Protectors of the Code

The Christmas Day Abortion Clinic Bombing

E. Michael Jones

Fidelity Press

206 Marquette Avenue

South Bend, Indiana 46617

Cover Art: Robert F. McGovern

© 1985, 2012 Fidelity Press

To Phil Dreisbach and Pat Monaghan

Table of Contents

Preface

"God Has His Hand On Pensacola"

The Death Lobby

Praying At Brownsville

Test It Out

The Trial Begins

A Reporter From The Village Voice

Opening Remarks

Monaghan's Opening Statement

Controlling Destiny

Rex Morgan, M.D. Enters The Case

Monaghan Hits His Stride

Mass At St. Michael's

The Confessions

A Big Firecracker

All Time Low

The Split Between Monaghan And Shimek

16,000 Canaries Would Have Been News

Saturday Morning

Assignment Life

Maleness Is Normality

"Their Faith Is All They've Got"

A Fanatic About Religion

Faith And Reason

The Defense Rests Its Case

The Government Rebuttal

The Closing Arguments

"Do You Want The Altars Of Baal Back?"

"Follow The Law"

A Thirteenth Juror

The Law Is King

What's Next?

The Case Goes To The Jury

Wednesday Morning

The Jury Announces Its Verdict

It Can Happen Here

Postmortem

A Ritual With The Unborn

Epilogue

Biographical Note

Preface

Protectors of the Code is the chronicle of one of the most intense two-week periods in my life. The Christmas Day, 1984, bombing of the Ladies Center abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, was national news. The April, 1985 trial of those accused of the bombing, which I attended almost 30 years ago, occurred at a time when those involved with the defense team in one way or another sincerely believed that the country was going to put an end to abortion one way or another, either by governmental fiat or by popular dissent.

The jury had an opportunity to send the country a message but got tongue-tied at the last minute. Evil never stands still, and as a result of that failure to act then, the killing has increased. Once it was clear that the life of the unborn was dispensable, it was only a short step to gunning down movie theater patrons in Colorado or grade school pupils in Connecticut. The government that didn't act then to end abortion now brags, as both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have, about murdering heads of state, criminal suspects who in a saner age would have been brought to trial, and those unlucky enough to fall into the sights of predator drones. It has all flowed quite naturally from those ten intense days in Florida during the spring of 1985.

E. Michael Jones

Christmas 2012

... the force of a law depends on the extent of its justice.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica

Quest. 95, Art. 2

... in America THE LAW IS KING.

Thomas Paine

Common Sense

1

"God Has His Hand On Pensacola"

"See that black girl there," John Burt gestured across the living room of Our Father's House, the home for unwed mothers he had established in Pensacola. "Her daddy was a Black Panther. He knows that I was in the Klan. When he sees this he's gonna think I'm up to my old tricks."

Burt pointed to two lumpy effigies sitting in chairs on either side of the entrance to Our Father's House. Both had hangman's nooses around their necks. lt reminded me of a Halloween party.

"That's Bo Bagenholm. He's one of the abortionists in town."

He produced a picture of the Swedish doctor with the well-trimmed beard. I had already seen pictures of him standing outside his bombed out abortion clinic wearing a surgical scrub top and jogging shorts, talking with one of the town's other abortionists, Linda Taggert, who was also about to be hanged in effigy.

"The girls got him pretty good," Burt said.

I had to agree. Abortionist Taggert had a trickle of artificial blood running down the side of her face from the corner of her mouth. Burt cited Joe Scheidler's book Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion as his authority.

"We're gonna hang 'em both," Burt said.

Everyone chuckled.

Burt became involved in the abortion issue in 1981 after reading a newspaper article which reported that for every ten live births in Escambia County there were seven abortions. Antiabortion work just seemed to him the logical extension of the ministry to the homeless and downtrodden of Pensacola he had already started. Burt did not come by his ministry naturally. Born and raised in the small Florida town of Palatka, Burt developed a taste for liquor before he was out of high school. By the time he left the Marines four years after graduating from high school, he had added a number of other chemicals to his repertoire. "He was," according to a story on him in the local paper, "hitting prescription drugs, uppers, downers, pot and everything else he could get his hands on." In 1971 Burt met his current wife Linda, who by then was separated from the man she had married at age 14. The two moved in together and led an on-again off-again life throughout the mid-seventies, with their children by previous marriages passing in and out of their lives. Eventually they divorced their respective spouses and married in 1975. Then in 1976 John got saved. "Maybe it was that I was facing all those bounced checks, or maybe it was a little girl (his stepdaughter) bugging me, or maybe it was that I had been popping pills the whole night before. I came to the point where I had my back against the wall. I don't know what happened, but I made a commitment to the Lord."

The above account appeared in the Pensacola News Journal on February 3, 1985. By that point Burt had become the unofficial leader of the antiabortion forces in Pensacola. Less than two weeks later Burt was arrested for trespassing and carrying a concealed tape recorder, a felony in Florida, when he walked into Bagenholm's office with the intention of counseling those inside. On March 9 he appeared on the Pensacola based WEAR-TV to discuss the abortion issue and in the middle of the interview produced "Baby Charlie" from underneath his suit jacket, an 18 to 20 week old fetus killed by saline abortion. Earlier on the same day Burt had marched with country western singer turned evangelist Penny Lea and about 4,000 other people to one of the abortion clinics which had been restored after the Christmas bombings. There, imitating the story of the destruction of Jericho, they prayed and blew trumpets and shouted in unison seven times, "Let my children go." The trumpets proved less effective than the pipe bombs, but the march was a good indication of the state of mind of Pensacola. "God," said Jack Brown, director of Our Mother's Home, the Catholic equivalent of Our Father's House, "has his hand on Pensacola."

Apparently the Almighty really started leaning on this northern Florida town in the spring of 1983. Penny Lea appeared for a Mother's Day rally that began at the First Baptist Church, not far from the courthouse where the bombers were to be tried. Gradually the issue of abortion began to impinge on the public consciousness in the same way that it had on John Burt's consciousness. Picketing of the abortion clinics followed, and with the picketing and the awareness of what abortion was and that it was going on in their town, came the feeling that something should be done about it. Then something was done. In June 1984 a bomb ripped through the Ladies' Center, causing $40,000 in damage. Six months later the bombers struck again, this time hitting all three abortion clinics in town simultaneously. The second time around the bombers made one mistake. They switched from plastic to steel pipe to get a bigger explosion. When the agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived on the scene they were able to find fragments of pipe and eventually trace them to the supplier where they were purchased by Matthew John Goldsby, who was arrested less than a week later along with his accomplice, James Thomas Simmons. This was the season for bombings. But even with all of the activity happening throughout the country, the Pensacola Four had a knack for drawing attention to themselves. First of all they were young and good looking, and secondly Kaye Wiggins, Goldsby's fianceé, went on national TV, not to mention speaking with People, Time, Newsweek, and The Washington Post, and called the Christmas Day bombings "a birthday present for Jesus." It was copy few editors could resist. Perhaps that was what made Pensacola THE bombing story. Perhaps that was why the national press was converging on Pensacola for the trial. Penny Lea had said that God had chosen Pensacola as the first city to target.

Paul Shimek, the fundamentalist lawyer who originally had intended to defend all four defendants simultaneously, had a knack too for flamboyant, religiously-oriented statements, the kind that editors love to hang on prolifers. He declared at the beginning that he was "the only lawyer in Pensacola who understands the scriptural and spiritual aspects" of the case. "This is a spiritual world," he said at another point. "We are all influenced by demons and spirits. ... This is a far deeper matter than is on the surface."

Eventually it became too involved for just one lawyer. Shimek contacted Charles E. Rice of the Notre Dame Law School, who in turn contacted Thomas Patrick Monaghan of Bardstown, Kentucky, with whom Rice had founded Free Speech Advocates, a legal organization which supports the constitutional rights of antiabortion protestors. God, it seemed, was determined to get involved in the case in one way or another. In the end the defendants had a total of six Christian lawyers working for them: two fundamentalists, Paul Shimek and his son Artie, two Catholics, Pat Monaghan and Katie Short, and two Episcopalians, Frank Booker of the Notre Dame Law School and Christine Kasun, a former assistant prosecutor from San Francisco. In the end, Monaghan was to describe it as "an All-American Ecumenical Presentation."

2

The Death Lobby

The death lobby, too, had made it known that it was interested in the case. Tom Wicker had squatted over the editorial page of The New York Times and after straining as hard as he could came up with "a crucial distinction between what I'd call moral vigilantism and civil disobedience." The distinction was, of course, that according to the Times it was okay to break the law if you were for civil rights for blacks in the sixties but not okay to break the law if you were for civil rights for the unborn in the eighties. People who agreed with the Times were "conservative"; those who bombed clinics were "destructive — not just physically but to the democratic process," said Wicker wiping the sweat off his forehead.

Rosalind Petchesky, writing for The Nation, opined that abortion "threatens patriarchal control over women's sexuality." And then an orgy of feminist paranoia and boilerplate went on to make a perverse approximation of one of the truths that would dominate the trial. "Indeed the abortion debate is less about motherhood than about manhood." If she had said it specifically about the bombings, Petchesky would have been right. Monaghan made the same point throughout the trial. "Matt Goldsby," Petchesky continued, "is only the shadow of the big men who are his leaders: the Joe Scheidlers, John Burts and others in the antiabortion crusade who advocate direct action and cheer his 'heroism'; the fundamentalist preachers in his community and around the country; the Catholic bishops who threaten to expel nuns who support a woman's right to choose; the director of the F. B. I., who says the bombings are not 'true terrorism' because they don't attack the government; and Ronald Reagan, who refuses to order a national investigation and who on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade assured a right-to-life rally of his 'great solidarity' with people who call abortion baby killing." Petchesky was right in a way that spoke eloquently for the divine ability of the Truth to proclaim itself even in the mouths of those who are bent on perverting it. The trial was about manhood. As St. Augustine once said, "All who desert you and set themselves up against you merely copy you in perverse way." Petchesky was proclaiming the truth. God was making use of her in a way that transcended her ability to understand His designs. The same was true of everyone else involved in the trial. Ultimately it was God's show, and America was being asked to come up with a verdict.

The local chapter of the death lobby held its own press conference on the day before the trial was to begin, an hour before press credentials were to be distributed, in the room next door to where they would be given out. Even still, less than ten reporters showed up. Gloria Mattingly, president of the Pensacola chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), began by reading a statement to the press. When another TV camera showed up she stopped in the middle of what she had to say and waited and then started all over from the beginning again. I entered the room with John Burt, causing the NOW types to start whispering to each other. Apparently everyone knew who John Burt was. Perhaps they half expected him to pull out Baby Charlie in the middle of Ms. Mattingly's speech.

"Tourism and new industry is jeopardized," Mattingly opined ungrammatically from the front of the little room. "The good name of our city, proudly known as 'the golden gate to the sunshine state' hangs in the balance."

Mattingly had claimed earlier in a newspaper article that NOW had "grown steadily" in Pensacola in the months following the bombings. "We had four people join today," she said proudly on March 3. That brought the total number of NOW members in Pensacola up to 40. NOW had called a meeting for city council members on their proposed ordinance limiting picketing for the middle of the trial but had to cancel when it became clear that no one was going to show up. Since there was no other news on Sunday, however, the NOW press conference received front page sympathetic coverage.

In response to a question from the press, Ms. Mattingly found it "very unfortunate" that Dr. Permenter, one of the abortionists, had "stopped providing services for the community" when his building got leveled as a part of Pensacola's Christmas present to Baby Jesus.

When I asked her if she knew whether the fetuses that were killed in the womb were male or female, Ms. Mattingly claimed not to know. "You have to go to the experts to get that information," she said.

Afterward the press seemed more interested in talking to John Burt. One got the impression that he was a better source of copy than the euphemisms and evasions of the death lobby.

"Brand-new prolifers," he said, "could tell you more about the fetus than these people. She knows. She just doesn't want to answer."

When everyone had drifted away, I asked John about Goldsby and Simmons. Contrary to the reports in The Nation, Burt was not their leader. He had never seen them before they made the national press as a result of the bombings. Goldsby's mother had picketed with Burt's people, but Goldsby thought such actions futile.

"She rebuked me when I tried to talk to one of the girls," said one of the residents of Our Father's House of Goldsby's mother.

"Do you think that God would tell somebody to do something like that?" I asked Burt referring to the bombings.

"I don't know. Do you?"

Before I could answer he finished what he was going to say anyway.

"God told the Israelites to tear down the altars of Baal, didn't he?"

God, I began to think, had urged quite a bit of destruction in the Bible, and not just of property either. The question of Matt and Jimmy's motivation was inextricably bound up with their inchoate theology.

3

Praying At Brownsville

Part of the Dictates of Righteousness of Our Father's House — their house rules, in other words — in fact the very first Dictate of Righteousness, was "mandatory church attendance with the household." No one objected when I went to the Black Catholic church in the neighborhood for Mass on Sunday morning; nobody objected when I asked to go along to the prayer service at the Brownsville Assembly of God Church with them in the evening either. John decided to pass because he had to get his scaffold ready for the next day's demonstration. Monday was the first day of the trial. Bo and Linda needed a cross beam that wouldn't let them down in front of the TV cameras.

"On January 1, 1901 the gift of the spirit came to Agnes N. Ozman, a student in Bethel Bible College, recently founded in Topeka, Kansas, by Charles F. Parham, a prominent Holiness evangelist." So describes Sydney E. Ahlstrom the beginning of the Assemblies of God sect. In 1908 A. J. Tomlinson consolidated the Holiness movement in the area around Cleveland, Tennessee and soon the Pentecostal movement was spread to Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The Assemblies of God grew out of Methodism but were more Pentecostal in their orientation. They believed in speaking in tongues, divine healing, distrusted medical care, and practiced a Puritanical code of personal behavior (A Religious History of the American People, p. 820). They were theologically conservatives when it came to the fundamentalist controversy, taking a clear stand for scriptural infallibility. They did not, however, align themselves with the classical Reformed denominations on the issue of predestination and as a result "added a large militant faction to the Arminian wing of Protestant conservatism" (p. 820). "We believe," I read in a pamphlet someone gave me during the Sunday evening services, "it is God's plan for every Christian to receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit. This New Testament experience is evidenced first by speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance and, finally, by the spiritual power to witness and to live the full, happy, and godly life outlined in the Bible."

