Someone Knows Something - S7 E5: Nemesis

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

David and Amanda examine the relationship between religious beliefs and justification for violence. The investigation takes them to Washington, D.C., where they meet with an American evangelical minister who was involved in the anti-abortion movement — leading protests against Dr. Barnett Slepian and blockading the clinic where he worked. Has the minister’s position changed? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/someone-knows-something-the-abortion-wars-transcripts-listen-1.6736516

Oh, hey there! I'm Andrew Fung and I want to tell you about my new series with ViaRail. Join me as I ride on from Toronto to Ottawa and London aboard ViaRail's new fleet of trains. My journey was a breeze. No traffic jams, just smooth sailing. The seats are super comfy and with complimentary Wi-Fi, I can work and play with ease. Plus, with meals and snacks on board, I arrived refreshed and ready to explore. From a boat cruise in Ottawa to the Grand Theatre in London, these cities are packed with amazing experiences. For your next trip, do yourself a favor. Skip traffic and take Via Rail.

Watch both episodes now on cbc.ca slash Via Rail. Paid content with Via Rail Canada. This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains mature subject matter. Please take care. Acquit Jim Cobb! Acquit Jim Cobb! Acquit Jim Cobb! Acquit Jim Cobb! For James Cobb, the justification for his violence

was in the name of religion. During his state sentencing, he uses many biblical and anecdotal quotations, the simplest example being, what does the church say about abortion? Nobody ever has the authority to destroy unborn life. In 2003, while Kopp was awaiting his state trial, a small but vocal group of people gathered in front of the holding center where he was being held in Buffalo, in the name of the army of God. We say hallelujah to all good men. We appreciate the deeds of Brother James Cox.

And yet Brother Cox withstood all the media propaganda, and he did a righteous act. May there be many more. James Cox. Watching video of this from the CBC archives, none of Cops' supporters are physically violent. Instead, it's the religiously charged language that contains the force. Some are carrying vile signs saying things like, Praise Jesus, Jim Cop popped and stopped a baby butchering doc. You're either on Jim's side or you're on the side of the abortionist. You're either on Jim's side or you're on the side of the baby butcher. butchering doc. I need to get a sense of how and why some people like Kopp get

here through religion to this place of extreme modes of thinking and action. I need to talk to someone who has been there. I'm David Ridgen, and this is Someone Knows Something, Season 7, Episode 5, Nemesis. How are you doing? I've never seen you again. Oh, thank God.

We're together again. I've come to Washington, D.C. and just walked up to Amanda Robb, who's been waiting for me on the sidewalk. It's been a while since we've seen each other in person, and we look around for a quiet spot outside to catch up. Let's just go to the end of the sort of road here and see what happens. Or by the old executive office building. It's an amazing number of anti-abortion posters

throughout the country in America when I drive through. When I drive through Michigan, all the way down to Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, they're new posters too. Some of them are old, some of them are new. It's like, you know, the baby picture with the Psalms. A life is precious kind of stuff. Life is precious, heartbeat.

Yeah, heartbeat. Like, and then some of them are like, they show the pictures that they still show those kind of... Well, they're very powerful images. Those images. Yeah, for a secular society, we're a very religious culture. On that note, I'm brought back to why Amanda and I are actually here. To speak to somebody else. I don't really care if he's pro-life or pro-choice or anti-life, but like, I mean, he made Bart's life a living hell.

This is not an issue of rights. This is not a social issue. This is a dead baby. This is a dead human baby. This is Reverend Schenck, about age 34, at an Operation Rescue anti-abortion protest in Buffalo in 1992. Schenk was a devout anti-abortionist who would parade around at protests with what he said was an aborted fetus, and he would also often lead protests to Dr. Bart Slepian's home. Amanda has never met Schenk before, though has outstanding questions, and we're here to interview him, together. He would sing so loud, like Jesus Saves the Little Baby. He had his whole congregation out there, in front of Bart's house. For my part, I wonder about his radicalism and where he stands on that now, and also if he knew James Kopp or people Kopp associated with. Me trying to hold people accountable for their actions plays out across much of my work,

and I've always found that the most meaningful accountability often comes from within. For Amanda, I think seeing Shank is something much more personal. Like, how did he find out where my uncle lived? He wasn't listed anywhere. You know, because of him, the whole world knew his address. You know, because of him, like, all these fragile-minded people thought he was a baby killer. We're meeting Reverend Shank at the National Press Club,

and we make our way over there. Good morning. Good morning. I'll take the next step up there. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Schenck greets us, waving down from a staircase with a smile. Good morning.

