Blood and Politics (56 page)

This was an unusual audience for Pratt, though he shared many of its obsessions. One and all were fervently anti-communist, opposed any form of gun control, and believed the establishment of the United States as a Christian republic was in God’s plan. Yet Pratt was neither a Christian Identity adherent nor a biological (racial) determinist. Chris Temple’s two-stage strategy may have opened the door to men such as Pratt, but it remained for Pratt to figure out a way to walk in without overtly compromising his own beliefs.

Pratt began his speech by dissecting the Brady Bill, then under consideration in Congress as a way of curbing weapons. He believed the Second Amendment guaranteed unrestricted individual ownership of guns—machine guns, LAW rockets, and assault rifles . . . whatever.
“The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting,” he told the crowd. By Pratt’s interpretation, the Constitution and the Founding Fathers had intended for the Second Amendment to provide personal protection from individual criminals as well as criminal governments. Although all the relevant Supreme Court decisions had declared the Second Amendment a collective right accruing to state governments, Pratt argued that a contemporary rationale for guns (and more guns) resided in the failure of government. “We need to keep reminding people, because people won’t hear it from anybody else, that the police can’t protect the individual citizen. The policeman can’t provide personal security. I suspect everyone in this room understands that. But a lot of the American people didn’t understand that, never had thought about it, until the riots in Los Angeles, literally, [brought it] home to them, by means of their television.”
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Pratt also advocated lobbying. “When we have a chance to testify,” he instructed the assembly, “what we do is to go and confront the legislators directly with the illegality of unconstitutional action.”

With just a few exceptions, the Estes Park Christian men were unlikely lobbyists. On the other hand, starting up paramilitaries would be almost as natural as not shaving on the weekend. Pratt provided the rationale. He told them he believed it was perfectly reasonable to walk into the office of a state secretary of state and declare: “My name’s Larry Pratt, and I’m the commandant of the Nathan Hale unorganized militia.” What would happen next? “That would be that. Then you’ve got a recognized, but unorganized, militia, one that’s not being provided for or commanded by the governor of the state, or the legislature.”

Pratt’s militia mind had been born in the battle against communism, particularly in Third World countries, as a way of defending dictators and mobilizing armed opposition to revolutionary insurgencies. He had gone to Guatemala three times during the 1980s and once to the Philippines. There, while the Soviet Union still existed and the United States was still fighting the Cold War, Pratt promoted a militia that turned ordinary civilians into death squads. “We find that the value of the Second Amendment,” he had written, “guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms as the way to insure that there be a militia made up of armed people, has been discovered in foreign settings.”

In 1990, as the Soviet bloc collapsed, Pratt published a book recapping his experiences and pointing toward militia formation in the post–Cold War world. At that time, the war on drugs had replaced the war against communism as his rationale. “America has been losing the War on Drugs, and it is probably safe to predict that the United States will continue to lose this war until the . . . professional monopoly
in civil defense are replaced,” he wrote. His answer was a return to “an armed people with functioning militias involved in civil defense (or police work, if you will),” an explicit call for vigilante action in the war on drugs. (It was an argument that would make even Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry blush.) Pratt had also previously developed a line of reasoning that was more applicable that day in Estes Park: form a militia to oppose the government. “When a government no longer fears the people, atrocities become possible,” he had written as if he were one of the insurgents in Guatemala instead of one of the regime’s defenders. “Long live the militia! Long live freedom! Long live a government that fears the people!”
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Pratt also argued: “We have to take every thought captive to the obedience of Jesus Christ and then all disobedience will be punished . . .” In his theology, “punishment” loomed larger than guns.

Pratt’s corporate complex rivaled Willis Carto’s in its intricacy. The largest entity, Gun Owners Foundation, is a nonprofit educational corporation, contributions to which are tax deductible. The second company is Gun Owners of America, Inc., a nonprofit corporation. Attached to GOA Inc. is a third group, a federal political action committee, Gun Owners of America Political Victory Fund, which contributes money to sympathetic congressional candidates. Together, GOF, the GOA, and the Victory Fund all operated in tandem as a more militant alternative to the National Rifle Association.

