YOU GET IT YET??????????

Not only is Terry such a dumbass that he wrote a whole book to convince Catholic bishops that abortion is bad, something on which they already agree unanimously and are happy to say so, but his tactic for convincing them that something needs to be done is to go with “ah, you don’t care about all of the babies being killed? Well, what if instead of babies, it was YOU??? Doesn’t seem so insignificant now, does it?” Now brace yourself for the even bigger reveal: 

“You will notice, if you haven’t already, that my choice of words is deliberately jolting, even shrill. Just like the “Pro-Bishop” activist in my allegory, I have been accused of being overheated, controversial, and radical. I acknowledge that my words grate and jolt, and cause discomfort. This is deliberate.” [emphasis Terry’s, emphasis is always Terry’s]

Terry has finally unveiled that he is being a dick on purpose, and you, the reader, are floored. The primary audience for A Humble Plea is explicitly Catholic bishops, but Terry, who has only been Catholic for two years at this point, seems to have hilariously misread his audience. The “even shrill” language, the graphic images used to describe abortions, the painfully obvious allegories, the punishing repetition: these are all tactics that feel more at home in Terry’s old fundamentalist churches than in Catholicism. A Humble Plea reads like a very long Chick Tract without any cool cartoons or theories about the Jesuits being lizard aliens. Here are my three favorite images from the book:

• “And the one word that they [abortion rights supporters] dread more than Dracula dreads a crucifix is the word used by John Paul II – murder.”

• “I ask these rhetorical questions to give some ethical and political clarity: After Herod murdered the innocent children of Bethlehem. . . . Could we vote for Herod? Should we serve Herod Holy Communion? If not, how could we vote for or serve Communion to the child-killers of today?”

• “Picture this: I’m in my car at a traffic light, and a man taps on my window, and says: “Excuse me sir, I want to go a couple of miles down the road to rob a bank. Would you please give me a ride?” If I say, “Sure . . . hop in!”, and take him to the bank, knowing his intent, and he keeps his word to rob the bank, I have participated in the sin of bank robbery! Likewise, if I'm at a traffic light, and a man taps on my window and says, “I’m a pro-choice candidate, and I will defend a woman’s right to an abortion. Would you please get me into public office?” If I say, “Sure, hop in!” and drive him to the voting booth and vote for him, knowing his intent, I have participated in the sin of child-killing!”

As Terry puts it in the introduction, “I promise you this: most readers will read things they have never read before. Hopefully they will be useful tools to you.” After reading that abortion rights supporters dread the word “murder” “more than Dracula dreads a crucifix”, I am inclined to agree with him; I certainly have never read anything like that before.

The reason Terry misread his audience isn’t just because he thinks he’s able to talk to bishops on their turf and tell them something new; it’s because of what "the humble plea" actually is. He’s asking the bishops to lead the way on a sweeping electoral and direct action campaign to end abortion in America. After tracing a eighth-grade level history of civil disobedience in America (it’s what Martin Luther King did, MAYBE YOU’VE HEARD OF HIM MISTER BISHOP?), he spells out that “many [bishops] believe that they have fulfilled their “prolife duty” before God and man because they gave money to a crisis pregnancy center, or they went to Washington, D.C., on January 22 to march for life. But they are sadly mistaken.” If that wasn’t blunt enough, he continues:

“After a quarter-century of deep involvement in this struggle, I am convinced that the single greatest reason legalized child-killing continues today is because the bulk of American clergy – bishops, priests, evangelical personalities, and pastors – have failed to courageously, clearly, and consistently defend the innocent from the pulpit, in print, and over the airwaves. They have refused to “convince, rebuke, and exhort” those over whom they have influence.”

One thing that one hundred percent of the current Catholic bishops have in common is that they are all old men. Some of them are very old. Most of what they do in their day-to-day work is figure out which parishes to close and who to write the out-of-court settlement checks to. This isn’t to say that the Catholic church doesn’t get involved in direct action; there are plenty of great examples from the church's history of radical Catholics throwing themselves into the material and political struggles of their times. But almost none of them were bishops; as with basically every other social movement, radical action was led by the young people at the bottom of society, or the laity in the case of the church. “Lead a civil disobedience movement” is one of the worst tasks you can give these men, right behind "turn over your personnel files to the state AG". These are septuagenarians spending their time in conferences and figuring out how to keep their diocese financially solvent. Terry also overestimated their influence on the laity, given that when bishops speak out on political issues, particularly ones involving sexual morality, the large majority of Catholics just kind of shrug it off and get on with their lives.