It's nice to meet you. Amanda, hi. Welcome to you both. Where do we want to do this? We're going to head right down the hall here. Shank is mid-60s and trim grey hair, black plastic glasses, short-sleeved shirt, untucked. He leads us to a sitting area we'll have to ourselves. Shank knows why we're here and that I want to get into talking about Cop eventually, but first I ask him to talk about himself, his past. I'm Reverend Rob Shank. I'm an ordained evangelical minister. Wasn't born that

way. Born into a nominally Jewish home in western New York State. Actually grew up right on the border of the US and Canada on an island, Grand Island, in the middle of the Niagara River, a few miles upstream from the famous Niagara Falls. When he was 16, Schenck says he and his twin brother Paul made the decision to convert from Judaism to Christianity. We heard an evangelist preacher from Plymouth, England, who presented the claims of Jesus Christ to be Lord and Savior. And we were very taken with that message and with the love and the acceptance and warmth of the people who were in that little country church. And they welcomed us as if we were family. And that was very important and influential. Because at the time our family was sort of disintegrating in a way, as many families were in the 1970s. There was alienation, you know, between the generations.

And this was like discovering a surrogate family. And we found that and the message very compelling. My father saw it really as a rejection of the family's Jewishness. So it wasn't long before my brother and I would choose Christian ministry as our profession. A very conservative Pentecostal. We entered Christian ministry as our profession, a very conservative Pentecostal. We entered Christian ministry. We were very successful, built a very large church outside of Buffalo, New York. And I was involved in international missions, preaching our message, establishing missionary outreaches and outposts around the world. Shanks says he was on a long 2,000-mile walk through the U.S. in 1988 when he received

a call about his brother. Paul had been arrested in Atlanta during a Democratic political convention there, protesting abortion. At the time, Shanks says abortion to him was an abstract idea, a personal matter that people went through. So I said, what the heck is going on? Why is my twin brother, the pastor of one of the leading churches in our city, sitting in a jail cell in Fulton County, Georgia? It was otherworldly to me. Schenck says he was then told how his brother had been alerted by parishioners about some bags of medical waste found outside a clinic.

And they thought maybe their own health was being threatened by this. They retrieved those bags, and those bags were filled with aborted remains, fetal remains. And they brought that to my brother. He was scandalized by this. The church was scandalized by it. I can't confirm if anything allegedly found in these bags were fetal or even human. But Shank says his brother Paul organized a public funeral for the remains. That became, obviously, a big public spectacle.

Around this time, Schenck says that his brother Paul and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry re-established contact. Randall traveled to Buffalo, our hometown, and kind of forged a partnership with my brother. And that's how my brother ended up in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Democratic National Convention. But you knew Randall before? I did know Randall. I had had one encounter with him at a big church convention in New Orleans prior to that, and he was handing out little tiny plastic models of human fetuses.

And I really thought that he was mentally ill. I actually thought Randall has lost his mind, because at that time it just didn't fit in anything we were doing, or it seemed completely crazy to me. What was alien was the activist side of it. It was a theoretical problem. Yes, we were opposed to abortion the way we were opposed to euthanasia. But nobody ever thought of blockading a hospital

to stop someone from being aided in their death, you know, with morphine. I mean, it didn't make any sense. Then Shank says his brother Paul invited him to an anti-abortion protest, a rescue, as he called it. Paul said, just come with me once invited him to an anti-abortion protest, a rescue as he called it. Paul said, just come with me once to one of these rescues, they were called,

where large numbers of volunteers would rush a clinic, an abortion clinic, and blockade the doors, essentially shutting it down, prohibiting staff from moving in and out, prohibiting patients from gaining entrance. I said, I'd do that once, and I did. And seeing it, there really is a kind of dual rush that you experience. One is the literal rush of adrenaline and endorphins. Adrenaline and endorphins are very powerful and you experience that chemical rush when you run for the clinic doors and you hunker down and the police arrive and you're in this highly defended mode.

And just as a little aside, I would watch over the years how many of us, including myself, became addicted to that rush. Spiral of belief and rush, right? Absolutely. We're supporting our belief. Yes. We even had sayings like, can you feel the Holy Ghost? You know, that's what you're feeling is the Holy Ghost so in a way this chemical rush became an affirm a kind of divine

affirmation that what you're doing is right can't you feel that it's right so all that started working on me and it didn't take long. I was converted to the cause. I started participating in the rescues. I was arrested numerous times. With each arrest you get sort of a invisible badge of honor. Yes, you escalate in terms of your visibility, your credibility, you've got creds, you've earned your status in the movement. And my brother and I would soon become national leaders and command a lot of attention inside the church world and outside, especially a lot of media attention. Media validation can be a powerful force.

