By Eric Sammons, Crisis Magazine, Aug. 25, 2023
Eric Sammons is the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine.
Graduating from high school in the late 1980’s, I was a prototypical Reagan Republican. Like any good Reaganite, I claimed a certain distrust of government, yet at the same time I strongly supported all the enforcement arms of that same government—the military, the police, and the judicial system. I trusted that, in America at least, our government might have some bad people in it, but fundamentally it was just and a force for good.
Then I got involved in Operation Rescue. For those unaware, Operation Rescue was a massive pro-life civil disobedience movement, in which opponents of abortion would block the doors to abortion clinics in order to stop women from killing their unborn children. Participants were usually arrested (personally, I was arrested a half a dozen times), and sentenced to anything from a slap on the wrist to years in jail (I never served more than a day myself, although I was sentenced to a year in jail at one point, which was later thrown out). …