In addition to directing the gun groups, Pratt formed the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, a Virginia nonprofit corporation he used for various Christian right causes, including a bit of gay bashing for money. In one fund-raising letter, Pratt called for the quarantine of anyone with AIDS: “Our judges coddle criminals instead of caring for the victims of crime. They’ve chased God out of our schools, defended abortions . . . and now they are trying to infect us and kill us with strange and horrible diseases.”

Among its other jaunts along the edges of respectability, Pratt’s Family Foundation raised funds for an antiabortion group, Operation Rescue, run by Randall Terry, at a time when Terry’s group was under a court order restricting its activities. Operation Rescue’s modus was staging large-scale sit-in–style blockades of women’s health clinics. Beginning in Atlanta during the Democratic Party’s 1988 convention, Terry called for hundreds of activists from around the country to descend on a city, mobilized local sympathizers, and then blockaded the clinics and
clogged the city’s jails with arrests. When Terry came to New York City in 1989, the National Organization for Women (NOW) got a court injunction ordering Operation Rescue not to interfere with the clinics. Terry flouted the court order, attempted a blockade, and was arrested. Operation Rescue was fined fifty thousand dollars. After Terry refused to pay the fine, the U.S. attorney’s office seized two Operation Rescue bank accounts, and the group was essentially closed down.

At that point Larry Pratt entered, wearing his hat as president of the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation. During the first six months of 1990, Pratt sent potential contributors three letters from the Committee to Protect asking contributors for money to pay the debts and operating costs of Operation Rescue. Pratt’s first letter stated his sympathies: “Many of us are grateful for the work of Randall Terry and Operation Rescue over the past two years . . . As you well know, the federal government has seized Operation Rescue’s operating and payroll accounts . . . We have set up a separate account to pay off . . . [its] debt.”
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A July 16 letter was slightly more hysterical: “THE GOVERNMENT IS DOING THE FEMINISTS’ DIRTY WORK WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS [emphasis in original].”
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The Committee to Protect spent more than $146,000 on Operation Rescue’s debts that year. When a U.S. district judge ruled that it could also be liable for Operation Rescue’s fines—since it was raising money and paying bills—Pratt stopped sending letters, and Terry shuttered his Operation Rescue office.

Pratt’s Christian nationalist résumé at the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation and his gun rights profile at Gun Owners of America were a remarkable combination. While he did not personally accept the obvious racism of men such as Richard Butler and Louis Beam, Pratt did not raise any public objections during the course of the meeting. He made it abundantly clear he was ready to work with the group at Estes Park if it was ready to work with him. (In his speech Pratt charitably described his audience as Bill of Rights–style constitutionalists. No Fourteenth Amendment in that Founding Fathers document. Pratt told the assembly he had a problem with it anyway.)

Gun rights and (white) Christian nationalism: upon those two rocks the contemporary militia movement was founded in the 1990s. Perhaps Beam summed up the anger and danger present at Estes Park in a leaflet he was circulating: “The federals have made a terrible error in the Weaver case that they will long regret. Their cruelty and callous disregard for the rules of civilized warfare will have the effect of solidifying opposition to them. Long after Weaver has been tried and has been
freed by the courts as an innocent man wrongfully accused, there will be 10,000 White men in this country who harbor in their hearts a terrible hatred for the federals and all they stand for . . .”
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In the first years after the formation of the militia movement, the importance of the Estes Park gathering was much debated. Ken Stern wrote of the meeting in his book on the militia movement,
A Force upon the Plain
: “The Estes Park meeting . . . may have laid the groundwork for the militia’s formation . . . Yet, its importance should not be overrated. Meetings happen every day.”
¹⁹
Conversely, Morris Dees and James Corcoran in their book on the militia,
Gathering Storm
, assigned a singular importance to the meeting.