Services at Brownsville began with singing. The front of the church was occupied with a large stage upon which stood the choir and the musicians, two pianists, a drummer, and a bass player. I found myself understanding why the Protestants did better at TV than the Catholics did. There was more showmanship in their services. After the singing someone asked if anyone new was in the audience, causing me to raise my arm timidly. The good looking pregnant lady from Fort Walton Beach sitting next to me took my arm and raised it high enough for the man up front to see it. As a result I got my visitor's pack, which included a Brownsville Assembly of God pen, "Where Jesus is Real," and a yellow card describing the various manifestations the Holy Spirit might take with members of the congregation, assuring me that if someone keeled over I should not be alarmed. The person was being slain in the spirit.

Finally, we got to the preaching. It was not on abortion. John Burt told me later that the church's pastor did not support him in his antiabortion apostolate. It was on doctrinal matters. The congregation was told that some people there didn't know if they had been saved or not. Those who hadn't found out (Rev. Kilpatrick spent much of his time eyeing me during this part of the sermon.) should get in contact with someone who had. The foundation of everything else was this experience that they called being saved. Everything else was built on that. "You've got to quit following every wind of doctrine," Brother Kilpatrick said at one point. "You gotta get preacher religion out of your craw," he said at another. "You gotta get your eyes on Jesus." From what I could gather from the theology preached at Brownsville, the church, or the churches, could be a hindrance for the Christian. They could distract him from his main duty, which was to follow Jesus alone, not preachers and not church doctrine. "You better learn to hear from yourself," Rev. Kilpatrick said, and I began to see that even if the Assemblies of God Church did not advocate bombing, even if they hadn't taken a strong stand on abortion, their theology put little check on the inner voice, and gave little help in discerning where it came from.

4

Test It Out

Before the trial was over I had the chance to talk with the Reverend Glyn Lowery of the Pace Assembly of God Church. I asked him a variation of the same question I asked just about everybody in Pensacola.

"If God told you to blow up an abortion clinic, would you do it?"

Brother Lowery affirmed that he would. I didn't find the answer surprising. If God told me to do it, I would too. And the more I thought about it, the less I felt it was out of God's character to make such a request. The real issue, though, was: knowing whether God was really telling you to do it.

"You take it to the word of God," he said answering my question.

"But isn't that what the kids did? They opened the Bible to the Book of Judges and read about Gideon and the altars of Baal and then went and blew up the clinics."

"God don't mean get up and do it right then," he said. "He wants us to test it out. You cannot take any one passage out of context."

How, I began to wonder, trying to put myself in the shoes of the boys who had done the bombing, does one test the call from God on Scripture? How does one adjudicate competing passages from Scripture by appealing to Scripture? I kept finding myself back at Square One. I felt as if I had had to reargue the antinomian crisis all over again. I felt myself being drawn into an archetypal American dilemma, one that this country had passed through many times since it first occurred in the colony at Massachusetts Bay. It was the logical consequence of the Protestant rejection of the Church. Every man was his own Church, and given that state of affairs there was nothing to prevent us from sliding into the dilemma we were now in, not so much the abortion dilemma, which was not a dilemma at all, but the epistemological dilemma that arose out of the Protestant rejection of any authority but the Scripture. Protestants were always either sliding into antinomianism or else denying their own first principles as a way of preventing the slide from beginning. If the individual conscience were supreme, then anarchy was the only logical outcome. That's why this country made such a fetish of the law. People were scared to death. They had no answer to the epistemological relativism that was the logical outcome of the Protestant Reformation.

Dualism was the other way out. It was the only way to save Protestantism from the anarchy implicit in its own principles. When I asked Rev. Lowery how he would vote as a juror, he said that he would probably have to disqualify himself because of his strong belief s on the abortion issue.

"But," I protested, "Christians are called to be the salt of the earth. If the salt loses its savor ..."

He completed the quotation for me in King James English.

"If I were on trial I'd rather be judged by someone like you than someone who was proabortion," I said.

Rev. Lowery seemed to be having second thoughts on the issue but in the end took refuge in the dichotomy he made between God's law and man's law.

"If a man breaks man's law he's got to be punished, even if he's following God's law. He'll be rewarded in the hereafter."

"But what about society. Isn't it our duty to see that society's laws are congruent with God's laws?"

He agreed that it was.

"Well, this is a way to change things."

By the end of the conversation I got him to the point where he would stay on the jury and acquit the kids, but it had taken a lot of arguing to overcome a dualism which I began to fear was shared by the majority of people in the Pensacola jury pool. Maybe thirty years was nothing in the sight of God. Thirty years in prison was surely better than eternity in Hell, but still. ... It was a long time for a 21-year-old who was planning to get married two months ago. It was a bad sign, both for our society and for the outcome of the trial.

After speaking with Rev. Lowery I asked a woman who had stayed for a prolife dinner what she thought of the bombings.

"I oppose violence," she said.

"M'am," I said, sounding less and less like a Yankee to myself, "I figured you were against violence, but the question now is: if you were on that jury would you convict them?"

She was a middle aged Southern lady who had the soft facial lines of someone who had looked at life's sorrows without being damaged by them. She hesitated. It seemed that it was the first time she confronted the issue from the point of view of a prospective juror.

"Do you think that God told them to do it?"

"I can't judge," she said.

"Let me put it this way then. If you were on that jury and after listening to all the evidence you were convinced in your heart of hearts that God had told those boys to blow up those clinics, would you convict them?"

She hesitated again.

"Would you send them to prison for thirty years?"

"I would try to give them a lesser sentence."

"M'am, that's not up to the jury. The judge hands out the sentence. For the jury it's just up or down, innocent or guilty. Would you convict them?"

"No," she said.

I knew then that this was not going to be an open and shut case and that Monaghan had a chance. It was possible. It all depended on how the case was presented to the jury.

5

The Trial Begins

The press was out in force on the first day of the trial. Two satellite dishes had been set up on the grass medial strip in the middle of Palafox Street across from the courthouse. There were reporters from AP and The New York Times there too, although nothing much got out into the mainstream of print journalism. There was a perfunctory story at the end of it all. Throughout the trial the press viewed the trial as just another story. Barfin' Jake Garn and the Space Shuttle were getting more play and even though the press seemed pretty uniformly proabortion, getting more air time was what it was all about.

John Burt was there with his effigies. Bo and Linda dangled from a scaffold carried by two young ladies dressed in monk's robes and wearing skull masks. As they passed me one of them winked at me from behind the mask. I smiled back. Up until Burt's arrival the camera crews had been standing at the side of the court building hoping for a shot of Matt and Jimmy when the marshals brought them from the jail. When Burt and the ladies from Our Father's House arrived, the cameras started rolling. The symbolism wasn't auspicious though. The press were hoping for a hanging anyway. It was just a matter of changing the labels on the bodies.

The trial began with the indictments being read, followed by voir dire, the selection of the jury. During questioning of the second jury panel people began to disqualify themselves because of their "strong religious beliefs" or "strong views on abortion." They were saying that they couldn't be objective. It was a bad sign. I suspected the same dualism that I had run into talking with Rev. Lowery. God's law was one thing; man's law something else. It was a bad sign.

In the afternoon in the absence of the jury an evidentiary hearing was held. The defense wanted to exclude evidence obtained in a car stop of Kay Wiggins and Kathern Simmons on December 30. The girls had driven by Matt Goldsby's house and had kept on driving when they saw the ATF agents in his front yard. After the stop, the agents had found rocket motors and toggle switches in their car. In the end the motion to suppress the evidence was overruled by Judge Roger Vinson. Vinson was young for a judge; he was in his 40s; he was a 1983 Reagan appointee to the court, a member of the First Baptist Church of Pensacola, a veteran of the Navy, and the father of five children. The defense had not been particularly happy with Vinson up to this point. The defeat of the motion to exclude the evidence from the car search did not bode well for Kaye Wiggins, the least involved of the four. Kaye had the best chance of being let off, but with the admission of the car search evidence her chances were dimmed. The introduction of the evidence was a defeat for Kaye and seemed like a defeat in general, but in reality it was part of Vinson's overall strategy to let virtually everything into the trial. It was Judge Vinson's liberality on this issue that made a horse race out of the trial. I had come to Pensacola half expecting to find a judge who was going to exclude everything but the bombings. It didn't work out that way. By the end of the trial the defense would be able to show a film of two abortions and have the jury read to from the Bible. But at this point the evidentiary ruling seemed like a defeat. It was not an auspicious beginning.

6

A Reporter From The Village Voice

On Monday evening I met Teresa Carpenter at the restaurant of the Lenox Inn, a motel a few blocks north of the courthouse. She introduced herself as a reporter from The Village Voice and Steve Levy's "significant other." Not only did I know what significant other meant — living in sin, one used to say — I also knew who Steve Levy was. As a matter of fact I had met him at a party in Philadelphia years ago. As a matter of fact we graduated from the same school, Temple University. Levy had written an article for Rolling Stone called "Birth Control Blues," which had been a moderate hit with certain elements of the conservative Catholic crowd because he had dared to express dissatisfaction with birth control. Not abortion, birth control. It was a daring statement for someone in his position. It was a little like expressing doubts about whether the earth was round or not, and according to Teresa he got grief from the sterility lobby for doing it. That's why the Catholics liked it. Herb Ratner had written half of a very long article based on Levy's piece and talked about it whenever he had a chance. It was like independent confirmation of the rightness of the Church's teaching from the noble savage — printed in Rolling Stone no less. One wonders if the article would have made it past the rejection box at Our Sunday Visitor.

I told her that I had also gone to school with Wayne Barrett, who also wrote for the Voice. Barrett had recently done a hatchet job on then Archbishop and later Cardinal O'Connor of New York called "Holier Than Thou," in which he found O'Connor guilty of things like being a Republican. Teresa said that O'Connor had called up Barrett, a lapsed Catholic, (I knew him from St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia, where he had been denied some award for being disloyal to the Jesuits.) and tried to talk to him in the way a pastor would to one of his erring sheep. Barrett took it as nothing more than an attempt to get good press. I said I thought he was mistaken.

We talked about the trial and then about abortion — Teresa had the views one would expect from one who wrote for the Voice — and then about feminism — my favorite topic — and then about religion. Teresa had been raised in Missouri as a Mormon. Then at age 12 she decided that she wanted to see the Golden Tablets upon which the Book of Moroney had been written. It seems that Joseph Smith had discovered this new book of the Bible, left in upper New York state by one of the 10 lost tribes who happened somehow to make it to the New World. It seems like a reasonable request. After all the Shroud of Turin has been around for approximately twenty times as long as the golden tablets should have been, but unfortunately Prophet Smith seems to have mislaid them somewhere between New York and Utah. As a result Teresa converted to secularism. Who could blame her? I would have wanted to see the golden tablets too. She went into journalism, moved East, worked for New Jersey Magazine, a regional glossy for yuppies who are stuck between Philadelphia and New York, and gradually made it into the big time. Two days later as we walked from the courthouse, she told me she had won the Pulitzer Prize for "three socko pieces."

"Sacco and Vanzetti?" I asked.

"No, S-O-C-K-O," she said.

I had been spending too much time in Indiana. I was beginning to lose my grip on their dialect.

One piece was on a Tufts professor, the great white hope of the animal rights movement, who got involved with a prostitute he met in Boston's combat zone and, after embezzling federal grant money to pay for her services and the cocaine habit he learned from her, ended up beating the young lady to death with a hammer when she tried to extort even more money from him.

Another was "Death of a Playmate" about Dorothy Stratten, who made her way into the big time after posing for Playboy but who ended up getting shot point blank in the face by the jealous husband who had gotten her to pose for Playboy in the first place. "Death of a Playmate" was made into the movie Star '80, starring Mariel Hemingway, the granddaughter of the famous writer. Mariel had to get breast implants for the role, the film's only lasting effect as far as I could tell.

We talked about feminism. I said that behind every feminist there was a failed male — a father who ran out or a husband who ran around. Women looked for strong men and couldn't find them and as a result they became feminists. Gloria Steinem's father ran out on her and her mother when she was ten years old. At Yale after she had become Ms. Famous, she said that women, meaning feminists, had to become the males who let them down. Joseph Smith was the primary failed male in Teresa's life. As a result she couldn't believe in the Ultimate Male, the one who never let you down. He was, after all, known as God the Father. It was all of one piece. The Pensacola Case was ultimately about the Ultimate Male. He was to pervade the case from the beginning. He was ultimately the one who was to write the story. Our only job was to interpret it correctly and write it down.

7

Opening Remarks

Tuesday began with the opening remarks. Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Novotny led off for the government. Novotny looked to be in her mid-30s. She was from Maryland, raced boats, raised dogs, had no children, had streaked hair, wore a light blue suit, and talked like a Yankee. Later she was to describe herself as "ultraconservative" to Teresa and the product of Catholic schools (She would not give her views on abortion.); however, at the moment she looked like the hand-picked candidate of Yuppie America. She was also planning to take no chances. The U.S. Attorney and his assistant had little to gain by winning the case; however, losing it would automatically catapult them into a very embarrassing position. As a result she began the case in a slow, factual, low-key fashion, describing how the kids bought the pipes and rocket motors and gunpowder and how they made the bombs and how they set them off. There was little need for emotion (Women have a tough time handling emotion anyway.) because from the point of view of conventional wisdom, it was an open and shut case.

The position of the defense was more complex. First of all there were five people defending four defendants, and as a result there were bound to be differences of opinion and strategy. In the end the split came down to two sides; it was Shimek vs. Monaghan, the Fundamentalist approach vs. the Catholic approach. Shimek was the born again native of Pensacola; Monaghan was the out of town Catholic. Before being born again, Shimek had worked for the ACLU. Shimek wanted to put abortion on trial; Monaghan wanted to put abortion on trial too but realized that he needed a way to get it into the trial.