Several media personalities were big boosters of anti-abortion actions and, in my opinion, helped to drive forward the movement. What I now call the limugh-ization of our movement. And that was another kind of affirmation. Now we had kind of broken out of our little evangelical silo, and we were now on the big publicity stage. Because you weren't just alone, there was an opposition, right? Like, there wasn't just you guys standing there. There were people that opposed you as well, right?

And they also had coverage, and it became a kind of an Olympic event almost, you know? That's a great way to describe it. Yes, you know, you had two forces, and we would literally meet for a kind of at least verbal battle in the streets. And, you know, this was big. I mean, in those days, we started with dozens of people.

Then came scores of people. Then hundreds of people. Until finally it was thousands. Thousands of people in the streets. And of course we learned pretty quickly what drew the attention that we needed, wanted, and after a while craved, and that was face-to-face confrontation. Sometimes we were literally screaming at each other across a police tape, which made it even more dramatic. And then the escalation began and eventually shoving started, people shoving each other, threatening words, and then came the shooting.

And when I think it was Dr. David Gunn, so sadly and ironically named, in Florida, who was the first to be shot. Pensacola? It was Pensacola, yes it was. Right, yes it was. Reverend Shank says that for him, even at the time, violence such as the March 1993 shooting of Dr. Gunn, the first person said to be shot because he was an abortion provider, crossed a line. We saw ourselves as the purists. We really had the pure message and motive, and we were willing to pay the price, which meant public scorn and ridicule, jail, you know,

arrests, prosecutions. But we were very committed to not crossing the line into violence. So immediately we thought these shooters were part of a third stream of the movement that we were conscious of. And I'm sorry to say, at least where we were located in the U.S., we used to think of it as the Canadian, the Canadians. We would call them that. We would say, it's the Canadian, the crazy Canadians. I'm so sorry to say that because I love Canada. Crazy Canadians. There had been three shootings of abortion providers in Canada before the murder of Dr. Slepian in Buffalo, but with this comment, I wanted to be sure whether Shank had any specific knowledge

about Canadian involvement. Crazy Canadians. So that must have come from somewhere, crazy Canadians. Like, did you know any Canadians that were involved? Well, I can't say by name. I didn't know... Can't because you won't or can't because you don't know? No, I literally don't know.

I know there are people who do know. There are most certainly current and former movement leaders who were in communication with the Canadians, and we would hear that. You know, we were talking to the canadians we were up with the canadians so there was definitely this consciousness of communications with the canadians and if i remember right something happened in bc dr ramales yes and i can't place that in time, but we were conscious of what had happened out there. Schenck says that he thought that the more extreme edges of the anti-abortion scene at the time

were a secular stream of the movement. These were people who really didn't have the same sensibilities, the same Christian sensibilities that we had. We took the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers, very, very seriously at that time. So we thought of these people as kind of almost in a way pretenders. They were embarrassing and they were dangerous. Embarrassing and dangerous.

Schenck infers that he held these other groups beyond arm's length, yet he and his Operation Rescue associates were at least gathering at the same places together during speeches and rallies. Schenck mentions a speech he gave in Pensacola, Florida in 1993. And I was in a stadium-like venue, and this is where I think I started crossing paths with this other stream. They would show up the same places we were. You were kind of amplituding each other, right? Like you were kind of working off each other, even though you may not have... Yes. Schenck says he had no personal communications with members of those groups, which included the more radical Army of God and Lambs of Christ. They were calling us wimps and weenies, I remember, and weak. You know, we were seen as sort of the idealistic peaceniks. And they saw themselves

as the formidable force that was going to end abortion in America. And we could take it or leave it. Randall Terry and others started showing up with very menacing signs, sometimes with the images of abortion providers as if they were wanted posters. I think one was actually stylized as a wanted poster. And that was disconcerting. It was troubling. Dr. David Gunn had been the target of one of those wanted posters, distributed at a rally for Operation Rescue Leader Randall Terry. According to a news article, the wanted poster included Gunn's picture and home phone number. But the messaging started getting much more aggressive and threatening.

