I’ll admit that I struggle a bit myself, and not just with the winters but the summers. Growing up a mile or two inland from Lake Michigan, I never knew that other parts of the Midwest (or even of the state) didn’t experience the moderating effects of the Big Lake. Even after 15 and more years, I have my doubts that I will ever become physically native to this place.

The onions, however, are a different story. Doubting their hardiness, I kept them in that same pot for five years. They grew and slowly multiplied until, last spring, they had become root-bound. I prepared a seven-foot row in the middle of one of our raised beds and planted most of them, though I kept a handful in the pot as insurance against a harsh winter.

I needn’t have worried. The onions were the first green to appear in our yard this spring, and as I write in mid-June, it would take several pots to hold them all. They simply did what nature intended them to do: put down roots, absorb the nutrients of their newly native soil, and get about the business of creating the next generation.

Doing what nature intended is a bit harder for people, especially those once rooted in a different soil. The bonds of memory and affection call us back, convince us that life was better way down upon the Swanee River or in the more temperate climes of the Lower Peninsula. Thinking that putting down roots in new soil is somehow a betrayal of the people and the place from which we came, we close ourselves in and grow too slowly. Perhaps without even realizing it, we live as if we’re strangers in a strange land. Five years pass, then ten, then fifteen, and our sights are still set on the old folks at home.

The onions will grow differently here in the dark, heavy clay soil of Northern Illinois than they did in the rich, sandy loam of West Michigan. A discriminating palate might even be able to discern a difference in flavor. But they will grow, because they can put down roots. Onions grow better in good soil than in poor soil, but they need soil of some type to keep them alive. Leave them in the pot long enough, and there will be no soil left.

Egyptian walking onions have a peculiar means of propagation. They don’t divide under the ground, nor do they produce seeds, as most onions do. Instead, at the very tip of every stalk, three or four sets (little bulbs) grow. Until they mature, their only connection to the soil is through the parent plant. When they fall to the ground, or are planted by man, they make their first contact with the soil.

There are times, most often in the summer and winter, not to mention the spring and the fall, when the call of home can be almost overwhelming. We grab a few days here or there and go back to Michigan, to stay in the house where I was reared, to visit my soon-to-be 98-year-old grandmother on her farm (where my father recently moved her onions to just outside her front door), to walk on the beach and climb sand dunes and to eat the local delicacies of the summers of my youth.

And through it all our children, who love their grandparents and their great-grandmother, who enjoy the time we spend in Michigan, still ask, “When are we going home?” They have taken root in a different land, and lived there all their lives, and they are connected through the soil to other people, to different places, to their own summer memories and sights and sounds and smells and flavors.

To move them for more than a month or two, even back to the land of their father and mother, would be like pulling up an onion by the roots. Given time and sufficient care, the onion will likely thrive in its new soil, but it will never be quite the same as it would have been had it remained where it was planted.

No one seems to know how Egyptian walking onions got the exotic part of their name, but the walking comes from their habit of growth. As summer stretches into fall, the sets grow larger, and the stalks weaken. The top of the plant gradually bends until the sets reach the ground, where they send out their own roots, the stalk withers and dies, and a new generation begins. Unless the grain of wheat . . .

Left on their own, Egyptian walking onions will spread, moving outward from generation to generation, moving back to fill in the holes left by the death of their ancestors. Still, without the intervention of man, they will never move far. When man does move them, though, they simply bow to the demands of their nature. Giving no thought for the morrow, they put down roots once again.

This article first appeared in the August 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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There was even a tea party, organized by R.E.A.CH (Rockford Educating All Children), in which tea bags were dropped off a bridge downtown into the Rock River. Though I was, for a time, a member of the board of directors of R.E.A.CH, I wasn’t present at the tea party, and I don’t recall ever wearing a tea bag as a protest symbol. I was more fond of the pins that we at The Rockford Institute had made, sporting a decaying wooden sign, surrounded by weeds, on which were written the words, “Welcome to Occupied Rockford. P. Michael Mahoney, Presiding.”

Magistrate Mahoney was the federal judicial dictator who controlled Rockford’s public schools and the wallets of anyone who owned property within the boundaries of School District 205. By threatening to throw school-board members into jail for contempt of court, Judge Mahoney technically ensured that his judicial taxation was not without representation.

R.E.A.CH was founded to combat the federally mandated busing that was destroying neighborhood schools and to protest the unconstitutional “tort tax” that made Rockford’s property taxes for several years the highest in the nation. In February 1997, The Rockford Institute and Chronicles joined in the battle with the publication of Tom Fleming’s “Here Come the Judge” and a wildly successful rally against judicial taxation, attended by over 700 people on a cold and sleety night, at the Rockford Woman’s Club.

I don’t have the room here to recount all of the history, which I covered at length in these pages over the next six years. Suffice it to say that Dr. Fleming’s rousing speech, and a follow-up rally a year later, helped to turn the tide, to bring more Rockfordians into the cause, and to change the make-up of the school board, until there was a four-to-three majority in opposition to the federal tyranny. Some of those members even wore their tea bags to school-board meetings.

In the end, it all made very little difference. By the time the federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit finally slapped Judge Mahoney down and ordered District 205 released from 13 years of judicial tyranny, two of the members of the board majority, president Patti Delugas and vice president Ted Biondo, had caved under Mahoney’s threats and twice authorized more illegal taxation. Rather than focus their efforts on what they could accomplish (and what they had promised to voters)—standing up to the judge even if it meant jail time, cutting spending, and slashing the other taxes that they did control—Biondo and Delugas spent their time trying to comply with the most outlandish aspects of Judge Mahoney’s desegregation plan. (Racial quotas were imposed not only on each school in the district but on each classroom, which meant that certain classes, such as calculus, had to be dropped altogether when too few minority students enrolled.)