Ultimately the difference between the two was that Monaghan had a way of getting the issue of abortion before the court and Shimek didn't. In a conversation with William Brennan, the social psychologist from St. Louis University and the author of Abortion Holocaust, Monaghan had come across the term cognitive dissonance, which was simply a description of the conflicting signals one encountered in society. Cognitive dissonance was the peg Monaghan was eventually to hang the whole abortion issue on. He would announce to the jury that abortion was not the issue and then put abortion on trial by asking them to consider the conflicting signals that had worked on the boys' minds to the point of forcing them to blow up the clinics. Monaghan had to argue to get the insanity defense introduced. In the end cognitive dissonance fared no better than the rest of the insanity defense, but by the time it was discredited, Monaghan didn't need it anymore. It was simply a useful way of getting information on abortion into the trial. By the end, the jury knew what abortion was all about. They had no excuses.

8

Monaghan's Opening Statement

Monaghan began his opening statement by saying that Matt Goldsby was not a terrorist. He told the jury to follow the law. He said that abortion was not on trial. American innocence was on trial.

"These kids don't smoke, they don't drink, and they believe that sex is properly a part of marriage."

A lady reporter sitting in the back row snickered.

Monaghan then went on to say that Goldsby's father was an alcoholic, that his mother was a Jewish convert and that he and Jimmy Simmons represented the best of American ideals. They believed in chivalry; they were protectors of the code. They helped people in distress. Jimmy drove along the beaches and used his car to rescue people who had gotten stuck in the sand. They were religious. When they read the story in Luke about the unborn child leaping in its mother's womb, they believed it. They read the story of Gideon about little babies being laid on the Altars of Baal as a human sacrifice that was going to bring the Israelites economic prosperity and how God told Gideon to tear down the altars to Baal, and how the kids believed that story too. They called their plans to bomb the clinics the Gideon Project. And when the Israelites came for Gideon, Joash, his father, went out and asked them if they wanted the altars of Baal back and they all went away. Then Monaghan turned and asked the jury himself, "Do you want those altars back?" It was a question that was to recur throughout the trial.

The issue was abortion; the issue was God; the issue was doing God's will in the face of an immoral law. The kids saw themselves as protectors of the code, as doing God's will in destroying the altars of Baal, the god with the insatiable appetite for human sacrifice.

If God told them to do it, Monaghan concluded, then it's beyond the jury's jurisdiction. If He didn't, then they were suffering from a delusion and should be let off.

After Monaghan finished his opening statement, Shimek got up, announced that he hadn't intended to speak (Had the Holy Spirit suddenly moved him?), and then proceeded to work at cross purposes to Monaghan's opening statement throughout his own. He began sensibly enough by saying that the government had no case against his own client, Kaye Wiggins, but then proceeded to jump into the bigger issue with both feet.

"They are not afraid to be spiritual," he said of the four. "They don't depend on the standards of this carnal world. They are peacemakers. They are preaching the Gospel in their way."

With seventy pound pipe bombs, one could almost hear the reporters saying to themselves. One wondered if the jury were thinking the same thoughts.

Shimek, among other things, failed to see that by making the kids into martyrs he was undercutting the thrust of the insanity defense. He made them more culpable.

"Shimek," said one reporter afterward, "is representing God."

By equating peacemaking and setting off bombs, Shimek made Christianity look ludicrous. "The real question," said the same reporter, "is, does Christianity drive you crazy?" With Shimek it was hard to tell.

The prosecution then went to its own witnesses. They called in firemen to describe the fire, and Monaghan got them to say that nobody got hurt and that life was more important than property. He even got one fireman to say that he felt that somebody was praying for him that night.

The prosecution called to the stand a nurse who was driving by one of the clinics when the bomb went off. She thought that someone might have been trying to do her harm.

"But that wasn't true, was it?" Monaghan asked. "No," said the nurse.

"Nobody was trying to hurt you."

"No," said the nurse.

"Thank you," said Monaghan.

The prosecution had put itself in the position of trying to prove an event which no one disputed. They spent the time trying to prove that the kids had set off the bomb and no one on the defense was saying they hadn’t Monaghan took advantage of the prosecution's witness to make the jury aware of the larger issues. When, for example, the prosecution brought on witnesses to describe how the clinics were involved in interstate commerce the defense would ask them if they bought suction curettes in Florida or out of state. Ms. Goldenberg of Miami, the lady who ran the franchise, was asked what ended up in the little glass jars on top of the suction machines after an abortion.

"Tissue," she replied.

She then allowed that the "tissue" was medical tested out of state, but could not say what happened to it after it was "medically tested." She could not say whether it was buried or incinerated.

"Do you sell it?" Monaghan asked.

"Absolutely not," Ms. Goldenberg replied. She had the demeanor of someone who is being asked impolite questions.

Chris Kasun then asked again about what is removed from the woman during an abortion.

"Uterine contents," said Ms. Goldenberg.

"And what are uterine contents?" Kasun asked.

"The contents of the uterus." Goldenberg was growing more defensive and embarrassed. It seemed that no one, not even the abortionists themselves, had anything to say about abortion that was not tinged with embarrassment and cloaked in euphemism. When asked if the uterus of a pregnant woman contained an unborn child Goldenberg replied that she did not know.

The prosecution then called Mr. Ravenscroft, the owner of one of the bombed buildings, to the stand and he complained about the price the insurance adjusters gave him for his building. He also claimed that he didn't know that his building was being used to perform abortions — not then and not now. The question seemed to propel him into a premature senility. It was amazing what people could pretend they didn't know. It was also clear that nobody was going to go to the barricades for a woman right to choose. It was clearly an issue of dollars and cents and not knowing (or pretending not to know) what was going on. As Ravenscroft complained about the money he lost as a result of the bombings, Jimmy Simmons turned to his wife and said, "I love you."

At lunch Monaghan came up to me and borrowed $20.

9

Controlling Destiny

That night Peggy Moen of The Wanderer and Teresa Carpenter of The Village Voice and I visited Our Father's House to talk to John Burt.

"Not only are you surrounded by the Catholic press," I said to Teresa as we drove there, "You're surrounded by the ultraright wing of the Catholic press."

We stood on the porch and talked about abortion, surrounded by black and white children saved from the suction curette by the efforts of John Burt.

It was a way of controlling one's destiny, Teresa said. She mentioned the worst possible scenario she could think of.

"Suppose a child was born with spina bifida?"

And I told her about Eugene Halpin, about whom the doctors had said many things — that he would be a human vegetable, that he would be confined to a wheel chair for the rest of his life — all of which had been proven wrong. Abortion was necessary for people who needed to play God. Those who don't believe in God and in his power to rule our destinies and take evil and turn it into good must pretend that they are gods themselves. It's a situation which allows no vacuum. Somebody has to have a handle on destiny. And the best way to play God is to get involved in human sacrifice. Florida on that warm evening in April was the closest thing to the tropics I had ever experienced. It made me think of Mexico and the Aztecs and the big pyramid and the priests with the obsidian knives who could cut the heart of victims in 15 seconds. In the end there is no spiritual vacuum. Our only choice is in which god we choose to worship, the God of life or the god of blood. In the final analysis it was either Jesus or Huitzilopochtli and Baal.

10

Rex Morgan, M.D. Enters The Case

Pat Monaghan arrived at the courthouse with a copy of Rex Morgan, M.D. Talks to You About Your Unborn Child, a comic book on fetal alcohol syndrome put out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, displayed prominently under his arm. It was meant as a lesson in cognitive dissonance for the folks out there in TV land. John Burt and friends were lying sprawled on the courthouse steps holding their Bibles and praying in tongues. A black sound man had a boom held 18 inches over John's head as if to get the Holy Spirit on tape for the midday news. A reporter nudged me and pointed out Hal Barton of Catholics United for Life standing on the courthouse steps.

"He's the big Catholic money behind the operation," I was told.

Hal was going around introducing himself as the janitor of CUL. He had just gotten a crew cut that was now about as long as the stubble on his Yasser Arafat style beard. He was wearing a black suit with '60s-style lapels, a white shirt with a collar two sizes too big and a clip-on blue tie of the sort I used to wear in May processions. He looked as if he were impersonating Harry John — except for the fact that he was wearing a black and white lanyard, the kind you make at day camp, with the black and white Dominican cross at the end of it. "This is the cross of the Inquisition," he would tell anyone who was interested. He would then defend the Inquisition as having saved civilization. Unfortunately none of the reporters knew what the Inquisition was.

Every story needs its eminence grise, and Hal and Charlie Rice were to share the honors off and on throughout the trial.

"He's the John Burt of Fresno, California," said one reporter of Hal.

"Actually, he's a former hippie who is now a member of a Third Order Dominican community in Bardstown, Kentucky," I said.

"Ah, Bardstown," said the Jewish reporter from Brooklyn.

The TV newscaster looked from one of us to the other, and then walked away. His mind has the capacity of a 30 second spot. The truth sends him into technical difficulties.

The Jewish reporter in spite of being proabortion is full of admiration for Monaghan.

"Monaghan's a genius," he says. "Without him there would be no defense. But you can see the dissension among the defense. Shimek is the local boy who announces that he's the only one who understands the scriptural and spiritual aspects of the case, and then here comes these Catholics rolling into town showing them how to run a defense."

11

Monaghan Hits His Stride

By Wednesday Monaghan had hit his stride. The prosecution had taken the technically correct but pedestrian course of piecing together the evidence, making a case that the defense had no intention of contesting. No one was arguing that the kids hadn't blown up the clinics. Monaghan's strategy was to make them into heroes for doing lt. He was going to do it in two ways: first by exposing abortion for the unspeakable crime that it was, and secondly by turning the kids from terrorists into Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn while at the same time portraying the bomb as a large firecracker. The defense was part guerilla theater, part stand up comedy. When the prosecution introduced the SWAT pants Matt bought from Old Sarge's, a local Army Navy type outlet, Monaghan produced a pair of green and white plaid pants (bought with my $20) as counter-evidence. Old Sarge's is the local emporium for survivalist macho, displaying pictures of big strong men in boots standing on rattlesnakes about to chop their heads off with machetes. Monaghan waved the green and white plaid pants in front of the proprietor of Old Sarge's as he sat on the witness stand.

"You wouldn't sell anything like this at your store, would you?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"If you were going to do a great deed, save a maiden in distress or climb a cliff with grappling hooks, would you wear SWAT pants or something like this?"

Once again he held up, the green and white plaid pants.

The witness hesitated a moment, looking to the prosecutor as if hoping to be saved by an objection. He then looked at the judge, who also said nothing.

"The SWAT pants," he said finally in a small voice.

Monaghan then asked to have the plaid pants entered as evidence. The judge demurred. A woman juror clapped silently. It was hard to judge the effect all of this was having on them.

Monaghan used the same tactics when the prosecution introduced the ski mask Goldsby wore the night of the bombings. After they made the point that the temperature had been in the 80s that week, Monaghan produced a multicolored ribbon and asked the man from Old Sarge's if he would consider wearing a ribbon on his ski mask.

"Yes, sir," said the bewildered witness.

"Would you?" said Monaghan, equally startled.

He then pointed out the similarity between the ski mask and the knight's helmet depicted on the protectors of the code T-shirts the kids had designed.

"The ski mask is something like knights used to wear, isn't it?" Monaghan said.

U.S. Attorney Dillard objected, but by then it was time for lunch.

12

Mass At St. Michael's

Mass was celebrated everyday at St. Michael's Catholic Church across from the courthouse at 12:10. Some days it was impossible to go because the trial ran late. On Wednesday Monaghan was there. We remained after Mass was over and talked quietly in the empty pews. I had last seen Pat in January while down in Kentucky visiting Catholics United for Life. The bombings were a part of the news, but none of us had any special connection to them. Hal and Pat and I had sat around Pat's dining room table, and I watched them drink whiskey and smoke cigars and talk about the bombings and abortion and Walker Percy in no particularly organized fashion, in a fashion that got less organized as the hour got later. I remember thinking that Pat was overweight at the time. When I saw him for the first time in months in the courtroom, I knew he had lost weight but didn't know how much.

"Fifty pounds," he said when I asked. "I've been on a bread and water fast for 120 days, ever since I got involved in the case."

Now that we were out of the courthouse, we could talk more freely. The gag order was still in effect, and so technically we were still breaking the law.

I asked him how he had gotten involved in the case. "Shimek approached me through Charlie Rice.”

"How did he know Charlie?"

"Everybody knows Charlie," he said. "First I had to pass his religious test. He asked me if I prayed to Mary, and I said yes. I ask my mother for help, and Mary is my mother. It wasn't true at the time though. I wasn't praying the Rosary then. I do now. The press got it all wrong with Shimek. He asked me in. The press is too cynical. They can't get anything straight."

The atmosphere of the church washed over us. Pat sat half turned around in the pew in front of me.

"Did you know I got fired?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

I had spoken to Jim Hitchcock the night before. Jim was the chairman of the board of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I knew that Monaghan had been having problems with Father Blum, the league's director, for some time now. He had gone from a full-time position as general counsel to a part-time position and had moved from Milwaukee to Kentucky. Father Blum had used Pat's involvement in the Pensacola trial as a pretext for firing him. In a letter sent to me and other editors of Catholic periodicals, Hitchcock described the situation at the Catholic League:

Three general counsels in succession have been forced out by Father Blum, the last being Patrick Monaghan. Now the legal department has been told that it should concentrate its attentions on filing amicus curiae briefs, which in effect emasculates it and leaves the Church unrepresented in many of the great legal and constitutional issues facing the nation.

On April 20 Hitchcock resigned as chairman of the board of the Catholic League after trying to oust Blum from his position as head of an organization he seemed determined to destroy. Pat was on the cutting edge of the abortion fight in this country and as a result got fired from an ostensibly Catholic organization which felt it was more important to find out who was putting out posters saying the Vatican controlled The New York Times and Playboy. I found myself with that old familiar bitter taste in my mouth. It comes to the lips after having been stabbed in the back. It should be familiar to anyone who has worked in Catholic apostolates in this country. The league was selling out as had so many other Catholic organizations. The sellout, the backstabbing, the big egos in little people, the underhanded mendacity of the supposed good guys — it was all tough enough to take on a full stomach, much less on a 120-day fast.

"What about your practice in Kentucky?" I said.

"What practice?" he laughed.

It was a tough position to be in for a man with seven kids. I would have spent my time feeling sorry for myself, but Pat took it all with grace and humor.

"You know the judge grew up fifty miles from where I grew up."

