Operation Higher Court
So now Politico, Mother Jones, and the New York Times have all written articles on “Operation Higher Court” where a radical, anti-abortion evangelical minister, Rev. D Schenck, orchestrated a highly effective campaign to influence the Supreme Court. Since he was too well-known and controversial to infiltrate the high court himself, he used a more devious tactic. Through his organization, Faith and Action, Rev. Schenck recruited wealthy conservative couples (known to be anti-abortion, anti-gay rights) and encouraged these couples to make large donations to the Supreme Court Historical Society, thus gaining them access to events where they could mingle with specific justices — Alito, Thomas, and Scalia. He urged these couples to invite the Justices and their wives to dinner and then coached them on what to say and how to say it.
According to Politico he gave precise and pointed coaching to these recruited couples in how to speak about an issue without referring to a specific case. They should “talk about the importance of a child having a father and a mother,” rather than engage in the particulars of a gay-rights case.” Politico 7/08/2022
The Wrights were one couple who became very close to Justice Alito. According to Rev. Schenck, Gayle Wright leaked the decision on the Hobby Lobby case to him two weeks before it was made public, a case where Justice Alito authored the majority opinion.
(Justice Alito has denied this.)
Now, after conducting an anti-abortion campaign for over thirty years, collecting and spending billions of dollars (by his own account), engaging in blockades of clinic so that patients, doctors, nurses, and other clinic employees would have to pass through frightening intimidation on their way to a safe place, he has seen the error of his ways. Really?
He realizes that he became callous to the people he was scaring at those clinics. He recognizes that he contributed to the deaths of abortion providers, Dr. David Gunn, Dr. George Tiller, and Dr. Barnett Slepian. Never mind that his behavior contributed to the fire-bombing and destruction of clinics, the deaths of clinic workers, and continued threatening and terrorization of women seeking safe, legal health care.
He now claims that the movement was taken over by more violent extremists and the Republican Party for their own ends. This, from an admitted leader of Operation Rescue, a violent anti-abortion group. Really, it took him thirty years to figure this out!
Could it be that having gotten what he wanted – the reversal of Roe—he can now claim his organization was co-opted by the Republican Party?
Now he says to other evangelicals, “Put your money where your mouth is. Devote yourself and your considerable resources to taking care of poor women and their children before you champion laws that hem them into impossible situations.”
When he was collecting millions of dollars to support his anti-abortion tactics, did it never occur to him then to provide funding to the women who were unable to get abortions and were unable to support their children?
Talk is cheap, Reverend.