And so June 30, 2002—the day the people of Rockford supposedly regained control of District 205—was bittersweet at best. Yes, the district buses fewer students today, but neighborhood schools have never returned. Academic achievement continues to decline, and many of the federally mandated programs, rather than being removed when the illegal taxation came to an end, were simply transferred by the administration, with the approval of the board, into the general budget.

For Fiscal Year 2003, the first year of local control, the district’s budgeted expenditures were just under $270 million. For FY 2010, which ended June 30, the district’s budgeted expenditures were just under $340 million—a 26-percent increase.

Over the last year, many of the grassroots protesters from a decade ago have once again pinned tea bags to their shirts. Their anger is still aimed at a federal leviathan that holds far too much control over the lives and livelihood of the citizens of the Forest City. But today, there are no taxes they can legally protest, and no local politicians they can support in an attempt to rein in federal power.

Those protesters did all the right things a decade ago, and they lost—even as they seemed to win.

It makes one wonder if perhaps those tea bags might be better used to make tea.

This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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Hoffman, who had once attacked that same board for firing a white principal who had changed the failing grades of white students, began volunteering his time last fall to mentor disadvantaged white students at a new charter school in the district. The superintendent was so impressed by his efforts that she drew up a contract for Hoffman’s services that was slightly less than $10,000. (Any expenditure over $10,000 has to come before the board.)

Now that Hoffman was being paid, he could expand his program, which he called Ásátru, an Old Icelandic word that means (roughly) “those true to one’s ancestors.” District officials were so pleased by the results that they decided to offer Hoffman the $40,000 contract. Some critics raised objections that Ásátru is really a religious program in disguise, and even one with some rather unpleasant racial elements. Still, board president David Kelley, a former state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Illinois and its 1994 gubernatorial candidate, told the Rockford Register Star that the program is “a cost-effective attempt to reach students who might otherwise turn to crime.”

A minor problem arose when it was revealed that Hoffman’s Ásátru, Inc., was not incorporated with the state of Illinois. While the district insisted that Hoffman would need to file for incorporation, the school-board attorney told the Register Star that “the board won’t have to wait for the state to approve the company’s application.”

And indeed, just a week later, the board voted unanimously to approve the contract, which runs from March 10 until June 30. Later this year, the board will consider expanding the program to a second school in the district.

If all of this seems a bit hard to believe, that’s because I’ve changed a few of the details. There is no Ásátru, Inc.; Michael Hoffman does not have a contract with District 205 (nor should he); and he hasn’t been mentoring white students and protesting the firing of a white principal.

In its essence, however, the story is true. On March 9, the school board voted unanimously to award a $40,000 contract to Shoresh, Inc. (Shoresh, the company’s website notes, means “rooted”). The company’s founder, Yahcolyah Muhammad, once demanded that the very same school board “Show respect for the black community and not remove our leaders,” when the board fired Kenneth Jackson, the principal of Jefferson High School, for changing the failing grades of black students. Muhammad later volunteered his time to mentor black students at the district’s Leadership and Learning Academy, which he parlayed into his paying gig.

And while Muhammad has never written any books, he is the founder and director of curriculum and instruction at Muhammad University of Islam, an organization associated with the Nation of Islam. Minister Yahcolyah is a fairly popular speaker at Nation of Islam events and runs an Islamic study group that brings other Nation of Islam luminaries to speak at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

One of those speakers, Ashashed Muhammad (no relation to Yahcolyah), came to the NIU campus on August 29, 2009, to hawk his book, The Synagogue of Satan, the Nation of Islam’s equivalent of Hoffman’s Judaism Discovered. (The Foreword to The Synagogue of Satan was written by Malik Zulu Shabazz, the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party.) Minister Yahcolyah’s website for the Islamic study group includes a book list featuring such titles as Our Saviour Has Arrived by Elijah Muhammad (“Messenger of ALLAH”), The Isis Papers by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (“This work is dedicated to the global system of white supremacy”), and the Nation of Islam’s old chestnut, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.

While the Register Star reported on March 1 that Minister Yahcolyah’s bio on the Shoresh website noted his role at the Muhammad University of Rockford, that line is now missing. I wonder why. It’s not as if school-district officials or school-board members, or even the Register Star or any of the other Rockford media that covered the vote, saw any problem with Minister Yahcolyah’s apparent racism and antisemitism.

In the fall, if Minister Yahcolyah finds that running programs at two schools is too much work, perhaps he can hire Michael Hoffman to help him out. Stranger things have happened—like the approval of this contract.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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He was well liked by some, but despised by others. Very few people had a neutral opinion, and even some of those who liked him and supported him in his rise to power were disturbed by his odd, self-centered behavior. He seemed unable to show much human emotion for those around him.

Whatever else anyone might have thought of him, he was a masterful politician, attacking corruption while engaging in inside deals that helped him both politically and personally. Unhappy with the location of the Illinois capitol, he essentially moved it to where he was living. But his ambitions extended beyond Illinois, and he needed money and backing to fulfill his dream of rising from his modest roots to the highest office in the land. Washington beckoned, and nothing would stand in his way.

Or, at least, that is what Gov. Milorad “Rod” Blagojevich thought right up until the phone rang at 6 a.m. on December 9, 2008, waking him at his home on Chicago’s North Side, which he had transformed into the de facto capitol of the state of Illinois. That same phone had been his undoing, and at a press conference later that morning, federal investigators outlined a 76-page indictment filed in U.S. district court, which detailed numerous calls made to and from that phone.

