This second post in the explanation of the mission of the Institute’s Titanic Brigade further explains why groups like the Brigade are important in the grand scheme of things. 

The Titanic Brigade is the Institute’s recognition that we must mobilize the grassroots of this nation if we are to preserve Christian culture.   A few standing alone can be overcome.  Millions standing together cannot.

Grassroot efforts colonized this blessed city on a hill.  Grassroot efforts brought about the American Revolution.  Grassroots effort formed the Underground Railroad.  Grassroot efforts supported most every civil rights initiative in our national history, and especially those that were religious at their core.  Grassroot efforts made the Rescue Movement what it was. Grassroot efforts explain the explosion of crisis pregnancy centers and independent churches across America. 

We Americans are a people given to grassroots movements.

The Titanic Brigade is a grassroots movement that recognizes Christian Unity as the necessary foundation to healing this sin-sick nation of ours.  Jesus is not a mere pasttime.  He is the author of eternity and time.  

Without Him we can do nothing.  Thus the Institute seeks to build nothing apart from Him.

Christian Unity is the high priestly prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ and the desire of Pope Benedict XVI.  The latter recently wrote the following:

“It [Christian Unity] is a unanimous plea made with one soul and one heart in response to the Redeemer’s own desire, who turned to our Father at the Last Supper and said, “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:20-21). Asking for the gift of unity, Christians join in Christ’s prayer and commit themselves to work actively so that all of humanity welcomes and recognizes Christ as our only Shepherd and Lord, and thus experiences the joy of his love.”

Message in anticipation of the Feast of St. Paul, 2008 http://www.zenit.org/article-21582?l=english

America is faced with a crisis of unbeleif.  More than anything else, America needs the faith that once formed her culture.  More than anything else, America needs to really beleive that the Father sent Jesus.

America needs Christian Unity.  Not party unity, not community unity, not even racial or ethnic unity.  These all will be byproducts of a robust Christian unity, but cannot be the lead step in the dance that is needed in this desparate hour.  The ship of state has struck an iceberg and is taking on water fast. The time for partial solutions is past.

We need Christian Unity — much like the Christian Unity that undoubtedly graced the brave men who fought the waves by loading women and children onto lifeboats … and then died together singing hymns to their Risen King.

Joe Catholic layman and Joe Protestant layman need to get together to network on the question of how to further a rebirth of Christian chivalry in this dire hour. 

Joe Protestant layman and Joe Catholic layman must get together to network on the question of how to save America from sinking further into the dark abyss of moral relativism and cultural destruction.

The Christian Joe laymen of this nation will, as was the case at every critical juncture in the past, make or break America.  We must make and dare not break.

We Christian laymen all realize that Jesus is the answer . . .  now just how do we get each other to ask the right questions???  And to ask them outside of the safe comfort of our cloistered sanctuaries???

Let’ s explore that very issue while meeting in Susan Hill and George Klopfers’ former abortion clinic as members of the Titanic Brigade. (I can assure you that they would not approve!)

The fact that it did not create any stir at all is further evidence that this culture is in trouble. As in failing to reproduce itself trouble.

That really, really big story that played out really small is this:

Our youth are not being taught the cultural history of these United States.

This is no shock to most who follow such things. It is time that our fifty years of shock began to crystalize into substantive action. 

Before it is too late, for our culture is well worth saving.

The USA Today article reports that,

The public education system is not producing students who have common historical touchstones with past generations of Americans. The public education system is graduating fully half of its students without teaching them, by way of example, how to understand the following literary concepts: “Big Brother. McCarthyism. The patience of Job.

Note that the first two have to deal with the recognition of totalitarian politics and the latter with the Holy Scriptures. An understanding of both were once considered hallmarks of American thought. No more.

Here is what the author of this troubling study by a new thinktank, Common Core, has to say: “If you think that it matters whether or not kids have common historical touchstones and whether, at some level, we feel like members of a common culture, then familiarity with this knowledge matters a lot,” says American Enterprise Institute researcher Rick Hess, who wrote the study.

Pop quiz:

What makes a white kid raised in Russia different than a white kid raised in America?

What makes a black kid raised in Trinidad different than a black kid raised in Hawaii?

What makes an oriental kid raised in southeast Asia different than an oriental kid raised in Fort Wayne?

Hint: It is not race. All of the above can be true, blue Americans. All they need is ….. no, not love. All they need is culture.