The judge was only a year older than Pat.

"He's from Kentucky. I'm from Tennessee. Both our great-great-grandparents fought for the South in the Civil War. They both spent time on an island in the Ohio River as POWs."

"Do you think the judge is getting annoyed at you?"

"I think that the judge is just happy that the kids are getting a good defense."

He then returned to the crux of his defense, as if rehearsing it to himself.

"Either God told them to do it, in which case we should leave them alone, or He didn't, and then the law has a way of dealing with that circumstance."

The lady writing for The Nation was right. The trial was about manhood. It was about standing up for the defenseless, standing up for the truth. The kids were acting out in their inchoate way a code that had been denied them because of the accidents of birth and culture. When they answered the call, the only expression they could come up with had to do with large pipes and gunpowder. If they had lived in the Middle Ages they could have gone on a Crusade against the Albigensians, the death lobby of its day. Now they could only approximate in their Huck Finn fashion, a code they had never really known by putting the emblem of knighthood and chivalry on eighteen T-shirts they had ordered because that was the minimum number one could get with a custom design. It was Monaghan's job to make the best out of a situation that never should have occurred in the first place. Kids who lived in a world gone crazy were trying to act like men in the only way that made sense to them, and now it was Monaghan's job to take that still, small voice and have it make sense to the jury and the judge.

13

The Confessions

Monaghan spent Wednesday afternoon and the beginning of Thursday trying to turn the confessions the kids had made back in their favor. It wasn't as hard as it sounded. In admitting that they were involved, the kids dispelled any doubts about their motives.

On Wednesday ATF agent George Bradley read a letter Kaye Wiggins had written to Matt Goldsby on November 20, 1984.

"Dear Matt," she wrote, "I want to share some things with you that God has told me. God is on our side. You are the light of my life, Matt. I love you. I want to make you happy. God will restore to you seven fold what Satan has taken away."

Matt was experiencing financial difficulties at the time. She then went into a long citation of scripture passages from Proverbs 16, beginning with "Pride goeth before the fall."

"I love you with all my heart and soul under my love for God. I want you to pray for the Gideon Project, for the proper time and place. God wants you to learn to be humble. God can't make no junk. You have got God, and you have got me. Think of all that blood he shed so that we can be free. All I want to do is do my best to make you happy. That's why God sent me to you. I'm just doing my best, baby. This time I've fallen in love with the boss."

The letter had a double effect. It linked Kaye with the bombings, but at the same time it also gave an insight into her character. It was not exactly your typical letter from your typical bomb-throwing anarchist. In the final analysis the jury was going to have to decide not whether they blew up the clinics, but whether what they did was a good thing or not.

14

A Big Firecracker

The defense began its case on Thursday. After having a munitions expert come in and testify that the bomb was just a big firecracker, they introduced a long line of character witnesses. By Thursday evening everyone was feeling the strain of having been in the courtroom for ten hours a day for four straight days. Thursday evening Teresa and Peggy and I met Jim Kappus of the American Life Lobby in the bar at the Hilton, the hotel where he was staying. A band was playing but not loud enough to destroy the possibility of conversation.

"If I were you and they hadn't produced the golden tablets, I would have left too."

I generally have a good memory for conversations I have had, even if I can never remember how I get on to particular topics. Teresa was drinking vodka and tonics. She was going head to head with Peggy Moen, who was drinking rum and cokes. It was part of what was to become a daily ritual with us, the drinking contest between The Wanderer and The Village Voice.

"I can't give my life over to anybody," she said. "Not to NOW not to God."

The music was loud enough to make general conversation impossible without shouting.

"Do you know what Dante said?" I asked.

"He said many things I'm sure."

"In His will our peace."

"I could never accept a God who allowed an innocent man to die," she said.

"Theology," Jim Kappus shouted from across the table. "They're talking about theology. We're supposed to be painting the town and they're talking about theology."

I took to stirring the ice in my ginger ale. Teresa repeated her theological objections to Jim Kappus, who said it was a matter of faith, which was true enough, but it seemed reasonable in its way to me.

The band started to play a Bruce Springsteen song, and Teresa started dancing in her seat. Apparently there was still a fair amount of Mormon in her. She couldn't bring herself to go out on the dance floor. The waitress brought the next round of drinks. Peggy Moen's Norwegian smile widened another notch. The ginger ale was starting to go to my head. I started to talk about American intellectual history.

"The trial is American history in a nutshell. We're a Protestant country where no one has found a modus vivendi between faith and reason. In America you're either a believer or a thinker. In the eighteenth century you could choose between being Jonathan Edwards or Ben Franklin. Now you have a choice of being either Jerry Falwell or Carl Sagan."

15

All Time Low

By Friday the nineteenth the defense's case had hit an all time low after becoming bogged down in a long line of character witnesses, one being Kathren's softball coach, who described what a spunky player she was. In the afternoon Peggy Moen fell asleep; John Monaghan, Pat's oldest son, also fell asleep. The proaborts among the press were starting to smile. They were beginning to smell blood. Even the defense lawyers were getting nervous.

"The jury looks as if they're ready to hang them to me," Monaghan said during an afternoon recess.

Katie Short was of much the same mood.

"They may as well just throw themselves on the mercy of the courts as keep this up," she said.

Then Shimek put Kaye Wiggins on the stand, and the entire mood in the courtroom changed. Kaye read from the first letter Matt wrote to her after being arrested.

"I'm sorry I put you through so much," he wrote. "I am willing to give my life for the cause of the unborn. I love you."

Kaye started crying in the middle of reading Matt's letter. She then read her own letter to Matt, the one ATF agent Bradley had already read to the court. "Like the saying goes, God can't make no junk." Kaye then said that she and Kathy wanted to go with Matt and Jimmy and help place the bombs, but they felt it was too dangerous for girls. Instead they were asked to stay at the Simmons house the night of the bombings and read the story of Gideon and pray that no one got hurt. She stayed at Kathy's house until 4:30 a.m. then got in her car to go home but before she left recognized Jimmy's car coming down the street because it only had one headlight.

Goldsby and Simmons had waited near one of the clinics until they heard the bombs go off. In a story in the Pensacola News-Journal he described his feelings when he heard the explosions.

"We could have gotten old and become governor or even president and changed the laws, but by then 23 million children would have died. ... In our youth we saw the quickest route and we took it."

"We just held each other and cried," said Kaye Wiggins of their first meeting after the bombings. "Then Matt told me to go home so I left."

The trial was like the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. The defense would be on the ropes for the whole day and then come back with some moves that would put the prosecution in trouble by the end of the day. After having Wiggins read Goldsby's and her own letters, Monaghan introduced a letter from President Reagan to Philip Dreisbach, M.D. dated May 5, 1982. It was part of a pamphlet Goldsby had seen describing the discovery of over 16,000 aborted fetuses in a trash dumpster in California. On February 6, 1982, State Senator Alex Garcia, who represents the district where the bodies were found, filed an official request to claim the bodies for burial. On June 8, the ACLU filed for a restraining order to prevent the release of the bodies. Finally, in December of 1984 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a suit filed by the ACLU, Atheists United, and the Feminists' Women's Health Center, claiming that allowing the fetuses a religious burial would violate the constitutional separation of Church and State.

According to Doctor Dreisbach, the over 16,000 bodies are now being stored in an unrefrigerated truck which sits in a secured maintenance yard in Los Angeles. In the letter which is surrounded by color photos of some of the 193 victims of late term abortions, some still in their plastic containers, President Reagan describes his own "horror and sadness."

When all is said and done, being confronted with the reality of abortion and its consequences removes all trace of doubt and hesitation. The terrible irony about this sudden discovery is not that so many human lives were legally aborted, but that they are only a tiny proportion of the 1.5 million unborn children quietly destroyed in our nation each year. This is the truth many would rather not face.

Your decision to hold a memorial service for these children is most fitting and proper. On such an occasion, we must strengthen our resolve to end this national tragedy. I am hopeful that evidence like that found in California will move those who have thus far preferred silence or inaction and encourage them to agree that something must be done.

Monaghan's basic argument, via the introduction of cognitive dissonance, was that President Reagan told the kids to blow up the clinics. He was the father of our country, our commander in chief, and was telling everyone "that something must be done." It was hard to tell how the jury reacted to the claim, but it seemed to have had its impact on the judge. During another evidentiary squabble that took place while the jury was out, Judge Vinson ruled against allowing certain magazines in as evidence because the defendants hadn't seen them. He had allowed the Dreisbach letter in, on the other hand, first of all because Goldsby had seen it and had told others about it, and secondly because it "includes in it a call to action, which I consider significant."

16

The Split Between Monaghan And Shimek

In spite of their strong finish on Friday, the split between Monaghan and Shimek over how to run the case widened to the point of an open confrontation in the parking lot behind Shimek's law offices. The issue was whether to show the film Assignment Life or not. Shimek wanted it shown. Monaghan didn't. Chris Kasun tried to resolve the issue without reference to the merits of the film.

"Every battle needs a general, and he's it," she said pointing in Monaghan's direction. He had already gone into the office building.

"No, he isn't," Shimek said and then walked away.

Inside Kaye and Kathren talked about the day's events. Kaye was explaining why she cried on the stand.

"It was the first time I saw the letter since they took it away from me," she said referring to the ATF agents. "Sometimes when I'm writing I just get the urge to quote scripture and then I go on for pages. That first letter from Matt just wasn't like him. Matt's got a very wide vocabulary so he can use big words and make eloquent statements."

She sounded like Becky Thatcher when she talked.

Kathy said she knew what Kaye meant and then talked about the model of the bomb that had been introduced by the prosecution as evidence.

"Big deal," she said, "we done seen that thing a half a dozen times."

On the way back to his room at the Hospitality House Monaghan discussed the merits of showing Assignment Life to the jury. He felt that showing the actual pictures of an abortion would desensitize them.

"We lost in the Alaska case because we showed the pictures. I don't want to take any chances now."

Kasun had already agreed with Monaghan's assessment. She felt that the film would make the defense too emotional. Kasun had her own youngest child, an infant, at the trial with her, as did Katie Short.

"I won't be able to watch the film. All I can think of is that little red baby lying there, practically glowing in the dark, with its arms outstretched. ..." She shuddered without completing the sentence.

On his way to the motel office to get his phone calls, Monaghan tries to put the split between him and Shimek in perspective.

"He's defending God," he said after thinking about it for a while. "I've got a different perspective. Man, God's defending me."

Back in his room Monaghan took off the black suit and purple tie he had been wearing all week and sat on the sofa, amid a litter of law books and prolife materials, in his white shirt and boxer shorts and waxed philosophical.

"His mind has no subtlety. Like Bartholemew he has no guile," Monaghan says of Shimek. But before he can continue the phone rings. He talks with the psychiatrist, who tells him she is coming over to talk about some new material she has discovered in reading the confessions.

"That was Nancy," he says after hanging up. "She's crazy."

Dreisbach and Brennan arrive with some sandwiches from Arby's. Dreisbach tells Pat that he should eat something. He mentions something about folic acid and the brain. Pat declines the sandwich but butters himself a roll and draws a glass of water from the tap. He congratulates himself on the stroke of genius he had in placing the letter from President Reagan on top of the prosecution's model of the bomb.

"Did you see them when I did that?" he asks laughing.

Booker arrives and Monaghan goes through the same story again. They begin to discuss how the day went but before they get too far, someone else knocks on the door. It's the psychiatrist. The men jump up and ask her to wait at the door while Monaghan puts on a pair of grey pants with suspenders. The psychiatrist is a woman who looks to be in her forties with graying hair. She is wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a Mickey Mouse tank top. Before anyone can say anything she begins reading from the transcript of Goldsby's and Simmons' confessions proclaiming them a virtual goldmine of neurosis and psychopathology.

After about five minutes, Monaghan tries to interrupt her and she tells him to shut up. She proceeds in her manic manner for another ten minutes. During this time Pat looks deadpan at me; I look at Booker; Booker looks at Monaghan. Monaghan looks at Brennan. Dreisbach concentrates on his Arby's sandwich. Monaghan again tries to interrupt and is again told by Mullan to shut up. During the trial she would handle Monaghan in virtually the same way; at one point she even told the judge what he should be doing. Mullan was the only one in the entire trial who really thought the kids were crazy. As a result she made a credible witness. If she had been lying it would have been immediately apparent. When she took the stand her manic personality bespoke sincerity.

After an hour or so Dreisbach offers to drive me back to Our Father's House. On the way back he offers to buy me dinner.

"I've got the appetite of a horse," he says. For all that he is remarkably thin.

At 11 p.m. we find ourselves at one of Pensacola's many greasy Greek restaurants, and Dreisbach tells me the story of how he and two other doctors performed autopsies on the largest of the 16,000 aborted fetuses that were found in the dumpster as he devours a plate of oysters Rockefeller.

"It was hot in there; the place stank; it was full of flies. Then when we held the press conference all the reporters wanted to talk about was where we got the photos and whether we got them illegally or not."

17

16,000 Canaries Would Have Been News

When I mentioned the case to Teresa, who one might think should be aware of such things, she said she never heard of the case. Except for stories in the National Right to Life News and certain Catholic papers, the story never got out of L. A.

"Doesn't that surprise you," I had said just before I introduced her to Dr. Dreisbach.

"Sixteen thousand canaries found in a dumpster would have been news," she said.

Dreisbach went on from one gory detail to another eating his oysters Rockefeller. Eventually the Supreme Court disallowed the burial. It was a measure of the depths to which this nation had sunk. If they wanted to talk about religion, they would also have to talk about the religion of ancient Greece and customs the civilized had held from time immemorial. I mentioned Antigone to Dreisbach. Antigone had gone to her death because she had defied the edict of Creon, her uncle and king, and buried her brother who was condemned to lie unburied outside the walls of the city.

"Nor did I think," she said, "your decrees to have such force as to enable one who is but mortal to transgress these customs — unwritten, unspeakable, divine. For not just now nor from yesterday does this usage live, and none knows when it first appeared."

"Western law," wrote Father Paul Quay, S.J. in an article on the commercial use being made of body parts, including those of the unborn, "long has stood, even if unsteadily at times, with Antigone against Creon." By December of 1984, the Supreme Court had long since sided with Creon; the question was how the people of Pensacola thought about those who objected to such treatment. Now it was time for the average citizen to have his say.