And I even found my own language in those days. You know, we were so careful to say, we don't use the word fetus to describe a pre-born child because that dehumanizes the child. And it's easier to kill something that isn't human. And yet we started engaging in our own version of dehumanization. Abortion providers were Demons, vermin, snakes, demons. I was using language like that to dehumanize our opponents. Once you dehumanize them, they are now vulnerable

because it's easier to kill something that isn't human. It took me a long time to realize that our rhetoric was charging the air with this kind of danger. And then some of the people I had been shoulder to shoulder with in the movement started showing up at first with empty holsters on their belts. And then I became conscious that some of the movement leaders were starting to arm up,

literally procure weapons, ammunition, storing ammunition. Much later, one of the national leaders would tell me I am never more than an arm's reach from my semi-automatic rifles. In my car, in my office, in my home, under my bed. Schenck, although not armed with a gun, was known to brandish what were said to be human fetuses during his protests. Well, we took fetuses and displayed them. And the reason we did that ostensibly was because we wanted people to see the reality of abortion, that this wasn't an idea. It was, the result was a real human form, you know, what we called a dead child. We did funerals, public funerals. We ordered tiny little caskets. Usually they were ring containers or something that looked like a coffin. And we would stage public funerals with them.

We would parade them at times in front of counter-protesters, what we called pro-death or pro-abortion protesters. They called themselves pro-choice advocates. So we would parade those in front of them and we took photos of them, and we used the photos in promotional literature and fundraising letters. We sold photos of them to generate income for the movement. And of course, at the same time came the shootings.

Shank says that an Oklahoma-based pathologist sympathetic to the cause of anti-abortion was a supplier of these remains and that they learned to preserve and transport them even through airport security at the time. Oh, hey there. I'm Andrew Fung, and I want to tell you about my new series with Via Rail. Join me as I ride on from Toronto to Ottawa and London aboard Via Rail's new fleet of trains. My journey was a breeze.

No traffic jams, just smooth sailing. The seats are super comfy, and with complimentary Wi-Fi, I can work and play with ease. Plus, with meals and snacks on board, I arrived refreshed and ready to explore. From a boat cruise in Ottawa to the Grand Theatre in London, these cities are packed with amazing experiences.

For your next trip, do yourself a favor. Skip traffic and take Via Rail. Watch both episodes now on cbc.ca slash Via Rail. Paid content with via rail canada at desjardins we speak business we speak equipment modernization we're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets and we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes because at desjardins business we speak the same language you do. Business.

So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardins today. We'd love to talk business. Did you ever meet James Cobb? No. No. I asked a lot of questions about him, who he was. I kept saying to the media at that time, and privately, where'd this guy come from? Who is he? And then somebody said, well, he's been at a number of your events.

He's been present at your events. And the other attacks in Canada, Dr. Short and Dr. Feynman up in Winnipeg, did you hear about those as well? Oh, yes. And did you have any kind of phone calls about who, who was in, who did that? Or did you, any kind of discussions with anybody about those incidents? No, no. Do you have any suggestions of other people that I should approach? There was a couple in Buffalo. They were implicated in some way with Copp. They had knowledge of the people who maybe sheltered or transported him or something like that. Something to look into. I moved the conversation to Dr. Slepian, asking Shank how well he knew him. Dr. Slepian, I mean, I had been in face-to-face confrontations with him.

I didn't know any of the other providers who were shot or injured in those days. But I knew Barnett Slepian. And in the aftermath of Dr. Slepian's murder, Shank did clearly state his position on the tragedy. Here's Shank on CBC in 1999. Anyone who entertains these notions of shooting abortion providers or injuring abortion providers or doing damage to buildings with the risk of injuring innocent human life

this is wrong it is sinful it is a supreme moral violation and it should be sanctioned in the strongest way and punished in the strongest way. But Schenk's behavior before the shooting was reprehensible, according even to him. Well, you know, to begin with, of course my encounters with Dr. Slepian occurred in terrible situations where there was, you know, protesters and noise and police presence and all the rest. My encounters with him were in the heat of the conflict. And maybe this is, you know, introducing too much into the equation, but Barnett Slepian was from the same family culture I came from.

European Jewish extraction, Ashkenazi. It's a very distinct subculture. I understood him culturally. Frankly, I liked him. I mean, there is a kind of tribal feeling that you have when you're with somebody of your own deep DNA and culture and story. And of course we made lots of comparisons to Nazi Germany and the extermination camps

and the gas chambers and the euthanizing and all the rest and we drew those parallels. So over time, I became convinced that Barnett Slepian was like a collaborator, like the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. And over time, that feeling of contempt overcame anything I found appealing about him. And I betrayed that in my expressions, my language about him, even towards him, face to face. I ask Shank how he seems to have changed his perspective on his actions and on abortion now. I see it very differently.

Something I wish I had done 35 years ago, and that is to listen deeply to people who have experienced abortion themselves. I wasn't listening back then. I had formed my own opinion. I wasn't really interested in anybody trying to justify support for abortion. I listened very differently for a lot of reasons. And I came to a conclusion that had I been in their same circumstances, and I had been a woman who was pregnant, I would have chosen abortion myself. And that was the big moment of change for me.