Take away the culture and you take away the nationality. Take away the culture and you take away the software identity. Take away culture and the kid can be most any nationality on Earth. All you then have is race. Even ethnicity is largely cultural.

Write this ten times “It’s the Culture, Pilgrim.”

Indeed, what made the Pilgrims who founded this nation different than the Hessians who later came to kill the descendants of the Pilgrims? Most were, according to race, Caucasian. Most were, according to family trees, out of Northern Europe.

But oh how different their cultures.

Write this ten times” “It’s the Culture, Warriors.”

Indeed, we can work the politics, we can work the economics, we can watch Fox News, we can gather in separatist enclaves on Sunday morning from now until the Second Coming and not have all that much of an effect on where America is really headed.

America’s future is being forged this very instant by the culture that is being enculturated in our nation’s kids.  And that future appears to be unAmerican (from a historical perspective), to use a phrase that is considered politically correct for some strange reason.  (Think of the Founder’s emphasis upon an understanding of the Bible as a key to the common culture necessary to govern this nation, for example.)

This process of enculturation is taking place, in the main, in public schools and through the media. Television and the internet give us a trite “pop culture,” modern education gives our kids a trite “popular education” and added together they give us what the February 25 USA Today story documents: The death of historic American culture and the birth of something that few of us under 40 will recognize in a few short years.

These “It’s the Culture” messages are important enough to share. (President Bill Clinton’s advisers posted ”It’s the Economy, Stupid” in the Oval Office to keep him on point.  Our problem is not, at root, economic.  Our problem is the culture.  This difference in focus arises out of a very consequential difference in philosophical assumptions.)

And that is why the Institute has put the message on bumper stickers that are in our rectangular office!  (See examples below) 

Drop by the Institute and pick one up — or send us a request and we will mail one out to you.

More important than sporting the stickers, start spreading the news. 

We must save this culture — or America is lost on our watch.  Lost for good, as in lost forever. 

The Institute’s Titanic Brigade is dedicated to standing on the bridge and resisting the cold waves that threatens to drown all that was good and holy about the culture that our forefathers and foremothers gave their sacred honor, fortunes and very lives to birth on this continent.

JOIN US!

Vision & Mission of the

ArchAngel Institute’s

Titanic Brigade

(an ecumenical & grassroots initiative)

A celebration of Christian chivalry advancing the Culture of Life by organizing Christian men (of various denominational Heritage) to cherish, to defend and to promote faith, family and freedom. 

Operational Goals for 2008

            – Advance ecumenism among Evangelicals in the three major branches of Christendom through informal dialogue, prayer, fellowship and joint service projects.

            – April 13 memorial kick-off dinner memorializing the men who gave their lives while rescuing women and children on the Titanic.

– Structured monthly meetings of the Brigade at 827 Webster Street 

            – Service projects, including, but not limited to . . .  

– security details for local crisis pregnancy centers.

                        – aiding widows, orphans and abandoned women as requested by local CPC’s and other Christian ministries.

                        – joint evangelism projects presenting a unified message based upon the historic teachings of the Christian Faith.

                        – community standards statements intended to shore up the morality of the community.

Note:  A local journalist recently told the ArchAngel Institute’s Executive Director that “getting Christians together is a fine idea, as long as you do not try to get them to pray together.”  The Titanic Brigade hopes to prove this journalist wrong on that front.

 The Titanic Brigade will be a group of men dedicated to, in the words of the Apostle Paul, making “every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” 

We seek men of strong Christian character and Evangelical, ecumenical intent. 

We seek men interested in making ecumenical history in the Fort.

The Titanic Brigade is the next station in our virtual tour of the Institute.

 This station has been set up by the previous posts on current social problems and our wonderful, treasured heritage as Christians in America.  If you have not read the last few posts, this would be a fine time to do just that.

Now we turn to our English cousins, for our wonderful American heritage was European before it was American.

My grandfather (the original owner of the brown mirror discussed in the previous post) was born in 1903 and thus came of age as the world that then was immolated itself on the technological battlefield of modernity.  WWI ushered in a New Age, an age that has led to most of the social problems that we struggle with in contemporary America.

The following is borrowed from the above mission criticals tab.  It prepares us for the coming post on the Institute’s Titanic Brigade . . . 