In selections from the transcripts of those calls, Governor Blago­jevich repeatedly instructed aides to hold up $8 million in state funds for a children’s hospital until the head of the hospital coughed up a $50,000 donation to Friends of Blago­jevich; discussed using $1.8 billion in state funds as a reward to a public contractor, a road builder, if only he would raise a half-million dollars for the governor’s war chest by the end of 2008, when new campaign-finance rules would go into effect; and tried to tie state assistance to the struggling Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs, to the firing of a writer for the Tribune who had penned editorials critical of Blago­jevich’s conduct as governor.

The press conference was conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who had successfully prosecuted Blagojevich’s predecessor, Republican Gov. George Ryan, on 18 counts of racketeering and fraud. Ryan had had the good sense to decline to run for reelection as the feds closed the net about him, and so he, like felonious former Democratic governors Dan Walker and Otto Kerner, avoided indictment while still in office.

Blagojevich not only ran for reelection in 2006 knowing that he was being investigated but as late as the day before his arrest declared to reporters that investigators were free to listen to his conversations because he had nothing to hide. Still, the transcripts showed that he was looking for a way out of the governor’s office so that he could rehabilitate his reputation—for a run for the presidency in 2016.

Milorad was probably too busy getting his trademark Serbian gangster hairdo coiffed for court that afternoon, but if he had a chance to listen to Fitzgerald’s press conference, the man who had consciously modeled himself on Honest Abe was likely cut to the bone when Fitzgerald declared, “The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.” Of course, Rod shares more with Abe than the Brooklyn-born Fitzgerald would like to think. The railmen who bankrolled Lincoln could teach today’s blacktop bosses of Illinois a thing or two. And as President, Lincoln didn’t need to use financial persuasion to halt criticisms of his conduct; he could—and did—simply sign an executive order for the arrest and imprisonment of “the editors, proprietors, and publishers” of newspapers and prohibit “any further publication therefrom.”

No, if Lincoln was doing anything in his grave on December 9, 2008, he was probably thanking the God he didn’t believe in that Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t invented the telephone until 12 years after his last Good Friday.

Most of Governor Blagojevich’s transgressions were politics as usual here in the Land of Lincoln, but Fitzgerald was compelled to act when it became clear that Blago was attempting to sell Barack Obama’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But what about our new President himself? Time will tell, but some of us in Illinois could not help but chuckle when the President-elect—another politician who modeled himself on Honest Abe—announced that the centerpiece of his New New Deal would be the biggest load of asphalt since the construction of the Interstate Highway System. One thing is certain: The appointment of outgoing Illinois congressman Ray LaHood (R-Blacktop) as transportation secretary had little to do with bipartisanship.

You can take the boy out of Illinois, but you can’t take Illinois out of the boy.

This article was first published in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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Alana Beamish, who had just dropped her son off at school, attempted to save Pouillon’s life, but it was too late. The 63-year-old died on the ground.

Drake murdered another man, Mike Fuoss, that day, and went in search of a third, James Howe, intending to kill him, too. Caught a few hours later, Drake told Detective Sergeant Shenk that “he was going to make our job very easy.” He confessed to both murders, and from then until his trial ended in a guilty verdict on March 11, Harlan Drake expressed no remorse.

Mike Fuoss’s name was little more than a footnote in most media coverage of that fateful day in Owosso, Michigan. It was the murder of Pouillon that captured the nation’s attention. As Drake told Detective Sergeant Shenk, “I asked [Pouillon] over the years not to do that in front of the kids. A little kid shouldn’t have to look at that.”

Was Pouillon a pervert, an exhibitionist? No: Through his decades-long stakeout at Owosso High School and numerous other places throughout the city and county, Pouillon intended not to victimize children but to save them from the horrors of abortion. Harlan Drake claimed that he had no problem with that message; it was the medium that Pouillon used that convinced Drake to put an end to Pouillon’s life: “I’m not against anti-abortion. I’m against showing little kids those pictures.”

Those pictures were three- and four-foot-high graphic photographs of bloodied, dismembered unborn children—the “product” of abortions. Drake wasn’t the only resident of Owosso who objected to Pouillon’s tactics. In a community that is largely pro-life, Pouillon found few defenders. Why? Because, as the Associated Press reported on February 23, Pouillon “was everywhere—the farmers market, City Hall, the county courthouse, football games—with verbal taunts that were as shocking as his signs.”

As Pouillon’s barber told the AP, “I had no problem with his message. He was just overboard with it. He knew how to push buttons on people, but Jim didn’t deserve to be executed on the sidewalk.” A local woman interviewed by the AP went even further: “I don’t agree with someone taking someone’s life . . . But I don’t miss the man on the corner or his foul mouth. He would chase you, call you names. He was evil. His pictures were so gross.”

One does not have to draw a moral equivalence between murder and a pro-life protest, no matter how unsettling the tactics used, to see a disturbing parallel between the two men. Their shared conviction that extreme measures are justified “for the sake of the children” left one man dead and the other in prison for life. But what, in the end, did either man accomplish?

Those of us who oppose abortion and support pro-life measures need not give Harlan Drake a second thought, except perhaps to utter a prayer for his conversion. But can we learn any lessons from James Pouillon’s tragic end?

The images that Pouillon used are being increasingly adopted by pro-lifers—a sign, perhaps, of desperation, as the years since Roe v. Wade continue to tick by, with only minor and occasional declines in the number of abortions in the United States, from 1.4 million to 1.2 million per year, every year, for over 37 years.

