Watching the images replayed over and over made me think of the years I spent in Fargo, N.D., as a reporter for a daily newspaper. Fargo is the only city in North Dakota that has a clinic that performs abortions. That makes it a constant target of protesters. For a few summers during the early 1990s, a group that called itself the Lambs of Christ specifically targeted the clinic in Fargo, coming up with ever more creative ways of disrupting operations there. They locked themselves to junked cars and refrigerators, spread themselves bodily all over the driveway and a few times managed to get inside the clinic itself.
People are either against abortion or else they support it.
They go along with animal-rights activists or they don't. Can't be done. But I can't help making a comparison. The director of the abortion clinic in Fargo once told me that in the days before the Lambs of Christ, sometimes the only demonstrators outside the building were a pair of traditionally dressed nuns who walked slowly up and down the sidewalk, praying silently. You tell me .