Christian Chivalry in America was, at least in part, the “quaint” social order that seventy years of post-War affluence has pretty much undone. Margaret Storm Jameson made this point in her 1965 work, The Early Life of Stephen Hind, therein recording a grandmother’s mourning for the demise of
 “[a]nother civilization … the one I was born into. It has died, I say, not vanished, because it was a living organism. A civilization based upon the family. What has taken its place is not alive; an atomized society, without security, without warmth, a chaos of fragmented mechanical relationships. O, I know as well you do, that in my world there was ignorance and poverty. But the right way was not to tear that world down and replace it by anarchy. The family base should have been extended, cherished, encouraged.”
Indeed.  The ArchAngel Institute stands four square on the concept of protecting the family at all costs.  Without the family civilization as our fore-bearers defined it will cease to exists.  Our social order is taking on water, in fact, because modernity has torn a gaping wound in our cultural superstructure.  Men and women of Faith and Courage must now stand in the gap and fight to repair the damage visited upon our social order by the modernist iceberg — before Christendom — the greatest ship of state known to mankind – sinks to the bottom.Will you stand with the Institute in the Titanic Brigade?More to follow . . .

The hallway is brown, the mirror at the end belonged to Richard Brown (father of John R. Brown, grandpa of Bryan J. Brown) and the poster on the wall is of famed Kansas civil rights activist John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame.

Richard Brown would break out in a smile were he to see his mirror gracing the Institutes’ hallway.  Grandpa went to his great reward back in ‘94.  He was a man who spent much time in the Word of God, and knew it cover to cover.

Nothing made Richard Brown happier than a good discussion of some topic in the Bible.  He looked forward to the second coming as the Hope for all mankind.  Grandpa was not much of a churchgoer, but he loved the Lord and lived his faith. 

Grandpa thought his son and grandson were doing the right thing in standing up for Life and calling the government to account for allowing the wholesale slaughter of the same. 

Grandpa Brown was a poor farmer most of his life,  and never had much of anything worth all that much.  The antique mirror that now hangs in the Institute was attached to  the nicest furniture he ever owned — and that was not all that rich of a unit.

I do not think that Grandpa woud have ever taken the direct action that I took.  Or the action that his firstborn, John, has taken.  (Dad has been an outspoken Christian activist for decades, and has risked arrest, and even been arrested, for the cause.)

Grandpa Brown’s way was less confrontational.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  Grandpa’s life struck me as a fulfillment of this admonition from the Old Testament: 

Thus Curry stands as a departure gate into post-modernity.  Could this Topeka mural of Brown  be considered as prophetic as it was historic? 

Postscript

Source:  The Kansas State Historical Society

John Steuart Currywas born on November 14, 1897, in the small northeastern Kansas town of Dunavent. The eldest of five children in a farming family, his inclination toward art began at a young age. Curry’s biographer and friend, Lawrence E. Schmeckebier, once wrote that as a youth on his father’s farm Curry was interested in drawing everything:

. . . horses and fighting animals, railroad engines and trains, pictures of battles from the Revolutionary War, hosts of everyday things about him. He kept a scrapbookfilled with newspaper and magazine clippings of cowboy and Indian scenes, illustrations by such westerners as Remington and Dunton, also hundreds of his own pencil sketches of guns and revolvers.

In 1928, Curry finally received national fame with the purchase of his painting “Baptism in Kansas” by the wealthy patron and New York art museum owner Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Curry was then introduced to two other artists who shared his love for the Midwest, Grant Wood of Iowa and Thomas Hart Bentonof Missouri.  Curry’s “Baptism in Kansas” in 1928, Benton’s “Boomtown” in 1928, and especially Wood’s “American Gothic” in 1930, all seem to encapture the unique experience of American rural life. These Regionalists attempted to create a distinct style of art that promoted idealism and rejected the duplication of popular European trends. In 1946 Thomas Hart Benton wrote, “We agreed that unless American Art came back to dealing with things about which American artists knew something it would accomplish nothing.” They painted images promoting a new American identity that included subjects of family, religion, and nature.

The growth of the Regionalist art movement can best be understood in the context of the rising nationalism and isolationism that occurred in the U.S. between the two world wars. Separation from European trends and a focus on American identity were concepts permeating American culture throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Through the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, the federal government commissioned Regionalist artists to complete murals on public buildings that promoted the Protestant work ethic and family values.