Thus the excitement in the pro-life movement in early October 2009 when the New York Times published an article on its Lens blog by reporter Damien Cave, who had covered the murder of Pouillon and attended his memorial service in Owosso. “Behind the Scenes: Picturing Fetal Remains” is the first serious and extended examination in the mainstream media of the use of such images in pro-life protests.

Cave interviewed Monica Migliorino Miller, the director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and a theology professor at Madonna University, a Franciscan school in Livonia, Michigan. Mrs. Miller estimates that half of the images of aborted children that are used in pro-life protests are pictures that she took, starting in 1987.

What is most interesting about Mrs. Miller’s story is her understanding of what she hoped to accomplish. From the beginning, she told Mr. Cave, her purpose was “journalistic”: “We felt it was very important to make a record of the reality of abortion.”

Yet “Over time,” Cave writes,

her views on which images are appropriate have evolved. She no longer sees gory pictures showing blood or organs as acceptable. She has tried harder to shoot younger fetuses, because that’s when most abortions take place, and she said she also believes that the most graphic images should not be deliberately directed at children because “they can’t intellectualize what they’re seeing.”

And yet an increasing number of pro-lifers who use such images justify deliberately targeting children by arguing that it is too late for adults (we have already made up our minds about abortion), while children are (as one put it) “not yet in that horrible fog.” And some even defend the use of such images by attacking the moral character of teenagers en masse. Because some teenagers engage in premarital sex, and some portion of those who do have sex get pregnant, and some portion of those who do get pregnant have abortions, all children—including those who would not have an abortion if they were to get pregnant from the sex that they are not having—should be exposed to these terrifying sights.

As parents, we have an obligation to protect our children from the violence of abortion. But confronting them with such images accomplishes exactly the opposite: It draws them into the reality of abortion in a way that can do great damage to developing minds and souls.

For her second thoughts, Mrs. Miller is now being criticized by some of those who have used her pictures the longest. Flip Benham, director of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, told Cave that Mrs. Miller’s current stance is “a nice sentimental argument. What’s important is truth to us; that this is the truth.”

There is something to be learned from the difference in the language that Mrs. Miller and Mr. Benham use. Perhaps it can be ascribed to Mrs. Miller’s training in theology, but her description of her photos as a “record of the reality of abortion” is accurate, while Mr. Benham’s claim that “this is the truth” is not.

This is not a mere semantic quibble. In the modern world, we often use the word truth as if it were synonymous with reality, but in Christian theology, as in classical philosophy, truth has a more limited, and more elevated, meaning. Abortion, by definition, is untruth; it is the destruction of the truth of human nature and of the created order. It is a direct assault not only on the child who is being torn apart, limb from limb, but on the God Who declared to the prophet Jeremiah, in that verse so familiar to pro-lifers, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5, RSV).

What happens when we dwell on untruth, when we constantly expose ourselves and others to it, even with the best of intentions? We become inured to the reality of that untruth. The shock and the horror that we experienced when first confronted with pictures of aborted children dissipate; we need even more graphic images in order to excite the same feelings of revulsion.

We can see this in an anecdotal way in a picture that the New York Times ran alongside a front-page story, also by Mr. Cave, in the October 9, 2009, print edition. At a prayer vigil for Mr. Pouillon in Owosso in September, in front of a camper plastered with signs that read “Mommy, why do they want to kill me?” and “Abortion=Murder: The same by any name,” several young girls stand talking. One, a pretty blond-haired girl perhaps 10 or 12 years old, has a broad smile on her face—while a foot or so behind her hangs a four- or five-foot image of a bloodied, mangled baby on a white sheet stained with more blood.

Mrs. Miller is right: “[T]hey can’t intellectualize what they’re seeing.” What they can do, what they will do, is compartmentalize it, become desensitized, confuse the reality of evil with truth.

That very confusion today afflicts the broader pro-life movement—even those who would never dream of using these graphic photos. Abortion has become a moral “issue”; a political “question”; a cultural “problem” to be solved. It has taken on a life of its own, separate from Christian teaching. Indeed, when pro-abortion zealots claim that opposition to abortion is simply an attempt to impose Christian morality, the usual response of Christian pro-lifers today is to point to Jewish and Muslim and even atheist pro-lifers, to declare that abortion is a matter of “civil rights” or “human rights,” to compare it to slavery and point out that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece is a pro-lifer, to decry the unequal impact that abortion for sex selection has on unborn baby girls and to argue that any true feminist must, for that reason alone, be pro-life.

What few will do is simply say, “Yes. And what of it?” At the time of Christ, both chemical and mechanical abortion were practiced in the Roman world; by the time that Constantine the Great issued the Edict of Milan, and for well over a millennium afterward in the Western world, such practices were shunned. How did that change come about? Through graphic representations of Flip Benham’s “truth” of abortion? By petitioning the Roman Senate to outlaw such practices? No: It occurred through the widespread conversion of Romans to Christianity.

The Didache, the first-century document known to early Christians as the teaching of the Twelve Apostles, declared that “There are two Ways, one of Life and one of Death”; those who would follow the Way of Life that Christian converts had embraced “shall not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide.” Why? Because such practices violate “universal human rights”? Because they are akin to the slavery that was commonplace in the ancient world? Because they make women no more than sex objects for men?

No. Such actions were to be avoided because they are the Way of Death, not of Life; they are untruth, and thus opposed to the Truth that will set us free.

Some may object that the civil-rights and human-rights and slavery and feminism arguments carry weight today, while Christianity does not. How can we expect to win the fight against abortion if we cannot even get people to listen to us?

But what exactly is it that we are fighting against? Better yet, what exactly is it that we are fighting for? Abortion is not simply a cause of our civilizational decline, though it is that; more importantly, it is a symptom—a symptom, first and foremost, of the increasing destruction of Christianity from within.