So, Terry identified the wrong people to act on his manifesto, but on top of that, he seems to have misjudged how much the bishops would give a shit about what he has to say. There are plenty of bishops who would publicly speak out against abortion, including in an electoral context, but that was happening long before Terry joined the church; remember, it was happening as far back as 1984. Bishops are not at all accountable to the laity, and that probably was obvious in 2008, but it’s definitely obvious today. Laity can’t make bishops do anything, and in the current structure of the church, the only person who can fire or really even reprimand a bishop is the Pope; that’s why, when the original sexual abuse crisis broke in the early 2000s and crested again in 2018, almost all of the bishops involved in it kept their jobs. It's why bishops who cover up abuse or hide records today get to keep their jobs for so long after they're found out. And that’s extremely bad for the church, but it hasn’t changed yet. One guy who just converted two years ago printing out a pamphlet isn’t going to get the entire American episcopate falling in step behind him.

To be clear, Terry definitely thinks that’s going to happen. He writes as much towards the end of the book, when he gives his lay readers explicit instructions to give copies of the book to their parish priests and hound them until they give detailed responses on what they agreed and disagreed with in Terry’s writing. As much as parish priests enjoy being assigned book reports from people they kind of know, Terry’s strategy seems to have flopped. But he urges his readers to do the same thing when they see their bishops, to do whatever they can to get a copy into their hands and urge them to read it. Then, incredibly, he writes this:

“Third, if you go on a pilgrimage to Rome, as crazy as this sounds, take a few copies with you and give them to any cardinals or bishops or members of the Vatican household that you see. It is no secret to the Roman Hierarchy that the Church in America has lost her way. The Vatican is acutely aware that there are renegade bishops in America – not to mention the Catholic universities and teaching organizations that deny central elements of the Catholic Faith.”

I suppose that's one way to sell a lot of books and get your name out there (it's also wild that his line of thought was "the good pro-life Pope can straighten out these renegade bishops", when the hard-right wing of American Catholicism believes the exact opposite just ten years later). I’m not done yet, though. “If by some miracle, the Holy Father or someone in the Vatican Household receives and reads this, I beg your consideration of the plight of the babies, as well as the difficulties endured by the faithful as we seek to end this holocaust.” Terry was hoping for A Humble Plea to ride a groundswell of support to the Pope’s desk; a two-year convert, essentially a carpetbagger to Catholicism, was going to convince the Pope to radically redesign the church. The institutions of the church would hear the cry of the faithful, led by Randall Terry, and finally take on the mission to end abortion in America, returning Terry to the head of the movement he believes he deserves to lead. Unfortunately for Randall Terry, and for most Catholics who knew this already, the institutions of the church are not particularly good at listening to or acting on the cry of the faithful. So, since I didn’t get to say this to Randall Terry when he first converted to Catholicism, I will say it now: welcome aboard.

CHAPTER SIX - PULLING OUT THE PINS

If Terry is this bad at thinking through and writing out his prose, how do you think he did in his music career? Surprisingly, songwriting is a place of clear strength for Terry, and reveals an emotional depth and intellect that you wouldn’t find in his activist work I’m kidding his music is awful.

Time to pull out the pins from earlier. Terry, when he wasn't terrorizing women and sending unsolicited PDFs to pope@vatican.va, wrote songs in his spare time, and has released two full-length albums. The later one, 2003's Dark Sunglasses Day, is currently streaming on Spotify, and I've listened to all of it. And yes, it's definitely the same Randall Terry. I was worried about that too, and did a lot of digging online to see if I could confirm that this was the same guy, and couldn't find what I needed until I just went to Terry's website and saw that he was still selling the album both by itself and as part of a bundle pack with A Humble Plea.

This is not an album of anti-abortion anthems, and most (not all) of the songs are not explicitly Christian. It's just a straight country album, with several early-2000s country tropes making an appearance. There's the butterfly-kiss-style ode to a daughter "Daddy's Girl", presumably addressed only to the children Terry chose to support financially. There's wedding-vow first-dance ballad "I Do", presumably addressed to the coed that Terry left his first wife for. There's the don't-play-games rocker "Slow Down Baby", presumably addressed to, I don't know, his old church or something.