The first exposure of the Kansas public to Curry’s artwork came in 1930-31, when a traveling exhibition of his paintings was sent from New York to the Mulvane Museum in Topeka. The showing produced harsh reactions from Kansas viewers and critics. Many claimed that Curry focused only on the negative aspectsof Kansas life. They labeled the paintings “The Tornado,” “Holy Rollers,” and “Mnt” as depicting miserable weather, religious fanaticism, and lynch mobs. 

 In 1937, artist John Steuart Curry was asked to return to Kansas to cover the interior walls of the Topeka capitol with scenes from the state’s history.  

As Curry finished “The Tragic Prelude” and “Kansas Pastorale,” murals adorning the east and west second-floor corridors of the capital building, tensions flared between Curry and the public over his use of fanatical abolitionist John Brown as a focal point.

End of quote from http://www.kshs.org/cool2/curry.htm

Fanatical, funny word, fanatical.  One man’s fanaticism is another man’s only reasonable response.  Some say living for Christ is fanaticism.  Others live for football, hunting or the stock market with the same degree of fanaticism and call it quite normal.  

Richard Brown was meek, mild and harmless, and most who knew him considered his life one live in obedience to the Lord. 

John Brown was outspoken, wild and a man of great action and even violence.  Most who knew him considered his life one lived in obedience to the Lord.

They could be bookends in many ways.  Both are brought to mind in the Institute’s hallway.

Lord help us find the right balance between extremes in all we do and say.  And help us to revere and preserve our heritage.

The Church speaks directly to this issue  — how to respond to a culture of anti-Christian sentiment and actions – in the latest major catechism, the catechism designed to build a “Civilization of Love.” 

FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE

COMPENDIUM OF THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

b. Starting afresh from faith in Christ

One of the goals of the Institute, and especially the Institute’s Gabriel Division, is to apply the historic teachings of the Church to the problems of the day.

We pause in the middle of our virtual open house to address one such grave concern that recently made the news.  This troubling sign of the times  was recently written up on the Wichita Eagle’s blog.  It is a problem that demonstrates a decrease in Christian charity on the streets of America.

It was posted by editor Phillip Brownlee and reads as follows:

Violence against homeless is skyrocketing

“Not only do the homeless need protection against the elements, they also need protection from teenagers who think it’s fun to attack vulnerable people. Nationally, there were more than 142 unprovoked attacks on homeless people in 2007, a 65 percent increase since 2005, the New York Times reported. And most of the attackers were teenagers and young adults. Why the increase and why such inhumanity? “I think it reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people,” said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.”

End of WE Blog quote

The lack of respect for the homeless can be one source of this disturbing trend/statistic.  But another could be a greater acceptance of violence as a personal response among disaffected youth.  Sociological studies have demonstrated that broken families, broken schools and a culture bathed in violence as entertainment (from Arnold’s movies to video games to rock/rap lyrics) have a hand in advancing violence as a response to certain stimuli.

In other words, it may not be that these violent youth view the homeless man as less human, it may rather be that these violent youth view violence as less taboo. 

Is that not the case with our culture in general?  Do children not routinely watch television that would have been considered far too violent two decades ago?  Play video games with unparalleled realism in the realm of graphic violence?  View You-Tube uploads of the most graphic violence known to man, including live beheadings and government-sponsored termination of alleged terrorists?

Our culture in marinating in violence — should we be shocked to learn that our teens are reacting violently to a group of people (the homeless) who are, for the most part and by most of us, unwanted?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that such cultural violence will bring about more personalized violence:

V. THE PROLIFERATION OF SIN

1865 Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root.

1869 Thus sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them. Sins give rise to social situations and institutions that are contrary to the divine goodness. “Structures of sin” are the expression and effect of personal sins. They lead their victims to do evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a “social sin.”

The real story here is that the increase in violence is news.  What would be shocking, given our choices for violence as a culture, would be a decrease in violence among teens and against the homeless.  In other words, since we have created a culture of violence in our “arts,” we must expect violence in our streets.  As the Church teaches, “sin creates a proclivity to sin … sins give rise to [sin-filled] social situations.” 

The next post in this series will tackle the more difficult question of getting this violent genie back in the bottle.  For the good of the homeless, and all of us who will be interacting with a generation that contains, by the media’s count, a significant number of amoral “superpredators.”