In Casti connubi, his 1930 encyclical on Christian marriage, Pope Pius XI speaks of the proper role of the state in upholding the teachings of the Church, but he never loses sight of the fact that “the family is more sacred than the State and that men are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for Heaven and eternity.” That is why there can never be a purely political solution to a cultural problem; if we put our trust in princes who have forgotten that God is the source of their authority, then our trust is likely to be betrayed when the teachings of the Faith threaten to bridle their passion for political power.

The solution is for the Church to play the role that She played in the conversion of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages. As Pius XI writes,

For the preservation of the moral order neither the laws and sanctions of the temporal power are sufficient, nor is the beauty of virtue and the expounding of its necessity. Religious authority must enter in to enlighten the mind, to direct the will, and to strengthen human frailty by the assistance of divine grace. Such an authority is found nowhere save in the Church instituted by Christ the Lord.

But surely the hour is too late; the day is too dark; we cannot spare the time necessary to convert the masses. Every year, 1.3 million children are murdered; are we simply to throw them to the wolves?

Of course not. But our time and attention are necessarily limited, and we need to focus on preventing abortions where they actually occur—not in the halls of Congress, or the Oval Office, or the chamber of the Supreme Court, but in the abortuaries and hospitals of our hometowns.

The unabashedly Christian 40 Days for Life campaign, held in towns and cities across the United States the past three Lenten seasons, is a perfect example of the kind of pro-life action that can and does make a difference. Volunteers take turns holding vigil, praying the rosary and offering other prayers of intercession for the women entering the abortuaries, the men who brought them there, the children whose lives are being snuffed out before they even see the light of day, and even the “doctors” and “nurses” who perform and assist in the act of murder. The faithful offer sidewalk counseling, directing women who have doubts about their actions to crisis-pregnancy centers and even, in some cases, opening their own homes to frightened women and girls who thought they had nowhere else to turn.

Political measures can be undone, but every child whom we save becomes a living witness—an icon—of the love of God and a testimony that we Christians live what we preach. Focusing on what we can accomplish, rather than on what we have failed to accomplish over the course of 37 years, will allow us to begin to turn the debate around.

Remembering that our opposition to abortion is not separate from our belief in Christ is but the first step. Simply urging mothers to “Choose Life” will not end abortion on the mass scale that we see it practiced today; bringing them to the One Who is the Way and the Truth and the Life will. Rome wasn’t converted in a day, and the United States will not be, either. But she will never be converted as long as our actions lead others to believe that we value the cause of life more than the Way of Life.

On the last day of His earthly life, Christ stood before Pontius Pilate and declared, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” Beholding the Creator of the world and the Savior of mankind, His body bruised by the blows of the servants of the high priest and His face covered with their spittle, Pilate responded, “What is truth?”

The bruises and the spittle were reality, but they obscured the truth that Pilate sought. And in the end, he sent that Truth away to be crucified—the same Truth Who, through His Resurrection, wrought the conversion of the Roman Empire and even, some traditions say, of Pontius Pilate himself.

We can end abortion in the United States in the same way that Christians ended abortion in the Roman Empire: by finding our hope in the Truth of the Gospel, rather than despairing in the reality of evil.

This article appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Portions of this article previously appeared in the Wanderer and on the About.Com GuideSite to Catholicism (Catholicism.About.Com).

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Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family Room (yes, that is its name) in the basement of Holy Family Parish was almost full. The crowd reflected not only the number of pro-lifers in Rockford but their composition. Nineteen priests and many prominent physicians, lawyers, and businessmen joined almost two hundred others to raise money for Rockford’s upcoming 40 Days for Life campaign. There were even a dozen or more politicians, though it was hard to get an accurate count because the Republicans all left early to attend the Lincoln Day Dinner, held nearly a month in advance of Lincoln’s birthday. (Is nothing sacred anymore?)

Sheila’s roots are in Rockford, but she has spent much of her life elsewhere. I explained that the local pro-life politicians themselves are part of the problem—once elected, not a single one of them has tried to shut down the euphemistically named Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic, housed in a former public school.

To be fair, their failure to act isn’t necessarily hypocrisy. Even those who are in a position to make life uncomfortable for the abortionist and his landlord, Wayne Webster (whose own child attended the school that Webster has turned into a chamber of horrors), lack the imagination to do so. During the 2001 mayoral election, I asked Denny Johnson, the pro-life Republican candidate, why he didn’t use his position on the board of directors of Rockford’s largest hospital to get the abortionist’s privileges revoked. Richard Ragsdale, now several years dead but then one of the most notorious abortionists in the country, didn’t perform abortions at SwedishAmerican, Johnson replied, so why revoke his privileges? (He didn’t suggest that Ragsdale’s privileges couldn’t be revoked; he simply couldn’t see what good it would do.)

Similarly, when I asked Johnson to pledge to use zoning restrictions to try to close down the abortuary, he admitted that the idea might work, but that he had never thought of it. Yet he refused to make such a pledge.

Politicians seem always at the ready to use the law to protect abortion, however. Just ten days after the Pro-Life Banquet, and within a few days of the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Rockford Register Star reported that city attorney Jennifer Cacciapaglia had drafted a “bubble zone” ordinance that would make it illegal for the pro-lifers who pray at the abortuary every Wednesday and Friday (the two days that it is open) to come closer than 8 feet to any person who is within 100 feet of the entrance to Turner School. The ordinance was requested by Karen Elyea, the alderman in whose district the abortuary lies, ostensibly (the Register Star reported) as a response to “128 calls for service from police and 64 complaints filed at the clinic’s address in the past two years.”