To be clear, it's not a very good country album. The best tracks on the album are the ones that are entirely forgettable. Unfortunately, there are a few that I can't forget, notably "Let Those Cookies Burn", a line dance celebration of having sex in the kitchen, from which I pulled the chapter epigraphs for this piece. It's hard to listen to somebody who I know disowned his kids, who I know left his wife for a younger employee, who I know spent decades screaming "murderer" at women he didn't know, attempt to be sexy. You kind of have to listen to it while you do something else so you don't keep your full focus on it. If you go back and reread the lyrics, you'll see that the images Terry uses go about as far as "it's hot in the kitchen, and also if we have sex it would be hot, but hot means a different thing in the second scenario"; coming off of reading A Humble Plea and listening to these tortured attempts at sounding poetic, I definitely felt like this was the work of the same man who gave us the “pro-bishop activist” allegory.

“Let Those Cookies Burn” is the funniest song on the album, but it's not the strangest. That’s the sappy (maybe?), Christian (maybe?), and jingoistic (maybe?) “United We Stand”. I can’t be sure because it’s very hard to pin down exactly what Terry is trying to do with this song. On the one hand, it’s probably a cheap ripoff of “God Bless the USA”, with a nice slow beat, overproduced guitars, and a big triumphant “God Bless America” in the chorus that people can sing along to drunkenly. Actually, the full chorus is this:

“God bless America/
God have mercy on our shores/
Take our hand, united we stand/
Lead us through the dark night of our soul!”

“Dark night of our soul” feels a little out of place, and “God have mercy on our shores” doesn’t feel like a complete thought, nor does it rhyme with "soul". But I guess in 2003, we still had post-9/11 songs about recovering from the attack and coming together as a nation, and we were looking for any sort of music that we could feel “proud to be American” to. So, if I were evaluating only by the criteria of that genre, and if I were only looking at other songs that came out in 2003, I’d rank Terry’s song somewhere below Yellowcard’s hit pop-punk single “Believe”. But it’s Terry, so you know this can’t just be a God Bless America song, it’s going to get much weirder, very quickly. Here’s the bridge, coming out of nowhere:

“We’re hunting outlaws, they’re hiding out in caves/
We’ll get ‘em dead or alive/
The lion they woke has started roarin’/
And the eagle is soarin’/
They’re callin’ for a holy war/
Hey, you want some of this, we got a lot more!/
They chose when it began, we choose when it ends!”

Oh, okay. It’s that kind of song. I suppose we know Terry is an Islamophobe, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that he would write a Toby Keith-style “boot in your ass” anthem. But I don’t think the call to arms and celebration of killing everyone in the Middle East is supposed to sneak up on you during the bridge. This is a ballad! The verses are about how happy and proud he feels to be an American! Three tracks earlier there was a song about having sex in the kitchen! Toby Keith’s song includes an extended metaphor about America getting sucker punched, looking back at her assailant through a black eye, and rallying with Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty to “light up your world like the Fourth of July”. It’s not a good song, and it definitely doesn’t say anything good about America, but Keith was actually having fun when he sang it and it’s faster than 80 bpm. 

As he has demonstrated throughout his entire career, Randall Terry does not understand metaphors or similes or implied meanings (or, in the case of "Let Those Cookies Burn", innuendo). One thing cannot also be another thing, as that would suggest the existence of a thing that is not Randall Terry. There is no image that I can find on this album that is not meant absolutely literally. In that America song, when he references a "lion" and "eagle", I can't discount the possibility that he's referring to actual animals. 

I was also stunned at the complete absence of response to this album that I could find online. There are, as far as I can tell, no professional reviews, positive or negative, available anywhere on the Internet. I couldn't even look up the lyrics, as they're not written up anywhere online, so I had to transcribe the lyrics for the chapter epigraphs by listening to "Let Those Cookies Burn" over and over again (I'm still not 100% sure about "makin' a bit of noise"). This is probably the exact reception that Terry deserves in all of his endeavors: total silence and emptiness, to mirror the moral and creative vacuum inside of him. Not enough people did this in response to his politics, but they did in response to his music. He terrorized countless women, skimmed funds for his personal enrichment, and has perhaps permanently damaged the image of Christians and Catholics in public life, but at least we can roast his shitty country album.

EPILOGUE - THREE THEORIES OF CHANGE

As I was writing this last piece, I realized that each of the three men featured in this series wanted to bring about sweeping and lasting changes to American Catholicism, but each had a very different idea on how to bring about that change, and each failed in a distinctly different way.