And I would have justified it and felt fine about it. I realize there's a reason we have Roe v. Wade in our country that legalizes abortion, that protects the right to an abortion. There's a real reason for that. There are real people who are in real circumstances that, whether we like it or not, does not portend a good future for them or for their child. All of that came to bear on me. And while I can't say I'm totally at peace with the whole dilemma of abortion, I understand why it must be an option for a woman to choose. Schenck says that his own wing of the movement from the mid-'90s to the mid-2000s

purged many of the women leaders from its ranks, making those in charge almost exclusively men. I realized the movement failed. So what began in name as a pro-life movement eventually became a pro-death movement, and it is to this very moment, because many of those movement leaders who remained have become anti-vax in the age of a global pandemic.

They've become pro-death penalty, anti-immigrant, contemptuous. And as a New Testament Christian, I'm very mindful that the New Testament teaches if you hate a person in your heart, you have already committed murder. It's the moral equivalent of murder. Shank shines a seldom seen light on the inner workings of the anti-abortion machine, a collective that would seemingly stop at nothing to promote and further their worldview. And while he has rebranded and claims himself a changed person, Amanda has her own questions. You personally called my uncle a murderer, a pig. You did it at their home.

You led singing so loud outside their home, they couldn't hear their own prayers like you were throwing fetuses at people I mean where where is your non-violence in this I don't understand it's a very profound and warranted question thank you for asking me I don't think I can give you a satisfactory answer. I had very little to no appreciation for the violence of words, of actions like you described, disrupting somebody's life, intimidating them, overwhelming them, you know, creating fear and intimidation. I didn't think of that as violence in those days. I had a very literal interpretation of violence, which was literally punching somebody, stabbing somebody, hurting them, killing them. That constituted violence, but degrading them, dehumanizing them, I now understand to be a very serious form of violence.

I didn't then. I just didn't see it that way. In the 1990s you were a leader and you were a vocal leader and you were a terrifying leader. No one would have known where Bart lived. He kept all of that secret. Like how did you find out? Well first, Amanda, let me tell you that I, I, uh, I, I'm very sorry that I inflicted that kind of pain on your family. I know that's probably meaningless and maybe even agitating to hear me say that. And I'm sorry about that. I do know, you know, we had meetings. We had meetings around tables just like these

in the basement of somebody's office complex near the Buffalo, New York airport. And people were assigned different tasks and one was to locate where these abortionists in our language of that period finding the addresses you know the homes and that would be reported at the table goodness gracious there was somebody who worked either for the state tax agency or the IRS, the Federal Internal Revenue Service, who had access to a tax database. And I knew that's where they were getting some of the addresses, was from the tax records. That's the kind of stuff that was going on behind the scenes.

And that's why we knew the addresses. You let them know. I do remember even using myself. My argument was, would you have said that about Hitler's commanders in Germany, that you shouldn't go to their homes? Of course you wouldn't. I remember saying that.

You know, Bart was very honest about abortion. He's like, it's not a pleasant thing. It's not the best choice. It's not, you know, if you do it because the alternatives are worse and you do it because if a woman can't decide when and if she's gonna become a mother, she can't choose anything about her life.

But it doesn't negate its moral implications. Wow. See, the heat of that movement didn't allow us to know your uncle in that way. We said it will take what course it takes. And I regret that deeply. I regret it deeply. If anything, what it left was a highly charged environment. For too many, it became a violent inevitability. And I think of that now as a moral failing of mine, certainly of my colleagues in the movement. It was our moral failing.

I wish I could say more to you. I wish I could. Okay. Thank you. I wish I could. Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye. Shank leaves us in silence. I just had hoped that he would...

I mean, I think he's had a genuine dark night of the soul. You know, I think he's really gone there. I guess I just wish it had been a little darker and a little longer. And he perceived a little bit more there. Schenck's rebranding does seem genuine. A spatial and spiritual repositioning towards a more accepting self. He's currently working with noted progressive Abby Disney on film projects that try to message beyond those hardened lines of thought and belief.

Schenck has become accountable in his self-change. Is it too little too late for Amanda? Maybe, though reconciliation seems more possible amidst all the truth-telling. And where some battle lines have softened, others have doubled down. In Mississippi, for example, where lawmakers have helped create the possibility of a future without Roe v. Wade, and where the state's only abortion clinic could close forever. Keep left onto I-59 South towards Laurel now. Thank you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.