The Rockford Pro-Life Initiative notes that the majority of those calls have not been made by mothers entering Turner School, or even by those who accompany them, but by pro-lifers filing complaints against a counterdemonstrator who spends his time harassing those gathered in prayer. (Most of the rest of the calls have been made by the counterdemonstrator.) Elyea told the Register Star that she is concerned about the “‘heated interaction’ between protesters and clinic staff and patients,” but the ordinance is likely to lead to greater tensions, as different people standing at different vantage points will disagree about whether the eight-foot “bubble zone” has been breached. And that will mean more calls to the police, not fewer.

Our current mayor, an independent, is a practicing Catholic, and I have heard him speak eloquently and movingly about his pro-life convictions. To his credit, Mayor Morrissey opposes the “bubble zone,” which will come before the Rockford City Council in a few weeks.

The real purpose of the ordinance is to prevent pro-lifers from handing out brochures on fetal development and alternatives to abortion, including material from the local pregnancy-care center, which has assisted many mothers who have decided to bring their children to term. During last Lent’s 40 Days for Life campaign, the weekly number of abortions fell by over 20 percent, and it continued to fall throughout the year.

If this year’s campaign were to result in a similar decrease, the abortuary might well have to close its doors forever. Undoubtedly, Alderman Elyea is concerned about the loss of a local business. But adding a few more folks to the ranks of Rockford’s unemployed would, in this case, be a very good thing.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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And thank him they will, as well as senators and congressmen who voted for the bill. But don’t worry about those who voted against it; the insurance companies won’t hold any grudges. They will spread their newfound wealth throughout the halls of Congress to ensure that no future healthcare reform will undermine their privileged position.

The Republicans who opposed the bill knew that, which is why they spent all of their time talking about abortion and other side issues rather than attacking the biggest corporate welfare plan in American history. When all is said and done, this gift to the insurance companies will dwarf the bailouts of the banks and the auto industry. The Republicans wanted to make sure that they would get their cut of the cash, too.

The big losers, of course, are the businesses that face fines if they do not provide adequate health insurance to their employees (Caterpillar estimates that the legislation will cost them $100 million, which likely means that their next plant will be built in Mexico or China rather than in Illinois), and those who are self-employed or work for small businesses exempt from the requirement to provide insurance. Like the businesses, they will be fined unless they purchase health insurance.

In the worst position will be those who do not currently have health insurance because they truly cannot afford it. They will be eligible for tax credits to make their mandatory insurance more affordable, but those tax credits will be nonrefundable, so if they owe very little or nothing in taxes, the credits will do them little to no good. They still won’t be able to afford health insurance, but now they will be forced to pay a fine—a minimum of $95 or one percent of their income (whichever is higher) in the first year, ratcheting up to a minimum of $695 or two percent of their income by 2014.

Come this fall, the Republicans will be able to campaign safely against the new law, and they will undoubtedly succeed in picking up a significant number of seats in the House and possibly the Senate. But they will never make any serious attempt to repeal this legislation. And by 2012, enough voters will have received tax credits so that the opposition will have died down. Those who will have been fined because they truly cannot afford insurance are among the least likely to vote anyway. President Obama, who staked his political future on this vote, is more likely now to be elected to a second term (after a campaign financed, of course, by significant donations by the insurance companies).

As awful as a single-payer national healthcare system would likely be, the United States just adopted something worse. The only consolation that those of us who oppose both Big Government and Big Insurance can look forward to is the coming consternation of those liberals who sincerely believe that Obamacare is an attack on the “criminal” and “evil” insurance companies and the first step toward a single-payer system. It won’t take long for them to realize that it is, rather, a major step backward from what they truly desire.

A single-payer system could only come at the expense of the insurance companies, and they are never going to give up the great gift that Obama and his colleagues have handed them, on a silver platter lined with 40-50 million new insurance premiums. The crumbs from their table that will fall into the campaign coffers of both parties will be enough to make sure that any additional healthcare reform will never threaten to put out the insurance executives’ cigars.

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When pro-life activist James Pouillon was murdered in Owosso, Michigan, on September 11, I read a few dozen accounts from both national and Michigan news sources and quickly decided I had a handle on the story.  Harlan Drake, the man who has admitted to murdering Pouillon, seems deeply disturbed, and he had murdered another man and pursued a third.  While neither of Drake’s other targets was publicly involved in pro-life activities, the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department and the prosecutor’s office both confirmed that Drake had told authorities that he had targeted Pouillon for his “pro-life stance.”

In a short piece for the About.com Catholicism GuideSite, I talked less about Pouillon, Drake, or the murder, and more about the disparity in reactions between pro-life and pro-abortion groups to the murders of Pouillon and late-term abortionist George Tiller.  While pro-life groups had been quick to condemn Tiller’s murder, with few or no equivocations, pro-abortion groups were much slower to issue statements about Pouillon’s murder, and when NARAL did, the statement had a “you got one of ours; we got one of yours; let’s call it even” feel.

After publishing the piece, I noticed that a number of articles about Pouillon’s murder had quotes from residents of Owosso referring to him as “the sign guy.”  I did some digging and found that, for about a decade, Pouillon had used graphic posters of aborted children in his protests, many of which (as on the day he was murdered) took place across the street from Owosso High School.  The use of such posters is controversial even among pro-lifers, and I have written before about why I oppose them.  Still, while their use may have contributed to Drake’s rage, it neither justifies murder nor mitigates Drake’s responsibility.

By the end of the day, however, I was contacted by a resident of Owosso who knew Pouillon and his activities, and who explained that the story was much more complex.  In their (our?) rush to score political points, pro-life groups had begun referring to Pouillon as a “peaceful” man and a “martyr” to the cause of life.  The inevitable comparisons with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., followed.

