One time, some big name national antiabortion leaders were visiting town, so the locals decided to put on a show for them. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was alerted, and sent a squad in to the clinic, taping the crowd (about 2000) so that if some of them committed crimes, they could be identified. I was also inside.

Fist they listened to emotionally inciting firebrand speeches. Then they marched around the clinic seven times, and each time, these guys blew trumpets. The reference was clearly to the Battle of Jericho, where the walls fell down after trumpet blasts, and then Joshua’s army entered and slaughtered every person inside.

Worked up into a self-righteous lather, they began besieging the clinic door in waves. The clinic guard, a local cop wearing an antiabortion ‘precious feet’ pin on his lapel, called back and said that he didn’t think he could hold them back, at which point this tiny black woman with the FDLC drew this big ass gun and told the cop that if he couldn’t hold them back, to just let ‘em on through, and she’d deal with them herself.

He suddenly found the strength to hold the door.

The mass protests stopped after we turned the protest tables on them. One bright Sunday morning, we drove from the local Catholic church supporting the actions, to the local Southern Baptist church that was bussing in church member protestors, and then to the local Assembly of God church that was also bussing in protesters from their pews. In each place, dozens of women who had been painted ghostly white with stage paint and were clothed in white shroudlike dresses silently protested outside the churches when they let out of services, each of them holding a tombstone shaped sign on which were displayed the graphic particulars of women who has died from illegal abortions.

The church members were horrified; they never imagined when they began dishing it out that they might have to take it. Our counter-protests made the local paper and TV station, the ministers of those congregations took heavy public flak, and the weekly church congregation antiabortion protester bussings ended.