This is the third “ArchAngel room” in the Institute and thus the third and final abortion procedure room.  It is the third room on the left as you walk toward the back of the building.  When this death star was fully operational it packed three “killing rooms” utilizing two abortionists in three “surgery” suites (see the sinks) taking up less than 600 square feet to “process” up to thirty “patients” a week.  When “business” was the best – back in the 80’s and early 90’s — abortions took place on Thursdays and Saturdays at 827 Webster Street.  Dr. Ulrich George Klopfer was the regular abortionist the past two decades, but others have “worked” 827 Webster in the 28 years that it was pressed into service as a “womens health clinic”.  Those others will probably be named on this site at a later date, and especially if they are yet involved in the grisly practice of terminating nascent human life.     

The walls were purple, see below, and are now textured and a warm brown.  (Thanks to the advice of Kathleen, Brett and Jamie Brown).   If all unfolds according to plan these walls will not be as depicted all that long, but will rather be covered to absorb reflected sounds.  It is the goal of the Institute to render this former procedure room a recording studio.  And to record the lifestories of persons throughout the tri-state area who have lived lives exemplifying the virtues of chivalry.  Pro-family activists, brave soldiers of WWII, mothers who have given life and virtuous teaching to their many children — start a short list to forward to the Institute, we are interested in interviewing many from the generation that is now knocking on Heaven’s pearly gates. 

The above framed print reads as follows: 

The Mission and Vision Statement of the Gabriel Division

of the ArchAngel Institute

A rebirth of Christian chivalry

advancing the Culture of Life

by emboldening Christians

to promote  

family, faith, and freedom.

Operational Goals for the Gabriel Division in 2008

Establish a recording studio in a former “procedure room” at 827 Webster Street.

Produce an audio documentary on the history, present and future of Christian Activism in NorthEast Indiana by interviewing the “old guard” as well as fresh leaders in the region.  

Manage a speaker’s bureau through the Titanic Brigade to present the mission the Institute, the challenges facing Christians in our culture and the necessity of unified Christian activism.

Produce powerpoint presentations in keeping with the vision of the Institute

Facilitate Christian unity among the media and the secular professions through banquets with guest speakers.

Conduct training seminars for strategic Christian Activism

Evangelize utilizing the classical proofs for the existence of God and evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

            Establish a local email alert system to call forth an ecumenical gathering of Christian minutemen when necessary.

Maintain the ArchAngel Institute website

Significant actions of the Gabriel Division in 2007

Produced and published http://www.flythecorridor.com/ and http://www.archangelinstitute.org/.

Conducted numerous educational presentations in Fort Wayne to recruit initial Board members.

Presented vision for the Institute in August 25 event at the library auditorium.

Multiple press releases and media interviews regarding the launch of the Institute.

Multiple powerpoint presentations, including to the youth of the Diocese of Wichita.

Initial publication of memoirs of Institute’s Executive Director on Kansas blog.

Networked with pro-family leaders across the nation.

A few pictures of the Gabriel room before the makeover follow.  Note once again the far-from-medically professional sink.  Does this appear to be a room in which proper medical care was rendered?  See this link for circumstantial evidence leading one to conclude the answer to be no:  WHY WE MARCH, part one

The political tide is reportedly turning throughout the nation.  The party that is no friend of preborn human life is poised to make gains on the the state and federal level.  It is possible that said party will come out of 2008 with more political power than said party has enjoyed since 1993. 

This could portend difficult times for pro-family activists.  Even more troubling, it could portend difficulties for the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across our land.

That is because state and federal bureaucrats have wide latitude (or at least assume that they have wide latitude) to investigate allegations of deceptive solicitations affecting commerce. 

That is exactly what the abortion industry accuses our CPC’s of doing on a daily basis.

This concept came to the fore in an Institute press interview in the Journal Gazette on May 27, 2007:

Brown says he sees one battle looming as crisis pregnancy centers – founded and run by abortion-rights opponents – face deception and fraud charges filed by state attorneys general, based on consumer protection law. “I believe I’m uniquely qualified to defend them, given [four] years in the state of Kansas attorney general’s [office] and 25 years in the movement,” he says. Vicki Saporta, head of the National Abortion Federation, says she knows of no such action in Indiana. She says the federation compiled a report on alleged misrepresentations at centers about two years ago and a bill was reintroduced in Congress last week to give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to proceed against such centers on those grounds.

This idea is also set out in great detail in the Heartbeat International letter that opens this post.  In that letter Peggy Harshorn quotes the President of Planned Parenthood as mailing this to her base:  “I’ve written to you about so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ – the fake ‘clinics’ set up by anti-choice groups …. [They] are dispensing misinformation and outright falsehoods … Sound the alarm to your friends and family and ask them to take action.”  