Tom Monaghan's theory of change involved investing in higher education, believing that it would influence the laity, judiciary, and clergy later down the line. That maybe could have worked with a different person in charge, but Monaghan had no idea what he was doing, and he refused to have anyone competent helping him. So, Ave Maria University is a joke and continues to molder down in Florida. Rick Heilman's theory of change involved producing a ton of content for new media. You can find him on roughly 100,000 podcast episodes, YouTube videos, and blog posts, but he's also soaked up too much of the poison in that world. He's probably selling enough red hats to pay the bills, but he's quarantined off in the alt-right Catholic corner of the Internet and isn't ever going to bring about the widespread cultural change he hoped for.

While Randall Terry is the most obviously villainous subject of this series, and while I'm really disgusted by him, his theory of change is the closest of the three to mine. Terry says that the fastest and most effective way to change society is through direct action and civil disobedience. After the time I've spent with organizers, striking workers, and socialists over the past few years, I'd say some version of the same thing. His writings and interviews confirm that he's got some familiarity with the mass movements of history, and he says he's trying to take the lessons from those movements and use them to end abortion in his lifetime.

Still, Terry has made almost every decision incorrectly when it comes to building a mass direct action movement. He enforced a rigidly patriarchal structure instead of building inclusively and democratically. He directed all of his movement's focus to only one issue, instead of trying to make a case that it was connected with other struggles. He targeted the powerless and vulnerable through his actions, making him a vile asshole instead of a fearless champion for justice. He emphasized the need to continuously fight and keep demonstrating, but also found time to jet down to Nashville and record a terrible album (he also, just to revisit this, sounds nothing like Michael W. Smith). He converted to Catholicism and appealed directly to the bishops, incorrectly assuming that they would be down for direct action or at all interested in what a layperson had to say. He tried to write a theory for the movement to reach a larger audience, but has no rhetorical gifts of any kind. He realized that spreading the message online was important, but he sells PDFs and DVDs on a website that isn't secure (please do not give Randall Terry your credit card number). And ultimately, he ran counter to every successful model of leadership in social movements by putting himself at the center of everything and making sure he had the loudest microphone; he couldn't even stand the idea of Operation Rescue continuing without him on the marquee and literally sued them to get the name back. None of these are the decisions you would make if you wanted to end abortion, but they are the decisions you'd make if you wanted to amass money, power, and notoriety as quickly as possible.

Every issue - abortion, immigration, public education, labor, you name it - has a few Randall Terrys, although they don’t all record country albums. But there are plenty of people who say they’re the new Martin Luther King because they can protest, when they’re just out there defending the people who already have way too much power, and treating everyone they meet along the way with a complete absence of compassion, empathy, or basic humanity. They target and demonize those who are already powerless, they use a warped interpretation of their faith to justify what they’re doing, and they conveniently find a way to enrich themselves while doing it. Left unchecked, they usually end up getting what they want; Terry is terrible at this, but people like him, with a little more tact, have been working hard to keep the powerful in power - whether they be men, rich people, white people, or otherwise - and subjugate the poor and marginalized for decades. I don't fully know what it will take to take power away from grifters like these. But it's very likely that it's going to take some direct action, because - it's still true - direct action gets the goods.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get  notified of future installments. 

Sources used for this piece include:

Randall A. Terry, A Humble Plea to Bishops, Clergy, and Laymen: Ending the Abortion Holocaust (2008)
Randall Terry, Dark Sunglasses Day (2003)
Rolling Stone - “The Gospel According to Randall Terry” (1989)
Los Angeles Times - “Operation Rescue: Soldiers in a ‘Holy War’ on Abortion” (1989)
New York Times - “Icon for Abortion Protestors is Looking for Second Act” (2001)
The Nation - “Faith and Commandments on the Campaign Trail” (1998, reposted on the author’s site in 2009)
Sunshine State News - “Pro-Life Activist Randall Terry Looks to Defeat Barack Obama…” (2011)
National Catholic Register - “Pro-Life Activist Randall Terry Converts to Catholicism, Still Slaying Dragons” (2006)
Media Matters For America - “Who Is Randall Terry?” (2005)
Rewire - “Randall Terry: Faux-Life Leader” (2009)
Operation Rescue - “Newman Prevails in Trademark Dispute” (2013)
Operation Save America - “Please Pray for Randall Terry” (2000)
Orlando Sentinel - “Candidate Pins Senate Campaign on Web Videos” (2006)
Washington Post - “Family Values” (2004)
BeliefNet - “My Prodigal Son, the Homosexual” (2004)