By the time the food came I felt more tired than hungry. I ate out of a sense of duty, and because Dreisbach was picking up the tab. In a corner booth a heavy-set, middle-aged man sat with an oriental prostitute. A crowd of drunks arrived and the Greek with the lacquered hair who owned the place beamed at them as if proud to have their patronage. When I got home I said the Rosary.

18

Saturday Morning

On Saturday morning Novotny began by cross examining Kaye, asking her why she never accompanied the boys on their rafting trips.

"I'm a girl," Wiggins answered. "I'm not a boy scout. I'm not a protector of the code."

Monaghan then tried to bring on Brennan to testify about cognitive dissonance. He took out the three easels which he had had made into the shape of crosses, which had been standing as a reminder to the jury behind Matt's head and then set them up next to the witness stand. U.S. Attorney Dillard objected that Brennan was a sociologist and that his testimony would have no relevance. Vinson, after listening to the arguments on both sides, sustained Dillard's objection but left the option of calling Brennan back open for later. The defeat left Monaghan with little more than another chance to get off another one-liner.

"I wasn't anticipating at this time having to go to my psychiatrist," he said.

Mullan took the stand after lunch. She proved to be as manic as she had been the night before, but it came across as sincerity to the people in the courtroom. Suddenly people were taking the insanity defense seriously. One woman defended Mullan's behavior later by saying that it was partially due to her being from California. She made much of a statement of Jimmy Simmons made after he had seen Assignment Life: "It was like a piece of me was taken out." At another point he talked about having the feeling that a knife was being plunged into his chest. The testimony was just psycho-sounding enough to get everyone interested in seeing the film. When Monaghan introduced the motion to show the film, he still felt the way he had the night before. He didn't want it in. He was introducing the motion in hopes that a "no" here would mean a "yes" when he tried to get Brennan back on the stand to talk about cognitive dissonance.

Dillard predictably objected, but the judge surprisingly overruled his objection. He permitted the film to be shown because it would make clear the effect it had had on the minds of the defendants. When the announcement was made a cheer went up from the closed circuit courtroom next door. The judge cautioned those in the court against any more such outbursts and then told the jury that the film was graphic and that he would stop it if any of them objected.

19

Assignment Life

Assignment Life could best be described as a cross between an army training film and a snuff movie. (It is available on YouTube.) In the middle of an incredibly contrived and mindless plot about a reporter who is told to write a story on abortion, the viewer gets to view not one but two actual abortions being performed. The first is a suction abortion during which we watch Dr. Edward Allred, the California abortionist, sawing away at the vagina of a woman with a suction curette. The tube leading away from it is red with blood. The blood is also running out of the woman's vagina. Her legs are held above the doctor's head in stirrups and begin vibrating spasmodically as the abortion reaches its final stages.

The second is of a saline abortion. We see the needle being injected into the woman and then see the scalded red fetus displayed by one of the technicians who assisted at its murder. The nurse or whatever holds out the fetus's arms in cruciform fashion. The fetus looks like a little visitor from another world, a visitor we have treated badly.

In the meantime there is a constant back and forth between the supporters of abortion and its opponents. The camera jumps from Dr. John Willke to Dr. Allred and then back again. One says it's okay; the other says it isn't. The film was amateurish and hyperrealistic all at once. It was enough to drive anybody crazy. When it was all over no one could tell what effect it had had on the jury. Some of them were seen wiping tears from their eyes after the lights went back on in the courtroom. The only thing that was certain was that now they knew. They had seen it for themselves. Now they had no excuse.

Afterward Monaghan said that he had been wrong about Assignment Life. Just before it had been allowed to be shown, while the defense was setting up the projector, Monaghan still had his doubts.

"I think it's a mistake," he said, "but I've got to let God run the trial. I'd prefer to have Brennan in."

Monaghan later said that he had been desensitized by having seen the film so many times. He had forgotten the impact that the film could have on people when they saw it for the first time. He was also bothered by the insanity defense and wanted to shift the burden onto the abortion issue once again. He had even apologized to Matt Goldsby during the trial for Mullan's testimony.

"You know what bothers me about it. In my heart of hearts and before God I know these kids aren't crazy. I hate like hell to do it. I'd rather prove that we are all crazy. But it's got to be done."

He had been noticing the effect that the testimony had been having on the families of the defendants. They had been walking out during the trial, some of them with tears in their eyes. The movie had had its effect on Monaghan too. Everyone had become a little more violent, either in their dislike of abortion or in their attempts to avoid the issue.

On his way back to the Hospitality House, Monaghan pronounced his final verdict on the insanity defense.

"I think psychiatry is a crock. You've got to be crazy to believe it."

20

Maleness Is Normality

Teresa and Peggy and I had dinner that night near Seville Square, the old part of town that had been turned into an entertainment quarter. The Ink Spots were singing at Rosie O'Grady's, a factory which had been converted into a night club. Across the street a man was holding his Bible and shouting at the folks watching the Ink Spots. It occurred to me that they were smoking and drinking, some of them anyway; some of them were dancing too.

"Jesus can come down and raise you up," the man shouted. He sounded as if he were going to be hoarse the next day. There were police cars on the street between him and Rosie O'Grady's. No one seemed too concerned. It was probably a weekly thing at Seville Square.

Over dinner Teresa told us more lurid details from the Dorothy Stratten story, things involving Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovich. Hefner had apparently suffered a stroke recently, brought on she said by what he read in Bogdanovich's account of the story.

"That just shows you how screwed up everything is," I said. "Here we have kids being put on trial for doing something noble and nobody does anything about pornographers."

Teresa said nothing.

"Their lives aren't sordid," I continued. "How many 18-year-old girls are still virgins?"

Shimek had brought up the fact in his cross examination of Kaye Wiggins.

"Did the film change your views on abortion?" I asked.

"Oh, no," Teresa answered.

"Just look at all the evidence."

"In order to be considered a grown up you've got to take responsibility for your life and that means either using contraception or having an abortion if that fails."

"That's like putting the baby carriage outside a taproom and going inside and getting drunk and then when you see that the carriage is rolling down the hill and heading for the river, you go out and shoot the baby."

"That's a good analogy," she said. "Did you just think it up?"

"It was the Holy Spirit."

Teresa laughed.

"That and the iced tea."

Peggy laughed. She was sipping alternately from her wine and her iced tea — uppers and downers.

"You have no idea," Teresa continued, "how vulnerable women are because of their screwed up bodies. You have a body that stays the same 365 days of the year. You can work day in and day out. You don't have to ask your employer to cut you a break for being on the rag. Maleness is normality. The male body is the normal human body."

"Are you saying that females are abnormal?"

"Yes."

"That's a curious thing for a feminist to say. No, then again, it probably isn't. Feminists are embarrassed at being female. Feminists worship at the altar of masculinity."

At the table next to us a good looking young lady got up wearing the tightest pair of pants I had ever seen in my life. She looked like an overdone string of Knackwurst. Teresa was skinny in a stylish sort of way. She wore the intentionally ill-fitting clothes that had been stylish the previous winter — a pair of pegged tweed pants and a blouse that was cut into a wedge shape. They were the type of clothes I had always thought went out of their way to look unflattering.

"Assignment Life was a profoundly disturbing movie — especially the part when the woman was in the stirrups and Alfred the abortionist was sawing away at her. You could see the blood running out of her. It made me feel like doing something violent. It made me feel like kicking the curette out of his hand and then kicking the shit out of him and his machine. No wonder those kids blew up the clinics after seeing the film. They did it because they're still normal."

Teresa said that the film made her feel vulnerable.

"Men just overreact to the normal maintenance a woman's body needs. There's a whole continuum of violation beginning with pap smears and D&Cs. Men just aren't used to seeing women in that position."

"I've been in the gynecologist's office when my wife was examined and in the delivery room when our last baby was born. This isn't the same thing."

"In order to be able to develop morally and spiritually, women have to transcend their bodies."

"You think normal bodily functions are pathological, don't you."

"Childbearing is not a normal bodily function," she said.

"See, I told you. You're a gnostic. You think the body is evil. You are vulnerable, but not for the reasons you think. You're vulnerable because you've stepped outside of the code. Given the normal course of events after the Fall, sex is going to be exploitative, and women, because of the way they are made, are going to come up with the dirty end of the stick. There are only two alternatives: a redeemer who offers redemption from the conditions established by the Fall, or abortion, which at its root is playing god, which is what caused the Fall in the first place. Feminists have this radical sense of insecurity because there is no ultimate male in their lives — no one can protect them from the consequences of the Fall and anatomy. No redeemer. Oftentimes there is no proximate male either. The feminist is someone who believes that men can't be trusted and as a result hands herself over to the exploiters — to the abortionists, for example. The history of feminism is the history of the failed male — either real or imaginary. Gloria Steinem's father left her when she was ten. Kaye Wiggins' father left her mother and ran off with his secretary."

"I think that people should be able to sleep with their secretaries if they want to."

"That's why you feel so vulnerable. Once you step outside the code, you've got nothing to protect you. You can't believe in God because you've stepped outside the code, and because you can't believe in Him, you've got to play God and pretend that you can take charge of your own destiny. You've got to play God by taking life and death into your hands. Abortion is the equivalent of saying that you're omniscient and can see the future and can know absolutely that this child will come to nothing and that your life will be ruined because of it."

I suddenly understood that America was on trial in Pensacola. I began to wonder how many tests like this we could afford to fail.

We left the restaurant thinking up tourist slogans that might help the Chamber of Commerce give Pensacola a better image. "Pensacola is a blast," for example. Or "I got bombed in Pensacola."

21

"Their Faith Is All They've Got"

On Monday morning I stopped at Our Father's House before going to court. Linda Burt was upset at what she had been hearing about the insanity defense.

"Their faith is all they've got," she said. "Better to get 20 or 30 years than to have their faith taken away from them."

"They need the insanity defense to get in the material on abortion. It's a strategy. Only the psychiatrist thinks they're crazy."

We talked about telling the truth. I told the story of St. Athanasius, who when asked by the Roman legions who were pursuing him where Athanasius was replied, "He is not far from you."

"That's a lie," said Linda.

"No, it's the truth," I said. "He wasn't far from them. He was talking to them, as a matter of fact."

"He knew want they meant."

"It wasn't his business to do their job for them."

"They should have made up their minds from the beginning," Linda said of the kids. "If God told them to do it, God will get them out."

I felt like saying that that didn't preclude the possibility that God would get them out as a result of lawyers using their brains and was ready to launch into a little speech on secondary causality but was going to be late for court and so restrained myself. If Shimek shared Linda's fundamentalist orientation he must have been having trouble with Monaghan's strategy too.

Outside the courthouse Rev. David Shofner had assembled a number of local Baptist ministers to show their solidarity with the Christians on trial inside. John Burt was passing out a letter signed by J. Daniel Bray and Joan Andrews, the woman who had been taking part in the sit-ins at abortion clinics in the Philadelphia area. She was presently in jail because she refused to promise the judge that she would not engage in more sit-ins once he let her out. The letter "advised and admonished" Vinson and Novotny, "the willing tool of King Herod, the mass murderer of Holy Innocents," that "we shall never render or surrender a single innocent life to Caesar. Nor shall we recognize any so-called 'laws' that sanction the slaughter of three times as many American babies as Jews were murdered by your devil-father, Hitler." I began wondering if John the Baptist had had tone problems too.

22

A Fanatic About Religion

Inside Mullan took the stand again and said that Kathren was a fanatic about religion. On cross examination Dillard droned on about the normal practice of religion. Maybe the reporter from Tampa was right: maybe Christianity did drive you crazy. It was a motif right out of Flannery O'Connor. Florida was even farther south than Millidgeville, Georgia.

Mullan and Dillard locked horns over the true nature of a delusion, and then without resolving that issue went on to talk about whether God and Jesus were two different persons. At any moment I expected the Nicene Creed to be entered as evidence.

Monaghan finally got Professor Brennan on the stand on Monday afternoon. Cognitive dissonance proved to be a big flop primarily because most of the evidence it was supposed to smuggle into the trial had already been entered. Brennan did give a good interpretation of Horton Hears a Who though.

"Horton is this huge elephant. He keeps going around saying 'A person's a person no matter how small.' Everyone thinks he's crazy because he's the only one who can hear the voice of the little people. In the end Horton's a hero because he recognizes something nobody else can."

Teresa tells me that her agent also represents Dr. Seuss. She intends to find out if Dr. Suess is prolife.

"That's the intentional fallacy," I say. "Texts can't be limited to the intentions of their authors. Horton Hears a Who is objectively a prolife book no matter what Dr. Suess's intentions are." It was a good analogy for the trial too. The longer one looked at the trial the more clearly one could see that the intentions of those involved in it were ultimately caught up in a design which transcended them. Monaghan had said it himself already. He had the keenest sense of it of anybody.

23

Faith And Reason

Paul Shimek had said that from the beginning his case was going to be based on three things: Assignment Life, Rev. James Darnell, and Dr. Bell, a local physician. On Monday afternoon, he got the second of his three wishes. He was never to get the third. Shimek's only problem was that even when he got who he wanted on the stand he couldn't get them to make the points he wanted them to make. He was having a typical type of exchange with Darnell.

Shimek: "Rev. Darnell, what does the Bible say about the pregnant woman and the contents of the womb?"

Darnell: "Well, let me begin with Genesis …"

Dillard: "Objection, your honor."

Vinson: "Sustained. Mr. Shimek, let me remind you that we have to limit ourselves to references that have already been identified as having an effect on the defendants."

After a while Monaghan was starting to parody Shimek's approach.

"Your honor, I intend to read the whole Bible from cover to cover as a part of my closing statement."

Dillard: "It doesn't surprise me, your honor."

Shimek wanted Darnell to cite six references from the Bible which would show that the fetus was a human being. It was, of course, a classic inversion of faith and reason. If you make the humanity of the fetus an article of faith, then all the rationalist has to say is that he doesn't have the faith and, therefore, the fetus isn't human. It's a sure way of turning a fact of the order of the speed of light into a religious, and therefore, private thing. It had been the strategy of the proaborts from the very beginning and here was Shimek using a variation of it in an attempt to get his client off. Geraldine Ferraro had used a similar tactic in the 1984 election campaign as she went around the country explaining why she was personally opposed to abortion. "As a Catholic," she said, "I accept the premise that a fertilized ovum is a baby. I have been blessed with the gift of faith but others have not. I have no right to impose my beliefs on them."