While this may sound like mere fund raising rhetoric on the part of Planned Parenthood, consider this shot across the bow from one of the most powerful Democrats on the Hill:

“Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) — a staunch abortion advocate — released a bogus ‘report’ that repeated the lie that ‘federally funded pregnancy resource centers often mislead pregnant teens about the medical risks of abortion.’  Congressman Waxman chairs [a House Committee] with subpoena power.”

Peggy Hartshorn included Waxman’s ominous intonation in her letter of six months ago.   One year before the political seas will likely turn a decidedly pro-abortion blue in the wake of a receding red tide, Hartshorn noted that she “fully expects [Waxman] to use his power to press the attack on the pro-life pregnancy centers and harass them.”

Anyone have to wonder how Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi thinks on this issue?  Or Ms. Clinton?  Or Mr. Obama’s advisers?

If such was the outlook last Fall, then how much more so if the “Party that is no friend of pre-born human life” takes over the Presidency and much more of Congress on November 3, 2008?

The handwriting may soon appear on the wall.   If the Executive falls into the hands of pro-abortion politicians in the Fall of 2008 then pro-abortion appointments will be the rule across the federal bureaucracy, including in the powerful agency (the Federal Trade Commission) investigating consumer protection claims affecting interstate commerce. 

The harassment will then be upon us by Spring, 2009, starting first in locations that serve clients crossing state lines.

The ArchAngel Michael Division of the Institute is prepared for this battle.   Your support of our mission will ensure that a robust defense to any such investigations can be mounted from 827 Webster Street — located in Indiana, a mere thirty miles from the Ohio line and only sixty miles from the Michigan line.

This post follows up on Nuisance Litigation steals away a soldier  and Open House background, page 2

The abortion industry and its ideologically driven attorneys found winning lawsuits against pro-life protesters to be about as easy as shooting fish in a barrel throughout the 1980’s and into the 1990’s.  The abortion industry showed up with ACLU and other left-leaning firms, and generated much money to pay attorneys.  The pro-lifers had a difficult time location competent counsel (who did not fear being politically incorrect) and a difficult time raising the funds to pay counsel.

The judiciary took many of the arguments of the well-heeled abortion industry attorneys at face value and duly enjoined the pro-lifers upon the land-owners request, or at a bare minimum, allowed frivolous litigation to drone on and on much longer that it should have.

As noted, such was the case in the Nurses Concerned case, with terrible results for the Avila family.  Such was the case in the line of cases arising out of Bray v. Alexandria as well. 

This pro-life unilateral disarmament ended in the early 1990’s.  Many public interest law firms rose up to defend the pro-lifers.  One of those was Reverend Don Wildmon’s American Family Association Center for Law and Policy. 

I (Bryan) joined that fine team in 1996.  Susan Hill and two other abortion clinic managers sued more than 50 pro-lifers in Milwaukee a few months later.  The AFA team, led by Chief Counsel Steve Crampton, rose to the occasion.  A great legal battle was begun in state court in Milwaukee.  I was privileged to be part of that battle as counsel for Daniel Balint and four others.

Susan Hill noted that the pro-lifers were going to fight back in court and quickly folded her hand.  She left the playing field the very week that I signed in. 

Eighteen months later Planned Parenthood and one other abortion clinic moved to dismiss their final nuisance claims in the litigation rather than argue against the AFA’s summary judgment motion.  The pro-lifers had prevailed due to prayers and a very aggressive legal defense by the AFA.  

Planned Parenthood’s attorney called me to surrender, asking that Mr. Balint agree to dismiss the counterclaims for abuse of legal process that I had filed on his behalf.

We did not agree to dismissal, and instead invited them to fight on.  We wanted to go to trial.

They did not.

This post opened with copies of the checks that Planned Parenthood and one other abortion clinic paid to a longtime pro-life activist Balint to get him to drop his legal claim against them for filing a frivolous nuisance case.  It may be the only time this happened in the movement.  Also see below the press release celebrating this clear victory for the pro-life movement.  Both hang in the ArchAngel Michael Division office at the Institute as reminders that pro-lifers can win in court.

Pro-family activists cannot afford to be disarmed when the Left commands so much power in the American legal system.

The Michael Division exists to ensure that activists are defensively armed and aggressive in that defense.