Certainly, common sense argues that there are limitations to the ultimate importance of any particular meeting, except those where specific overt acts are planned. But the participants at Estes Park did not behave as if they were bank robbers plotting a heist. Louis Beam was not the gunman with a watch, ensuring that his cohorts escaped before the cops arrived. Neither was Pete Peters the getaway driver or Larry Pratt the man with the alibi for all. The militia movement was not the result of any conspiracy, although as a movement it eventually engendered dozens of actual criminal conspiracies.

History is always ambiguous about the meaning of specific events. Consider, for example, the January 1942 conference of Nazi leaders at Wannsee. Did they plan the “final solution” to the Jewish question at that place and only at that place? The Holocaust would have probably occurred without Wannsee. An ideology that regarded Jews as a subhuman menace guided Nazi policy long before 1942, and the mass murder of Jews had already started before that particular meeting.

Similarly, both the view that the federal government was a menace to white people and the actual formation of militias predated Estes Park. In fact, the “unorganized militia” had been a basic tenet of Posse Comitatus practice since the early 1980s. The ideology and social forces that manifested themselves in new and explosive ways after Estes Park had been in the process of (re)developing since Willis Carto and William Pierce had rescued the white supremacist movement from complete eclipse in the very early 1970s.

Nevertheless, Estes Park was unique and of significant historical weight on several counts. This was a relatively calm and deliberative meeting, absent the usual bombast and conspiracy mongering—not an everyday occurrence among racists and anti-Semites. This band of
Christian Identity leaders and Aryan types planned to organize around an issue that resonated widely and had immediate consequences. While their southern kinsmen had already campaigned à la David Duke, and those in the Midwest had created a minimovement out of dispossessed farmers in the 1980s, most of those in the Northwest tended to withdraw into the mountains. A few robbed bank trucks. But Estes Park was a new departure, in part because the urgency of Randy Weaver’s and Kevin Harris’s coming trial loomed over virtually every point.

Another unique aspect of this gathering was its truly collaborative leadership. Despite Pete Peters’s role in convening the meeting, there was little planned agenda or preapproved list of speakers. By contrast, at Peters’s summer Bible camps he was the unchallenged chief, and each speaker in each time slot had been arranged in advance. At Estes Park a group of men made decisions ad hoc, during the proceedings.

Although the militia movement in the 1990s eventually traced directly back to the Estes Park meeting, the most singularly significant aspect of the meeting was less the initiation of the militia than the participation of such men as Larry Pratt. Temple and others like him had nosed their way into groups such as Moral Majority or lobbied legislatures on gun issues in the past. But in those instances, others outside the movement had set the political agenda. On this occasion, however, it was Pete Peters’s tent, it was Louis Beam welcoming the guests, and it was Chris Temple setting the strategy. And it was the likes of Larry Pratt walking in on an expanded white nationalist turf. The shift that had manifested itself with the collapse of the Soviet Union continued. Much like Pat Buchanan’s adopting the rhetoric of David Duke and Willis Carto’s
Spotlight
, a number of activists and organizations associated with Christian conservative causes adopted a more militant opposition to the status quo. A new Christian nationalism emerged, distinct yet entwined with the post–Cold War white nationalism. And a mixture of guns with religion burst like the muzzle flash of a .38 revolver. No metaphor intended.

March 10, 1993.
At 9:40 a.m. Dr. David Gunn drove his 1992 Buick up to the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services Clinic on Bayou Boulevard. The detritus of commuting hundreds of miles from his home in Eufaula, Alabama, to clinics in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama was scattered around him: a McDonald’s bag of fast-food trash, a carton of empty beer cans, a jar of peanuts, empty coffee cups, several changes of clothes, and various legal and bank documents. A slight, unimposing forty-seven-year-old gynecologist, Dr. Gunn provided abortion services in a region where they were legal but not widely available. So he traveled, a moving target for antichoice activists aiming at what they considered the weakest link in abortion services, the doctor. In front of the clinic, a crowd of protesters had gathered. Some stood in a knot off to the side, apparently in deep contemplation. A band bunched in the middle of the drive, making it difficult for women to pass into the clinic. Gunn parked in the west lot, away from the front and closest to the employee entrance, and got out of the car.