Making the humanity of the fetus an article of faith had been the mainstay of the proabort Catholics in the Democratic Party. It just showed that fundamentalism and secularism were part of a dialectic that was typically American and would probably never be broken.

"The First Assembly of God," Shimek went on, "is a Spirit-filled, Bible-believing people. The Bible saturates these people's lives. Now will you please tell the jury what does the Bible say about life in the womb and abortion."

Rev. Darnell then started off on Psalm 139 and Luke 1.

Pat looked as if his eyes were about to roll back into his head.

Shimek: "Rather than give every reference, lest you offend the government ...”

Dillard: "Your honor, I object."

Vinson: "Sustained."

"Is God real?" Dillard asks on cross examination. "Yes, sir, he is."

"How does he talk to us?"

The Reverend Darnell then talked about how he switched his major from biology to preaching in college without losing any credits because unbeknownst to him the rules had been changed just a week before he made his decision.

"God was working in my life," he said to U.S. Attorney Dillard.

Pat is nodding approval now. In spite of Catholic qualms about the relation between faith and reason, the testimony is apparently having a good effect on the jury. Teresa notices the bald man in the back row nodding vehemently in agreement with Pastor Darnell. She predicts a hung jury.

24

The Defense Rests Its Case

After failing to get a few more people on the stand whose testimony wouldn't have made much difference anyway, the defense rested its case. They had gotten more on abortion into the trial than anyone, including themselves, could have hoped for. In the end they had covered all the bases. It was an all-American, ecumenical presentation. It had been Catholic, and it had been Fundamentalist. The jury had the Bible read at them, and they had seen the film. Abortion had been examined in the light of faith and reason. Now it was up to them.

After the defense closed it case, Monaghan refused to take credit for what even the opposition was to term a brilliant effort.

"God is running this trial. I didn't want Assignment Life in, and I was wrong."

Over lunch Teresa and I went at it over abortion once again.

"The fetus is a parasite," she said. "The mother is the host."

I watched her eat her alfalfa sprout sandwich and then looked out the window.

"Did you ever see a lamprey?" I asked.

She hesitated.

"Is that a type of fish?"

"It looks like an eel and has a mouth that looks like a suction cup full of teeth. It's disgusting looking. The lamprey uses its mouth to attach to fish. That's the only way it will ever eat. When you were in utero you got food through the umbilical cord, then from your mother's breast, then the way you're eating now."

Teresa said nothing. She munched away on her alfalfa sprouts.

"According to you, then, all mammals are parasites. Is that right?" I was determined to pursue the issue.

"They go through a parasitic stage."

"Lions are parasites, and elephants are parasites, and cows are parasites."

"They go on through a parasitic phase."

"You mean they exist in the wombs of their mothers. It seems to me that the only reason you're interested in the term is because its derogatory; you need it to desensitize yourself so that it's easier to treat the child badly.”

The talking on abortion led to talking on the family. Teresa had had bad experiences, all her friends had had bad experiences too. She lived in a world where the family was pathology, where there was no difference between the tumor and the womb. She accused me of being antisex.

"No," I said, "You've got it backward. I'm the Catholic. You're the Gnostic."

Abortion was Gnostic medicine.

25

The Government Rebuttal

The government began its rebuttal of the insanity defense after lunch by calling to the stand Dr. Daniel Jansak, a bald round man in a brown polyester leisure suit with a canary yellow shirt. But by Monday afternoon Monaghan was no longer interested in the insanity defense.

"If they find them insane, it's worse than guilty. They'll send them to the nuthouse for 20 years — automatically."

The Pensacola case was one of the first to be tried under the new insanity defense that came about as a result of Hinkley's assassination attempt on President Reagan. Monaghan was using the insanity defense as a way of destroying criminal intent and as a way of putting the issue of abortion before the jury. The only way to get something like Assignment Life in front of the jury was by saying that it had affected the defendants' minds.

"It's like talking to people about abortion," Monaghan said. "If you say abortion is wrong, people are going to fight you. But if you say smoking hurts the unborn child, you get an argument going which gets everybody on the child's side."

Monaghan had abandoned the insanity defense before the prosecution began its rebuttal. The strategy now was to take the psychiatrists' statements that the kids were normal and amplify them to the point of having them say that they were good kids too. Pat was attempting to resurrect diminished capacity.

Back at Shimek's office that evening none of the lawyers was thinking about the insanity defense anymore. They were going to focus on the routineness of the government psychiatrists' tests and were planning their closing statements.

"You've got to get Kaye separated from the other three," Kasun said to Shimek, "and get her out. Honestly, you've got the only chance. The rest of us are going to need a nullification. Kathren was the obedient wife. The obedient wife is a nullification," she said, half to herself. Everyone seemed lost in his or her own thoughts.

Shimek opened on Tuesday morning by asking Jansak how much he was paid.

The prosecution then brought its second psychiatrist to the stand. Dr. Manuel Cepeda wore thick glasses and a crew cut. He looked like a nerd. He seemed to enjoy reciting his resume the way other people like to sing songs. He said that Matt and Kaye had met at a roller revival skating party and said that neither suffered from any severe mental disease or defect.

At the break Monaghan had made up his mind.

"I'm gonna shuck it," he said referring to the insanity defense. "I'm going to argue abortion from now on. I'm gonna use your article on the jury."

He was referring to the piece I had done on Pensacola in a recent issue of Fidelity magazine. "By returning a verdict for acquittal," I had written, "the jury could send a clear message back to the Supreme Court. We're not going to waste four more young lives because of your mistake." In the end we were both wrong. The jury wouldn't have to nullify. They would have the chance to acquit handed to them on a silver platter. All they would have to do was follow the judge's instructions.

Myra Shofner, the wife of the Baptist minister, who two days ago had been so impressed with Mullan on the stand, now saw the psychiatric defense as hopeless. The turn in the trial was making her feel more and more sorry for the defendants and causing her to think about what got them to the mess they were in.

"The Bible isn't enough," she said. "These kids have been brainwashed. Nobody has ever taught them how to think. They're told that God will make everything all right if they just follow the Bible. Well, he won't. They move out of that little milieu of theirs and then realize all of a sudden that the world doesn't work that way."

After the break Monaghan began cross examining Cepeda to bring out the bigger picture.

"Do you believe that God's law is above man's law?" he asked.

"No, sir," answered the government's shrink, showing signs of being ill at ease. "Both have to be used in conjunction for an orderly society."

"You believe that God exists."

"Yes, sir."

"Then you believe that God does speak to individuals."

"People report to me that God speaks to them. I have no background to evaluate their claims."

"Could it be true that God speaks to the heart?"

"I'm here to speak as a scientific witness. We can't measure God speaking to the heart by placing a microphone next to the heart."

"Do you believe that God can speak to human beings?"

"As a personal belief I do believe that God can speak to those people."

"It can happen?"

"It's an unmeasurable phenomenon. I want to go back to being a physician."

Shimek began his cross examination by going on the attack. He was warned by the judge, who used his gavel then for the only time during the trial. Shimek backed off but continued working at cross purposes with the rest of the defense.

"Are you Spirit-filled?" Shimek asked the government's psychiatrist.

"I was brought up in the Baptist Church."

"In your study of the Bible have you ever come across examples of people possessed by demons?"

"Objection, your honor," Dillard said.

"Your honor, I'm only going over the same stuff Mr. Monaghan went over."

Shimek tried again.

Cepeda answered that he never had a case where a patient thought that God or the devil was torturing him.

Shimek then asked Cepeda if he had ever taken a course in the history of Israel. Dillard objected and the defense got shut down once again. By then it was time for the closing arguments.

26

The Closing Arguments

Novotny opened for the government. Her closing statement was in keeping with the way she had run the rest of the case — methodical, if not plodding. She restated the evidence that the kids had blown up the clinics. Novotny ended her case as she had begun it — two steps behind finding out what the defense was up to — yet in her statement she averted to what was to become the critical point of the whole trial. She brought up the necessity defense. Motive, she said, was no excuse for a crime. For any action to be undertaken maliciously, there can be no legal alternative to solve that problem. She concluded by telling the jury to follow the law.

Shimek made the first closing statement for the defense. His job was the simplest of all the defense lawyers because the evidence against Kaye Wiggins was the weakest. All he had to do was get her disentangled from the other defendants by claiming that the prosecution hadn't made its case against her beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead of sticking to something simple though, Shimek decided to draw the big picture.

"The whole country is looking at you to see whether this curse on our government is broken," he said.

He then told the jury that they were not involved in a search for the truth.

"I'm not asking you to find the truth because if the government were interested in the truth there'd be no case against Kaye Wiggins. It's not wrong to set these people free 'cause the government didn't prove its case. Don't come back looking at the floor. You're not going to be punished because you found a reasonable doubt."

Shimek was plausible as long as he confined himself to trying to get Kaye off on a reasonable doubt. However, the preacher in him couldn't resist THE BIG ISSUE. From the conspiracy charge, he moved on to Kaye's character.

"She loves the Lord. She’s in the Bible every day. They live it out. There it is. The government has tossed out a big net. They gonna drag in anybody they can because the catch is bigger. The government is overreaching. They have unclean hands. Their BATF agents tore up letters and they know it. You can't serve both God and Mammon."

Shimek then discoursed on Matt and Kaye as two in one flesh even though they weren't married, on Miami money coming to Pensacola to spill Pensacola blood, and, inevitably, on religion.

"God's talking all the time if you get on the right frequency. Satan is a liar and a deceiver. If you believe that there's a God you better believe there's a Satan. You got blessing or you got cursing."

Shimek had switched on his rhetorical afterburners and was leaving the jury and the courtroom behind as he shot off into the legal equivalent of Hyperspace.

"Soon abortion is going to be a thing of the past. Jesus is going to return. These kids are going to reign with Jesus Christ. There's a kingdom out there. It's invisible. These kids know they're spiritual beggars. They just go to God and ask for what they need. God is the jockey and you're the horse and that's why these kids are victors. They want to be like God."

And at this point Hal Barton turns around in his seat, his eyes wide with disbelief.

"He's hallucinating," he says.

"There's a fragrance about these kids," Shimek says and continues until he reaches the climax of his closing statement, whereupon his voice cracks with emotion.

Monaghan is sitting at the defense table with his hands folded as if in prayer and his eyes shut as if wincing in pain.

The judge calls a recess after Shimek sits down. In the hall outside the courtroom Katie Short comes up and says that we're about to see legal history in the making.

"The government," she says, "put the necessity defense into the instructions the judge is going to read to the jury. They're phrased in a negative way, but they're still there. It's providential."

Katie Short was the antithesis of fundamentalism in a way that eluded the either/or, faith or reason dichotomy that had proven the nemesis of American intellectual history. She had gone to Thomas Aquinas College in California and then to Berkeley for her law degree and had always struck me as what Katherine Hepburn would have been like if she had been given the lead role in the film version of the Summa Theologica. She had even named her son Thomas Aquinas Short.

"God's hand was in this one," she said. It was something that both the Catholics and the Fundamentalists could agree upon.

The closing statements followed the pattern of the whole trial. The sublime followed the ridiculous. After being on the ropes for the whole day, the defense came back and started to do some damage. Kasun led off after the break. She was the first one of the defense lawyers who openly abandoned the insanity defense.

"I'm not arguing to you that she's insane," she said of Kathren Simmons, her client. "I don't buy that for a moment. We had a duty to put on that evidence, but I don't believe it."

Instead Kasun said that Kathren got involved by embracing the Bible and following her husband.

"Wives, submit to your husbands as unto the Lord. She believes it. … She couldn't oppose her husband."

27

"Do You Want The Altars Of Baal Back?"

Kasun then retold the story of Gideon, who was scared but went during the night and tore down the altars of Baal, the god with the insatiable appetite for innocent blood. Gideon wanted to destroy the altars because they were the places of human sacrifice. In the morning the people came to Joash and wanted to know where Gideon was so that they could punish him, and Joash said to them "Do you want the altars of Baal back?"

Kasun paused at the podium. She wore a tan suit and a peach blouse that did nice things for the color of her skin. She then asked the jury the same question.

"Do you want the altars of Baal back? Do you want the abortion clinics back? Joash said if Baal wants the clinics, let him speak for himself. Where are the abortionists? They are ashamed to face you. They are too busy spilling innocent blood and hiding behind the law. The abortionists are the ones responsible for the fact that Kathren's life is ruined. Just a few years ago these kids could have called the police to have an abortion stopped. Now because of a perverse and cruel decision of the Supreme Court, they are considered criminals for doing what the police would have done and should have done. Forty years ago if Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons had sabotaged trains going to the Nazi Death Camps, they would now be heroes."

Kasun then talked about the film Assignment Life, about the baby that had been killed by the saline abortion being held up to the camera by someone who had assisted at the abortion.

"I wept when I saw that little baby lying there helpless there on that table. Had those hands baptized that baby?" she asked the jury: "If you felt bad when you saw that, how do you think Matt and Jimmy felt? What would you want to do about it?"

Kasun then moved to what was now the crux of the defense's case.

"To justify a wrong act, there must be no legal alternatives available. If there is a necessity to save a human life, then that act was not wrong. Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons have not hurt one hair of anyone. Were lives lost? The only loss was in dollars. Is it really necessary to offer up four more lives on the altar of this Moloch?"

28

"Follow The Law"

Frank Booker, the Notre Dame professor who represented Jimmy Simmons and who up until this time had confined himself to the technical aspects of the case, took much the same tack during his own closing statement focusing on the necessity defense and the fact that it was part of the judge's instructions.

"Follow the law," he said. "The law in this case is the defense of necessity. You have a right to act from necessity when there's no legal alternative, when no policeman may be called. Your state legislature had laws protecting the unborn, but the Supreme Court struck them all down. It is the government's obligation to prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that a crime has been committed and that there are no legal alternatives. If the harm is imminent and there is a direct causal relationship, then there is no crime at all under the law. Like Gideon's father I would plead, let Baal speak for Baal."