Yet pro-life activists in Owosso had a different story to tell, and my contact directed me to the website of the Argus-Press, where residents of Owosso were discussing their experiences with Pouillon.  Even local admirers admitted that he seemed to thrive on confrontation and had told several of them that he expected—indeed, hoped—to be killed one day while protesting.

All of this had been ignored by outside news agencies.  Even the Argus-Press, while it should be commended for providing a forum in which a fuller picture emerged, shied away from discussing the details in its news stories.  That is why so many of us thought that we knew everything, when in fact we knew only the barest details.

In a follow-up story published in the September 24 issue of The Wanderer and reprinted on the About.com Catholicism GuideSite, I explored the implications of Pouillon’s activities and his murder in greater depth, and questioned whether such confrontational tactics are either appropriate or useful.  What did Pouillon’s death actually accomplish, other than to tear apart the community of Owosso?  By the time the piece appeared, however, the damage had been done, and readers responded to the attempt to paint a fuller picture of James Pouillon’s activities and murder by repeating the myth.

Over the past nine years of writing The Rockford Files, and several more years before that covering the Rockford school-desegregation case and eminent-domain land grabs by local government, I have seen many situations where the reporting of outside news agencies simply did not reflect the reality of events here in Rockford.  The Rockford desegregation case, for instance, was about the closing of a neighborhood high school before a greedy Chicago lawyer, brought in by the mostly white plaintiffs, turned it into a racial class-action suit.  (Many of the original plaintiffs spent years fighting the very lawyer they had hired.)  The Chicago Tribune, the Rockford Register-Star, and the weekly Rock River Times all printed glowing profiles of the local Muslim school before two editors from a small monthly magazine actually spent an entire day at the school, interviewed students, teachers, and administrators, and came away with a very different story of a library stocked with radical Islamic books and videotapes, young children singing rap songs glorifying jihad, and a school-board chairman who touted the virtues of sharia and Osama bin Laden.

In other words, I should have known better.  Life at the local level is always much more complex than what even a good, unbiased, hard-working reporter can capture in a few hundred words for a wire story or a 90-second segment on the six o’clock news.  And a reporter from outside a community will always have trouble placing an event such as Pouillon’s murder in the context of that community’s history.  That is why local news is more important than ever, even as the internet threatens to put the last truly local newspapers and radio and TV stations out of business.

And that, too, is why readers need to take everything they read with a grain of salt—even when it comes from someone they trust.

This article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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Would that it were.  Instead, for the last quarter of a century, it has been the home of the Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic—the antiseptic-sounding name for Rockford’s only abortuary.

It has another name, too.  The building’s current owner, Wayne Webster, dubbed it “Fort Turner,” but its walls offer no protection—certainly not to the children whose lives end there, but neither to the mothers who may spend the rest of their lives in regret over having sacrificed their daughters on the altar of “women’s rights,” nor to the fathers who pay for the ritual murder of their sons.

And if the antics of Wayne Webster over the years—dressing up like the devil to harass pro-lifers praying the rosary on the sidewalk outside the clinic; trying to drown out their prayers by shouting obscenities over loudspeakers he has mounted on the exterior walls; hanging rubber chickens (including one mounted on a crucifix) and obscene signs and pictures in the windows—are any indication, the walls of Fort Turner (where Webster also lives) have not protected him from spiritual attack.  But then demons, like vampires, are always looking for an invitation to enter in, and they may well have taken up residence inside Fort Turner when the first abortion was performed there a quarter-century ago.

As if providing a location for an average of 35 murders each week is not enough, over the years Webster has hung signs in the windows of Fort Turner mocking the Christian beliefs of the pro-lifers: “Jesus loves these braindead a—holes,” “These Bible-thumpers suffer from lack-o-nookie,” “God bless these horny old sweat-hogs,” “NIWC 50,000, JC 50” (that is, by the time the abortuary reached 50,000 children killed, Jesus Christ had saved only 50).  But Webster’s latest outrage crossed from mockery into blasphemy, when, in late summer, he hung up a sign with the inscription “Even Jesus Hates You,” under an image of Christ extending the middle finger of His right hand.

The Rockford Pro-Life Initiative, a coalition of pro-life activists founded in 2008 to “eliminate abortion in the Rockford area through Christian, non-confrontational means,” including “Prayer, Fasting, Education and Personal Sacrifice,” asked Rockford police to enforce city ordinances against the offensive use of property by ordering Webster to remove the image.  When a police sergeant refused, saying that the sign was not offensive, a veteran pro-life activist, Kevin Rilott, received permission to address the Rockford City Council.  Pro-lifers showed up at the meeting with small devotional pictures of Christ, and Rilott implored the council to take action—to no avail.

The Rockford ordinances state that it is illegal to “disturb or destroy the peace of the neighborhood in which such building or premises are situated.”  While it is by no means certain that a court would agree that Webster’s blasphemous sign violates the ordinances, many of his other actions—especially the blasting of rock music and the shouting of obscenities over the loudspeakers mounted on the outside of Fort Turner—clearly do.  Yet there is no record of Webster or the clinic being issued a citation.

A few weeks after Webster hung the “Even Jesus Hates You” sign, Rilott was praying outside of Fort Turner, in the same spot where he has stood for a decade.  Webster’s security guard asked him to move, and when Rilott refused, he called in the police.  An officer on the scene asked Rilott to pick up a large painting of Christ that he had propped up next to him; when Rilott refused, the officer called in the same police sergeant who had refused to take action on Webster’s sign.  After ordering the pro-life protesters to turn off their video cameras, the sergeant confiscated the painting on the grounds that it was “unattended” and threw it in the back of his squad car.

