Working hard to make themselves into the PETA of the Pro-Life Set.
Operation Rescue's newest form of protest raises eyebrows.



On a Church Street sidewalk, Randall Terry raised his prop knife high, then brought it plunging down into the chest of a hapless baby doll.
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“I’m the doctor and I stab babies,” he had explained earlier.

Dressed head to toe in costume surgical scrubs, the 50-year-old activist chucked the doll over one shoulder and held out his hand expectantly. A large white man in a Barack Obama mask obligingly handed him the next victim.

After dispatching three dolls in rapid succession, a tiny woman in a white granny wig tottered over to the “doctor” to accept her “health care ration” coupon. Obama gave the thumbs down. The doctor jabs her in the neck with a needle and granny falls down dead.

Terry, founder of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue, is branching out into the health care debate these days. He’s been staging protest skits and stunts around the country and today, he brought his show to Nashville to perform outside the closed office of U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Nashville.

“I know these skits are a little edgy,” said Terry, who is based in Florida but taking a five-day, seven-state tour of Southern congressional offices. “But they’re meant to jolt people into reality.”

The next skit involved the guy in the Obama mask holding up passers-by at paintball gunpoint demanding money from them, then blindfolding the baby dolls, lining them up in a row and shooting them point-blank in the face with blasts of air.
Up and down Church Street, jaws dropped.

“It’s an angry white man in a black man’s mask,” said Nashville resident James Davis, watching the proceedings from across the street. “They’re just trying to shock people. They’re trying to say, Barack Obama doesn’t care about you, he doesn’t care about your kids, because he’s black.”

But the performance got an ovation from Renee Sawyer, passing by on her way to the public library next door.

“I don’t go to the doctor, I don’t take prescription drugs, so why should I pay for someone else’s healthcare?”

“This is the biggest crowd we’ve had,” said Diana Roccograndi, who hit the pavement at least a dozen times in her role as the doomed granny.

“I don’t know how I would react if I saw this,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t think everybody is challenged enough to think about these issues. Obviously, killing babies like this, has to be wrong.”

There are, of course, no granny death panels in the Obama administration’s health care plan — just a proposal to allow doctors to discuss end-of-life issues with elderly patients before they become too ill to make their own treatment decisions.

As for abortion, federal law bans the use of taxpayer funds for abortion and the health care bill now before Congress would do nothing to change that. Abortions are included in the health care plan, but they would be paid for by private funds, not public.

Terry resumed his skit, reaching into the box of baby dolls one more time. Among the crowd watching him were several very confused middle schoolers.

“I think this is a disgrace,” said 13-year-old Jontrez London of Nashville. “Obama’s trying to save people. He ain’t gonna try to kill an old lady.”

Another baby doll went flying and 14-year-old Malcolm Wells shook his head and sighed.

“These are adults acting like children,” he said.


I find it amusing that the middle-schoolers have more sense than the protesters.



ETA: Courtesy of somnambulicious, have more of Terry's Traveling Show of WTF, at their town hall gig.



Terry's colleagues put on a skit with a man in an Obama mask pretending to whip a bloodied woman, who kept saying, "Massa, don't hit me no more. I got the money to kill the babies."

Terry himself dressed in a doctor's lab coat and pretended to stab a woman in a gray wig.

"There's no way to pay for this thing without killing granny," Terry explained.

...I got nothing.