How to Protest Without Fear of Getting Shot

A million—or at least 30—years ago, I would go every Friday morning with a group of Notre Dame students to the local abortion “clinic” in South Bend to protest the killing of innocent babies. Our protest was simple: for one hour we would pray the entire Holy Rosary and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. Then we would leave and go back to school.

So with a couple of deaths in as many weeks in Minnesota during the anti-ICE protests, it especially bothers me that people who want to express their opinions via free assembly wind up dead. There is, of course, enough blame to go around on all sides here; but there’s also a real lack of common sense on the part of the protestors that we had learned as student protestors at that abortion mill.

First: a healthy respect for the police. There was always at least one policeman present on those Friday mornings, and he would, in no uncertain terms, lay down the law, literally, about how we were to conduct ourselves if we didn’t want to wind up in the back of his squad car.

The main thing was that we had to keep moving: no blocking the doctor’s—make that “doktor” since this man had more in common with Mengele than St. Anthony Maria Zaccaria—driveway. We didn’t have to run or jog or anything of that sort; we just could not stand still. We were to keep to our beads and process back and forth. Simple.

Second, we were not to engage anyone: not the people entering the abortion clinic—many of whom looked eerily similar to our classmates at Notre Dame—nor the pro-abortion protestors on the other side of the street. No throwing leaflets, no proselytizing—otherwise we were going to cool off in the police car. And I don’t think it ever occurred to us to antagonize the police, who, in fairness, were only there to maintain order.

Finally, we could not do anything about those abortion-loving protestors who would cross the street and get into our faces with their cameras, snapping pictures of us whether we liked it or not. I did not like that, and I think I crushed one or more rosary beads while shuffling back and forth with my confreres and the locals, of which there were many, while these all-but-belligerent “cameramen” repeatedly took my picture. Mercifully, one of the policemen was unabashedly pro-life and was definitely on our side; so whenever someone from the other side would cross over with their cameras, he’d put them back in their place.

But it’s good to recall that in 1993-1995 abortion was the law of the land, and at least as far as the law was concerned, we were the dissenters. Occasionally, there would be a police officer who would look at us askance, almost wondering aloud, “Don’t these kids have anything better to do with their time?”

Ironically, the worst actor in these series of protests was Herr Doktor himself. He drove an enormous Mercedes-Benz S-class sedan and would wait until we were slowing walking on the entrance to “his” driveway and then gun the engine so as to disperse us. This didn’t bother me so much: I mean, what else can you expect from a man who makes his living by killing innocent children? However, as I mentioned, many of the protestors were from the city of South Bend, mainly elderly and not as agile, and occasionally one of them would fall during these peel-out entries by the doctor. We would help them up, of course—while the opposing group of protestors would laugh and continue to take our photos.

These protests could have turned ugly any given Friday, but they didn’t, thanks be to God. Why they never devolved into the debacle we are seeing in Minnesota is that both sides, more or less, behaved themselves in the presence of the police—despite the fact that the pro-abortion folks were deliberately trying to provoke us with their endless picture-taking and the doctor was trying to run us over in his fast German car.

Also, I don’t think anyone on either side of these picket lines actually wanted to go to prison. As students, we had to go to class; and as a graduate student, I had no money for bail so I wasn’t about to start to mix it up with some angry pro-abortion fanatic and find myself in St. Joseph County jail, calling my parents back home in Niagara Falls to wire me money to set me free. So there was a real element of pragmatism to what we were doing.

Not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but the Rosary is a peace-filled meditation, as is the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and I think that helped keep us grounded—as did the many locals who had been doing this sort of silent protesting much longer than we students. 

There is something to be said as well about letting the other side go into full-fledged histrionics. In addition to the endless picture-taking—I always wondered if they had a bulletin board in someone’s basement with our pictures pinned to it or if the whole thing was just to agitate us; I suspect it was the latter—when an especially young woman, or couple, would approach, the pro-abortion protestors would rush around them, throw a coat or blanket over them, and usher them into the clinic. I never once heard anyone ask for this kind of “protection,” and frankly, it looked ridiculous and over-the-top, especially considering that we were always at least 30 feet away from them. All it ever accomplished was that it made the strange mix of undergraduates, graduate students, and the elderly denizens of South Bend look not only unified and dignified but restrained and calm.

That is not to say that we didn’t have our moments of “hey-this-might-be-a-good-idea” mad-tea-party touches. Once, after a particularly trying hour of prayer and protest, our leader (who went on to become a priest) got into my car and said, “Kevin, what do you say we come back here tonight when no one is around and cut the power lines?” Mercifully, the entire sedan-full of students immediately threw a ton of cold water on that idea: “It’s illegal”; “You’ll get electrocuted”; and the pragmatic, “They’d just have it fixed in time to perform more abortions.” The point here is that this was a bad idea expressed in anger: it was never a plan or plot, let alone something carried out.

Also, one of the locals was a local man with a pickup truck, a long beard, and a longer pole on which he had affixed a crucifix which he himself had carved. He told me one time, “This drives Satan crazy,” which it probably did. But it also drove the pro-abortion people insane since they claimed the pole was stretching onto “their side.” The policeman told this protester that he had to hold the pole upright and not stretch it out toward the pro-abortionists.

In the two years of these protests, no one was ever arrested. There was never an altercation, at least directly, with the other protestors. And vis-à-vis the disaster area that has become Minnesota, never did anyone antagonize the police so as to incur their ire or their ability to make us disperse or, worse, cuff us and take us into custody for disorderly conduct.

Which, to me, seems the biggest difference between these anti-abortion protests and anti-ICE riots in Minneapolis. There is a generic confusion between what is a silent, peaceful protest where peace officers are present and a protest versus the peace-officers themselves. On a practical level, there’s an inherent danger one invites in getting in the way of police of any stripe. For one thing, they represent the law and are so armed to carry it out. To get in their way while they are carrying out their functions as peace officers is to invite—if not incite—conflict in which at least one party is armed. 

This never occurred to us as something to do: the police represent The Law (which says abortion is legal), ergo we should attack the police. But this is the type of tenuous chain of causality that has happened in Minnesota. If you’ve ever been pulled over by a State Trooper for having a broken taillight and then mouthed off after you’ve been handed a ticket, you can’t act surprised when the Trooper asks you to step out of the car. How much further it escalates is up to the driver.

I’m glad that we did have those peaceful protests in South Bend, Indiana, during “Our Generation’s Civil War,” the fight over legalized abortion. If nothing else, it taught me that if you are going to literally put yourself on the line against a law you disagree with, you better be careful. The demonstrators in Minneapolis could stand to learn this lesson sooner rather than later.