So, pictures of Our Lord giving the finger to faithful Christians are acceptable; “unattended” paintings of Christ are not.  (As video footage of the incident shows, Rilott was never more than two or three feet away from the painting at any time.)

When pro-lifers use graphic images of aborted children in their protests, the media views such actions as provocation (which, in some cases, such as that of the recently murdered James Pouillon, it may well be).  But you will look in vain for equivalent treatment of Webster’s blasphemy (or similar actions at abortuaries around the country).

Pro-lifers’ use of graphic images, I have argued, is counterproductive at best; but while they do not show us the truth, they at least portray reality.  Webster’s sign does neither—though it may give us a glimpse into the depths of his soul and of the sleepless nights he spends guarding the gates of Hell.

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Family traditions often get started by accident—especially, perhaps, those that center on food. On the second New Year’s Eve after we were married, my wife and I found ourselves trapped in our apartment in Vienna, Virginia, victims of a freak snow and ice storm that made the Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., streets downright dangerous, especially since no one in the area knew how to drive in such conditions. While we both had weathered far worse growing up in Michigan, we decided not to risk our lives but someone else’s, and so we ordered Chinese delivery. (To salve our consciences, we tipped very well.) At the end of the meal, one of us conceived the sappy idea of breaking our fortune cookies open at midnight, and by 12:01 A.M. (disappointing fortunes notwithstanding), it was probably inevitable that we would do it all again the next year.

And so, when we arrived in Rockford two years later, on December 27, 1995, one of my first tasks was to locate a Chinese restaurant. In a dingy strip mall on North Main Street, around the corner from our apartment, I found a little hole in the wall with six or seven tables. I guess it will do, I thought. By next year, we’ll have located the best Chinese restaurant in town. Little did I know that we already had.

The food we ate that New Year’s Eve—crab rangoon, fried rice, and black bean and garlic chicken with green peppers and onions—was not the best Chinese I have ever had, but few restaurants I have dined at have ever topped it (most notably, a Chinese restaurant on Long Island whose name I can’t recall, where I first enjoyed General Tso’s chicken—delightfully crunchy-chewy, with fiery little peppers and the lightest of sauces—and my personal favorite, the Sichuan Pavilion, on K Street in Washington, D.C.). Over the next five or so years, I enjoyed innumerable lunches and dinners with family and colleagues at the place we all came to know simply as “Mrs. Lee’s”—Lee’s Chinese Restaurant, immortalized in the small ads that we placed in Chronicles as a token of our gratitude for the many kindnesses that Mrs. Lee and her husband, Al, bestowed upon us.

A decade earlier, Tom Fleming had also eaten one of his first meals in Rockford at Mrs. Lee’s, when Chronicles’ founding editor Leopold Tyrmand took him there to sample the wonton soup—the best in Rockford, Tyrmand claimed. And it was, though I always preferred the hot and sour. (If you’re ever in D.C., try the best of both worlds: Sichuan Pavilion’s hot and sour wonton soup, a sublime—and spicy—dish I have never seen anywhere else.) My children always said that no one could make white rice quite like Mrs. Lee—whose real name was Ann Wang and whose unrelenting cheerfulness and good nature are reflected in the fact that it took her almost five years to correct us.

In mid-size Midwestern towns such as Rockford, small ethnic restaurants come and go, which made Mrs. Lee’s 20-some-year run little short of a miracle. While such places might survive for generations in New York City or San Francisco, the normal pattern here is for small restaurants (often run by first- or second-generation immigrants) to blaze the way, introducing adventurous Midwesterners to an interesting new cuisine, which is then picked up by a larger restaurant (often a chain), which ditches all of the sparkle and originality of the cuisine in order to make it more palatable to a broader range of American diners. And, of course, it never hurts to make up for the loss of quality by increasing the quantity, preferably by putting the food on an all-you-can-eat buffet. (Rockford now has a Chinese-Japanese-American buffet featuring sushi—a risky proposition if ever there was one. Nine eighty-nine, no doggie bags—something for which Rover can be thankful.)

This dynamic is more proof that, to the extent that any assimilation has actually occurred in the “Great Melting Pot,” it has largely been destructive, stripping immigrants and their food of their distinctiveness and reducing them to the lowest common denominator. If there were still a true American cuisine, it could adopt the best foods and techniques and spices from other cultures and make them its own, the way that, say, Poles, Lebanese, and Vietnamese did with French cuisine. Instead, American chain restaurants and agribusiness conglomerates take other cultures’ food and try to make it taste like a TV dinner. And, unfortunately, they usually succeed.

Mrs. Lee’s has been gone for almost two years now, and with it not only the crab rangoon, wonton soup, and beef kow but Mrs. Lee’s insights into the local public schools and the mayor and her tips about Brazilian telephone stocks. Ann and Al were not forced out of business by their competition but chose to retire rather than battle their landlord, who wanted them to make thousands of dollars worth of improvements to their space before he would offer them another lease. The forces of homogenization, however, were closing in—a local Chinese restaurant chain, predictably named “Happy Wok,” had opened on the corner, and a Chinese buffet, predictably named “China Buffet” and featuring such traditional Asian dishes as frozen pizza and boxed mashed potatoes with canned gravy, had taken up residence in the next mall to the north. Still, I’d like to think that Mrs. Lee could have withstood the competition, perhaps less because of the quality of her food than the loyalty of her patrons and her loyalty to them—though, in the end, “the quality of her food” and “her loyalty to her patrons” may simply be different ways of saying the same thing.

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