By now the cat was out of the bag. Both Dillard and Novotny became visibly agitated when Booker mentioned the necessity defense for the second time. Now Dillard would have to redirect his closing statement away from both the facts of the case and the insanity defense and talk about the necessity defense, which they themselves included in the judge's instructions to the jury. Dillard had basically the time of Monaghan's closing statement to come up with yet another argument in a trial that had taken still a third turn since it began as what everyone considered an open and shut case.

In a world of frauds and hype, of the devil's empty promises tricked up in Madison Avenue packaging, of proabortion theologians and feminist nuns and lickspittle professors at Catholic Universities that have sold their souls to the Rockefeller Foundation, it's easy to become cynical. If my view tends to be negative, it's only because negative phenomena predominate in life. In a world full of intellectual eunuchs, backstabbers, and toadies whoring after alien gods — Baal and Huitzilopochtli and the like — brushes with greatness are few and far between. That's why I felt fortunate to have seen Pat Monaghan's closing statement. Loaded down with relics and the cross of the inquisition, having lost his job, and after living on bread and water for four months, he had taken a hopeless case and now had the prosecution sweating bullets. Novotny herself characterized Monaghan as a genius after the trial. He had taken an open and shut case where the defendants had admitted their crime on national television and had turned it around to the point where America was on trial — America and its complicity with abortion.

"Perhaps God is speaking to America," he said and then related how nothing in the trial had gone as he had planned. "I wanted to bring in a Colonel from the army and wanted to talk to Dr. Brennan about cognitive dissonance, and nothing worked out the way I planned it, and now suddenly I find in the instructions of the court the defense of necessity, which says that it is no crime when you prevent the taking of innocent human life. The power has been given you to follow the law. Those kids are innocent. They are the best that we've got. Jimmy's mother talked about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. That's who we've got on trial today. Tom Sawyer took a whipping for Becky Thatcher. That's what an American boy would do. That's what you would want him to do. You don't want the modern wimps who are taking women into the abortion clinics.

"Huck Finn broke the law too. He was involved in violating interstate commerce. He wanted to get a black man to Cairo. Huck Finn confronted the problem of following the law and betraying Jim, the conflict between the requirements of the law and morality. He wrestled with it like an American boy and in the end he didn't see a piece of property; he saw a man. I've got Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer to defend. It's American innocence that's on trial in this case."

By the middle of his closing statement it was clear that Monaghan was going to pull out all the stops. He talked about the holocaust, about John Brown, about slavery, about a trial in Kentucky where the jury nullified the slavery statutes, and about Jerusalem putting Jesus on trial.

"The worshippers of Baal want a victim. Right to lifers want a martyr. This trial by ordeal has punished these kids enough. When a government tries innocence itself, that government goes on trial. If the government wins, then the country loses. Jerusalem won its case, and Jerusalem fell. If the United States wins this case, America loses, and we cannot take that loss impending upon us now."

29

A Thirteenth Juror

"There's a mystery here that is beyond me. There's a thirteenth juror in this case, and that's God himself. God is an unindicted co-conspirator in this case. He's been all around it from the very beginning. Part of the judge's instructions on the necessity defense will be that to justify a wrongful act there must be no legal alternatives available. There are kids who might be being born right now while this trial is in session because of what Matt and Jimmy did. Writing your congressman wouldn't have saved that life. When that building was open and doing interstate commerce, innocent children were being killed. What these kids did was not a malicious act. There was no criminal intent.

"When I made my opening statement in this trial I wrote the number 4901 on the blackboard. That's the number of babies that died while you listened to me. During the trial 36,981 innocent lives have been lost. The only thing you can do is make sure it's not 36,895. Tell the Supreme Court they can do their own abortions. Tell them the ordinary people of this country reject their law. That's what American innocence is all about. A house divided against itself can't endure. A country can't be half slave and half free. It can't endure half killing. This is your chance to say that life is more important than property. Nobody was hurt. The fireman at Dr. Permenter's told us that somebody was praying for him that night. We know that now. The question I put to you is this: Do you want the altars of Baal back?"

Monaghan paused.

"There is something afoot in this case that is beyond us. I had a plan for this trial, and nothing I wanted to do worked out, and that was because God had a better plan. He wanted you to see that film and see those aborted children. I never dreamed I'd get a necessity defense in an American court. I only pray that God has not hardened the heart of America. This is not Egypt. God is waiting for the judgment of the community. We need to tell the true story to the world. Let's talk about who is in danger of being destroyed and not what. Give America, America. The protectors of the code love you."

It is hard to convey the emotional intensity in the courtroom at that moment. We had been there for ten days for ten hours a day and in the end it all came down to 12 average people who knew virtually all there was to know about what abortion entailed along with a way to let the kids off, which would be read to them by the judge himself. It was to be a maximal exercise of the freedom of the will. Monaghan had transformed an open and shut case into a referendum on the altars of Baal — with the help of God, the judge, and the prosecution.

30

The Law Is King

U.S. Attorney Dillard probably realized the force of Monaghan's closing statement more than anyone else in the courtroom. The longer the jury had to think about it the more dangerous the situation became for him. That was why he began before Monaghan had a chance to sit down. Dillard must have recognized too that an appeal to the facts was pointless now. The only way he could counter Monaghan's arguments was to appeal to another religion — the American religion, the worship of law. "In America," Tom Paine had written, "THE LAW IS KING." The American Constitution was written by men appalled at the religious wars of the seventeenth century and demoralized at the failure of Protestantism to succeed in creating a voice of authority greater than that of Rome. Out of the ever-widening centrifugal disintegration of one Protestant sect into another which resulted in a Babel of competing and conflicting voices all claiming God as their authority was born a relativism and a despair at ever speaking authoritatively about higher things. The age called it deism. From it the founding fathers forged the artifice which was to eschew controversy over the higher things in favor of having clearer answers about the here and now. The machine that was to accomplish all this was known as the law. Let's forget about what God wants as Jesus made it known to us through all the strife of history, let's instead make laws. The founding fathers built a beautiful edifice without much care for its foundation. The law was built over the abyss, and the greatest minds in this country all knew it in their own way. "Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen." Jonathan Edwards knew it; Natty Bumppo knew it; even Oliver Wendell Holmes knew it in his way. But none of them could do anything about it. Aquinas could have helped them, but Aquinas was part of the strife of history that Americans found so irritating. "Since then," the Angelic Doctor could have told them if they had been willing to listen, "the eternal law is the plan of government in the Chief Governor, all the plans of government in the inferior governors must be derived from the eternal law. … Therefore, all laws, in so far as they partake of right reason, are derived from the eternal law." The infallibility of positive law was our supreme fiction, a fiction which plunged the whole nation into crisis whenever the law was manifestly wrong. Dred Scott was one such crisis; it led to the Civil War; abortion was a crisis of the same magnitude in our time. The question at the back of Monaghan's closing statement was an uncompleted equation. If slavery led to the Civil War, where was abortion leading us now? The deification of the law in America was the rationalist's way out of the relativism that came as the logical result of the Protestant Reformation.

"The law we believe in," Dillard said to the jury, "is a very thin fabric that keeps us together. The only thing that keeps us out of the jungle is that we obey those laws. If my God (The relativism was creeping in.) says I'm right and you're wrong, does that give me the right to blow up your house? If that's the case, what's next?"

It was an appeal to the fears of people who lacked the intellectual wherewithal to extricate themselves from the relativism that had become this country’s media certified, official philosophy. It was an appeal to practical agnosticism. How do you know you're right? What's next? Beirut? Northern Ireland? Iran? That's where religion led people. Dillard then turned Huck Finn into a Palestinian driving a truck full of dynamite.

"Today it's the God you and I believe in. Tomorrow what will it be? Suppose the next time someone says, Allah told me to blow up the federal building? We," he said referring to the prosecution, "have been called the forces of Satan and likened to Pontius Pilate. It's frightening to see what happens when you put religion into a lawsuit like this."

31

What's Next?

In the final analysis that was the government's case — to scare people into feeling that they were committing a sin if they allowed religion to be the explicator of the law. Dillard held up the spectre of relativism and dared the jury to come up with an answer to it. Ultimately, he was saying, no one's religion can pass judgment on the law. That's why Americans believe in the separation of church and state. He dared the jury to come up with an alternative to legal agnosticism, knowing that even if one person felt that way he couldn't argue his case against 11 legal positivists. "The positivists were all in the jury," Monaghan was to say later. "Caesar was okay."

"What's next?" Dillard asked, and the jury had to decide whether the legal system was more sacred than the lives it purported to protect. In the end it came down to a choice between fear of the Lord and fear of the law. Dillard played on the fears of the untutored relativist who feels (He has nothing stronger than feelings.) that life in a congeries of irreconcilable opinions — Everything exists nothing has value — and that the only way to adjudicate these competing claims is according to the extrinsic standards of that epistemological fiction known as the law. In the end the vulgar mind fears exposing its inadequacy more than it fears transgressing God's law.

After Dillard sat down, Judge Vinson read the jurors 30 pages of instructions, the most significant being the defense of necessity.

"You have also heard evidence," he said, "concerning the defendants' motive regarding the offenses set out in the indictment. Intent and motive should never be confused. Motive is what prompts a person to act. Intent refers only to the state of mind with which the act is done. Good motive alone is never a defense where the act done is a crime. One may not commit a crime and be excused from criminal liability because he desired or expected that ultimate good would result from his criminal act. Moreover, if one commits a crime under the belief, however sincere, that his conduct was religiously, politically, or morally required, that is no defense to the commission of a crime.

"The motive of the accused is immaterial except insofar as evidence of motive may aid determination of state of mind or intent.

"To justify a wrongful act there must be no legal alternatives available, the harm to be prevented must be imminent, and a direct, causal relationship must be reasonably anticipated to exist between the person's wrongful act and the avoidance of harm. Otherwise, no criminal act intentionally committed is justified by the law."

It was as if God wanted to make it as easy as possible on these mediocre people. In the article I had already written before the Pensacola trial started, I had called for jury nullification. A jury in the seventeenth century in England had been literally imprisoned in the trial of William Penn only to come back and nullify the law which prohibited preaching to an unlawful assembly. The jury in Pensacola could pass judgment on an infinitely more heinous law simply by following the instructions of the judge. It was as if God understood the limitations of modern Americans and wanted to make things as easy on them as possible.

32

The Case Goes To The Jury

It was 7:30 p.m. before the case went to the jury. As their first act the jury did something sensible. They decided that they needed a meal and a night's sleep before they could begin deliberating. They would reconvene in the morning at eight.

I was so wrung out afterward that I didn't even want to talk to Pat. In a sense, there was nothing to say that hadn't already been said. There was no more strategy to plan. It was now all up to the jury. This was a story with no deep, hidden meaning. It was all up front. The real story was put in plain view before the jury so that they could deliberate with no excuse that they didn't know. Pat said as much later on. He said at one point that he couldn't remember what he had said to the jury. He was a front man for the Holy Ghost. Everyone was being moved around a divine chessboard into a final configuration which would assure the maximal exercise of free will on the part of the jury. They had no excuses anymore; there was nothing more to say.

Teresa Carpenter and Peggy Moen and I went to the Marina Oyster bar on Bayou Texar for dinner. It was the type of place where the natives ate. In spite of that the food wasn't very good — except for the oysters. Teresa and I shared a dozen raw oysters. Actually I don't know whether they were good either. It was the first time I had ever eaten raw oysters, but I had been through so many new experiences I hardly noticed.

Sensing that I was a Yankee, the waitress mixed up my cocktail sauce for me. I found myself talking about a snapping turtle whose acquaintance I had made once while riding my bike at St. Mary's College. Snapping turtles were mean, but up front about it — unlike English professors. I said I preferred the company of snapping turtles. Peggy Moen smiled enigmatically. Teresa ate another oyster. I also said that I thought that Pat Monaghan was a hero.

"He's a protector of the code," I said. "Joe McGinnis once wrote a book about how he couldn't find any heroes, didn't he? He spent his time talking to all the wrong people — to turkeys like Teddy Kennedy."

It turned out that Teresa and McGinnis were friends. She described him as "very much a Catholic." At least as Catholic as Teddy Kennedy, I felt like saying.

"He has lots of progeny," she said.

"If he's divorced his wife and remarried, he's been excommunicated."

I turned to Peggy.

"Isn't that right?"

She nodded.

"Joe and Nancy are very happy together."

I found myself wondering how happy his first wife was. I remembered McGinnis for the column he had written for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the sixties. He had made the big time at the age of 26 when The Selling of the President made the best seller lists.

"I thought it was a lightweight book," I said.

"He was in the right place at the right time."

"He left his wife and kids when he hit the big time."

He had crystallized in my mind as the epitome of the Catholic sellout.

After the noise over his first book had died down, McGinnis wrote some maudlin articles trying to rationalize his own failures. It was not the kind of thing a protector of the code would do. He talked about being hung over and eating William Styron's crabmeat. Styron got annoyed; scratch one more hero.

"He left his wife and children," I said. "Don't you think that's despicable?"

"It depends on the relationship. There's no sense hanging around when love has died."

She talked about love as if it were a goldfish one found belly up upon coming downstairs for breakfast in the morning. But I liked her for her honesty.

Teresa was becoming the subtext of the Pensacola story — the explanation of why we were all there, of why abortion existed in the first place. She was playing according to rules which made it a liability to be a woman. The only way to even up the score was to practice gnostic medicine on oneself, to neuter sex technologically with the pill and the knife. In a godless world someone has to take charge of destiny. Abortion is the most direct way of playing God because it grants power over life and death.

33

Wednesday Morning

Wednesday dawned rainy — the first day without sunshine since I got there over a week ago. I took it as a bad sign. In the courthouse there was nothing to do but mill around and wait for the jury to come up with a verdict. The TV people have all withdrawn into their support vehicles. The satellite dish opens its wide mouth to the heavens and collects rain. Hal Barton spends his time evangelizing Teresa, talking about his own odyssey. Simon from CUL stands around looking like a rabbi for life and talks about his days as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill. I end up with Marie from Cantonment, and we refight the Thirty Years War but in a pleasant sort of way. Marie is a nice Fundamentalist lady who had a bout with principalities and powers over a Ouija board in Puerto Rico. When she got in so far she couldn't get back out again, she lay down on the kitchen floor and told God she wasn't going to move until God made his move first. She wanted a sign and she got one. She got saved and came to the Lord and has been with him ever since. I found it hard to argue with personal experience.

"You'd be happier if you were a Catholic," I said. "You'd have the Eucharist ... and reason to."

She didn't seem offended. It didn't seem like much of an offer from her point of view. When Marie came to the Lord, she brought her Ouija board mind with her.

"The head has got to come off," she said.

Given the circumstances I didn't like the drift of her imagery.

"Just like the saints were beheaded. We got to lose our heads too."

She had gotten the faith and lost her reason in the process. I cited Scripture to her about Peter the Rock and the Pope, his successor.

"Tu es Petrus et supra hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam. I saw that written in gold around the vault of St. Peter's in Rome. It's literally true, you know. The Church is literally built on St. Peter."

Marie opined that I was just seeing the carnal sense of Scripture. I was being too literal for the Fundamentalists. Marie felt that the real people lived inside us.

"God covered us with animal sin," she said.

We were ghosts living inside our bodies. Another dualist. The world was full of them. I was becoming befuddled. It was either her thinking or her blue eyes.

34

The Jury Announces Its Verdict

At noon the word went out that the jury was ready to announce its verdict. As Shimek predicted, they looked at the floor when they entered the courtroom.

"I am advised by the jury," Judge Vinson said, "that they have reached a verdict."

Novotny later said that when the jury came back after only four hours she knew that she had won. Goldsby and Simmons were found guilty on all seven counts. Kaye Wiggins burst into tears. Goldsby consoled her as the jury found the girls innocent on six counts but guilty of conspiracy. Jimmy Simmons took it like a man. So did Matt. More than one person afterward said that the judge seemed annoyed with the jury when they delivered their verdict. It was hard to tell. His response to their verdict was unprecedented though. In front of the jury he told the court that the defendants, who had been in jail for four months without bail and who had just been convicted of seven counts of terrorist bombing, did not pose a threat to the community, and he then let them off on their own recognizance until the May 30 sentencing hearing. One of the federal marshals later told the boys he had never seen anything like it.

Because of the rain the TV cameras had been set up in the courthouse lobby for the post-trial press conference. The foreman of the jury, a Catholic and chief petty officer in the Navy, was the first to speak. He announced that the jury would make no other statement to the press other than the one which he then dutifully read as the lights glared and the still cameras whizzed and clicked.

He said that the jury had based its verdict on the law and that their personal beliefs on religion and abortion did not influence their decision.

It was a statement worthy of the walking lobotomy the average man had become after twelve years of legalized abortion, and fitting that a Catholic should deliver it. In the final analysis the philosophy of Geraldine Ferraro and other "personally opposed, but" Catholics may have found its most telling expression in a jury of 12 ordinary men who felt, when all was said and done, that the law was one thing and religion something else. The verdict that could have been a signal of protest from the common man against the reign of terror unleashed on this country by the Supreme Court in the end came down to nothing more than a vindication of the philosophy of shallow minds, namely dualism. Demos labored and brought forth a mouse. The law was one thing and religion was another. Religion was a private affair. It should not influence our decisions on important matters. In that case we look to the law. The foreman of the jury was one of life's innumerable minor characters, who, when called on to life's stage, flubs his lines. He had had his brush with greatness and had decided that religion shouldn't influence his decision. He didn't want to impose his views. He stood all alone in the end zone of history with the score tied and no time left on the clock and when the ball got to him he dropped it. He was an American Catholic in the mold of Mario Cuomo or Tip O'Neill, one of history's also rans, a might-have-been in the history of a struggle that now seemed doomed to plunge headlong to an ever-bloodier conclusion.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker

And in short I was afraid.

The Catholic Prufrock wandered away from the bright lights and blinked for a moment as if to wonder what had happened and then reentered the obscurity he merited through the mediocrity of his response.

When Monaghan took his place behind the microphones he radiated the peace of a man who had done his best. He hadn't done the impossible, but he had made it possible for the jury to do so, and the jury confronted with its moment of greatness blinked and dropped the ball.

35

It Can Happen Here

"When I defended Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons," Monaghan said, "I defended America. America is what I fear for. Now we know it can happen here. God bless America," he said.

I remember the Pope saying the same thing to Harry Reasoner on 60 Minutes.

"Now we know. It can happen here. The U. S. Government in this case was talking about interstate commerce. But these kids saw something else. They've seen the child."

The reporters shouted mundane questions at Monaghan, who brushed peripheral things aside and addressed the main issue squarely.

"I think that God in his mysterious way had something to say to us in Pensacola, and I think we should listen."

"That was a pretty awesome weapon," said the reporter from Tampa, referring to the bomb.

"I think that a child is an awesome thing. While we're here 4,000 children have died. America may be choosing property over life."

He talked about the neutron bomb, which destroys life but spares property, and pointed out a connection between Pensacola and Geneva, where the arms reduction talks were taking place.

"The Civil War was a chastisement on the nation of the free for the sin of slavery. It falls on the just and the unjust. We're all in the same boat."

The reporter from Tampa took Monaghan to mean that some sort of conspiracy was afoot. Monaghan brushed the question aside.

"When the jury gave its verdict, all I could see was that little red baby with its arms out as if being crucified."

He was referring to the baby killed by the saline abortion in Assignment Life.

"I still see that little red baby lying there on that table."

Shimek took Monaghan's place behind the microphones and started talking about the history of Israel. The reporters kept trying to get him to make an anti-Semitic statement about the lady from Miami who ran the abortion clinics.

36

Postmortem

One by one the defense attorneys began to regroup in the conference room of Shimek's law offices. It was a windowless room lined with bookshelves full of law books.

"I think," Monaghan said, "the judge believed that America is on trial. That's what terrifies me about this case. There was no screw up in it. These kids were in pretrial detention and then convicted of seven felony bombing counts, and the judge let them off. The judge heard the evidence and he was right."

Monaghan paused as if thinking the whole thing through one more time.

"The jury are a bunch of sons of bitches," he said as if delivering his own verdict.

Chris Kasun, who sat on his left, was the next one to speak.

"They are moral cowards," she said. "And they are going to get what they deserve."

A clap of thunder rolled over the building.

"I think," Pat said, "that they didn't appreciate the relation between God and the law. The U.S. Attorneys never did understand the case."

"The judge was hostile in the beginning," said Artie, Paul Shimek's son.

"He could give them all concurrent sentences and give the girls probation," Monaghan said. "I think the judge bought our arguments."

"I think that the jury was opposed to abortion," Kasun said, "but not enough."

"The jury was involved in denial," Pat said. "After they saw the film they said to themselves, 'Oh shit, if that's what's going on, why aren't we blowing the clinics up?' I think there's going to be some more clinics going up. If it were a conspiracy, the government could stop it, but it's not."

"I am deeply, deeply angry," Kasun said.

"I don't know why I feel so good," Monaghan said. "It's because Goldsby's out."

He had reached the point where he was talking to himself and then answering his own questions.

Monaghan had barely finished his sentence when the defendants arrived. Everybody seemed happy; they were acting as if they had been acquitted. It was because they were out for the first time in months.

"The jailer said to me, 'I ain't never seen nothing like it,'" Matt said.

"This is the feast of St. George," said Pat, "the slayer of the dragon."

Everyone was beaming. Monaghan accepted a dollar from Goldsby as his fee. He also demanded a protectors of the code T-shirt. Goldsby continued to smile at everybody in his 'aw, shucks' fashion.

"I want to go to church tonight," he said.

Monaghan said that he wanted to go too. Then he turned to Jimmy and Kathren who were holding each others' hands.

"And I want you to get pregnant for the sentencing hearing," he said to Kathren. "Everybody clear the room."

Jimmy laughed and Kathren covered her face with her hands. She had changed out of her court dress and was wearing jeans and sneakers which had been stained from playing softball on the local soil. Jimmy's brother Mike was a policeman. Today was his birthday. He was 23 years old. The bombers left, and the post mortem continued.

"This whole thing really scares me," Monaghan said.

"When Paul called me I went on a bread and water fast, and after being on that for a while, everything came together. When I said America was on trial I really meant it. I really think we're going to get kicked. The press thinks I'm talking about some underground movement, but I mean some cataclysmic thing, like divine retribution."

I thought of the message of Fatima. War is a punishment for sin.

"I think we convinced everybody but the stinking jury. The jury was a bunch of ..." he paused. "Hear that thunder?" he asked.

"You did everything you could," I said. "In the final analysis it's just the way Aquinas said it was. The will is free. Even God wouldn't coerce the jury."

"We put the issue to the jury in maximum form. Their decision was made from the maximum awareness. Each one brought to the verdict the optimum exercise of free will. That's what scares me. It's a judgment on America. You get a representative sampling of the American people to make a decision and they choose those damn buildings over those kids. I believe God talked to Matt Goldsby, and God's going to protect him. Gideon played a trumpet, and Matt's got a trumpet. I think Matt answered the call."

He paused.

"I wonder if people will keep blowing up clinics."

More thunder.

"The marshal said that there was in inordinate amount of gunpowder purchased in the past few weeks," said Katie Short.

It was like listening to a Greek chorus after a while. Now it was Chris Kasun's turn.

"What can we expect from an ordinary jury when Catholic bishops won't excommunicate Teddy Kennedy?"

"The clerk said that this is just starting," Pat said. He began to wonder out loud if he could have done things differently.

"You were terrific," I said. "You gave it to the jury on a silver platter — an invitation to do something heroic — and they said, 'No, thanks. We're not going to let our views on religion and abortion affect us.' What more can you say? The will is free. You offered 12 mediocre men and women a chance at greatness, and they turned you down."

"I think," said Pat, "that Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons are genuine heroes, and will be recognized as such. People will buy slavery; they'll buy abortion. They'll buy anything as long as you wrap it in law. I think Caesar's servants see that. The positivists were on the jury. I talked about the kid who knew the railroad car was going to Auschwitz and so he blew up the tracks, and the government put him on trial. Well, now we've had that trial in this country. Now we know that it can happen here. The decision is a public statement; we're all implicated. It's scary."

"That's the trouble with American innocence," I said. "There's too much pretending involved in it. Daisy Miller said, 'I don't think I want to know what you mean.' The jury found out about abortion, and they couldn't handle it."

"I think it was an ecumenical American presentation," Pat said.

"So they had no excuse," I replied.

37

A Ritual With The Unborn

Pat had an interview with Teresa Carpenter. I went with him to her motel and arranged to go with her to services at the First Assembly of God to check out the four defendants in their natural habitat. It was my final attempt to work the "Did God really tell them to do it?" angle. I left the two of them in Teresa's motel room with the tape recorder between them and wandered back to Our Father's House.

It was twilight in April in a latitude farther south than I had ever been before in my life. The light was strange. The palm trees would rustle whenever a breeze came up. It looked as if the rain were past. I suddenly felt a million miles from home.

O Florida, Venereal Soil!

I felt awash in indeterminate meanings, dwarfed by a story whose author was God. O Divine repository of all meanings! O Explicator of all our texts! O Omnipotent Chess Player using pawns perfectly free. I was overdosing on significance when the phone rang.

"Is this Our Father's House?"

"Yes," I said, "But I'm not, you see ..."

The caller had no time for my complicated explanation.

"There's going to be a ritual with the unborn up on scenic highway tonight."

"A what?"

"Somebody's doing a ritual up there," the caller croaked.

Was I being invited to attend or called to stop it? Before I could answer the line went dead.

The services at First Assembly of God had been disappointing at first and then downright embarrassing. The local TV station was there willing to film anyone willing to talk to them, but the services were under attended nonetheless. Frank Booker was there with Nancy Mullan, the psychiatrist, but Matt and Jimmy and Kaye and Kathren had not arrived by the time the services began. They missed the singing. The lyrics were projected on a large screen above the pulpit. I forget whether there was a bouncing ball too. I chose not to sing.

"Oh, how I love Jesus," sang the man on the stage with the big smile and the hairsprayed coiffure.

The emotion was of the same upbeat sort I had encountered at my first service. I wasn't feeling upbeat now though. I kept wanting to genuflect. I would have led them in a few verses of "Pange Lingua" if they wanted. But nobody wanted.

After I was given my pen kit and visitor's card ("Pensacola's Miracle Church"), Pastor Ballanger turned the services over to a man from Assembly of God headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, who was to give a short presentation complete with visual aids on how to fill out one's last will and testament, with the opportunity, of course, of making over part of it to the Assemblies of God. Jimmy and Matt were in the church now. I wondered what they were thinking.

After we learned about filling out our wills, Brother Ballanger asked Jimmy and Matt to come forward. He said it was good to have them back. He introduced Pat, who was sitting in the back with his son, and Frank Booker, and then asked everyone to come forward and to pray. When I turned around Pat was gone, and Booker was leaving. The congregation went forward and began to pray, holding hands and swaying back and forth to the singing. Before long Kathren was crying uncontrollably. I began to feel like a voyeur. All I could think was that they deserved something better.

And as for the rest of us ... . I kept wondering about the ritual up on scenic highway, and the fact that we all deserved —  now more than ten days ago — to get kicked.

Epilogue

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson sentenced Matthew Goldsby and James Simmons to ten years in prison. They were released after serving about half of their sentences. Kaye Wiggins and Kathy Simmons received five years probation.

On July 29, 1994, Paul Hill shot and killed abortionist Dr. John Britton and his escort James Barret as they arrived at the Pensacola clinic.

On January 1, 2012, Bobby Joe Rogers firebombed the clinic.

Biographical Note

E. Michael Jones, Ph.D., editor of Culture Wars magazine, is the author of many books, some of which are available for Kindle, including:

Abu Ghraib and The American Empire

Assassins and Character Assassins: Spielberg's Munich

Benedict's Rule: The Rise of Ethnicity and the Fall of Rome

Escape From Globalism: Meditations While Rowing Down the Danube

Jewish Nazis

L'affaire Williamson: The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

Lejzor and Fiszel Sing the Blues: Chess Records and the Black-Jewish Alliance

The Logos of Architecture and Its Opponents

Niggas in Denial: Pimping the System and The System of Pimping

Requiem for a Whale Rider

Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer Identity