Troy Newman, the head of the anti-choice group Operation Rescue and a driving force behind the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood, made news this week when he was barred from entering Australia after a member of parliament raised concerns that his extremism “would cause significant harm to our community.”
Operation Rescue is understandably upset with the decision, and is taking advantage of the controversy to gin up plenty of publicity for itself. But the group has also taken exception to some of the Australian MP’s complaints, specifically claiming that Newman has never called for the execution of abortion providers, as MP Terri Butler wrote in a letter disputing Newman’s visa.
Operation Rescue said in a statement:
A pro-abortion Member of Parliament, Terri Butler, sent a spurious letter to Minister of Immigration Peter Dutton falsely accusing Newman of advocating the execution of abortion providers, which Dutton never bothered to fact-check.
Newman has never advocated violence against abortion providers or facilities and has instead adamantly encouraged pro-life activists to work through the legal, legislative, and justice systems to bring abortionists who are breaking the law and harming women to justice.
In fact, as Butler detailed in her letter, Newman said exactly that in his 2000 book “Their Blood Cries Out,” whose 2003 revision includes this passage:
When moms, dads, abortionists are added together, well over 100,000,000 people bear personal bloodguilt for at least one abortion. The doctrine of community bloodguilt found in Scripture further implicates the entire nation. The perpetrators are far too numerous and the bloodguilt has spread too far. We deserve God’s judgment.
In addition to our personal guilt in abortion, the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes in order to expunge bloodguilt from the land and people. Instead, the act of abortion has been elevated to a “God-given right” and the abortionists canonized as saints. Consequently, the entire nation has the blood-red stain of the lives of the innocent upon its head.
And also this one:
The innocent blood of the New Covenant in Christ has the power to atone for all the innocent bloodshed from the beginning of time to the end, and to purify the whole earth — the land. Rejecting that innocent blood is to reject the only standard that is effective against innocent bloodshed, excluding the lawful execution of the murderers, which is commanded by God in Scripture.
Sure, Newman wasn’t advocating the extralegal killing of abortion providers — he’s always been very careful to never quite go there — but he was very explicitly saying that providing an abortion should be a capital crime equivalent to murder. In fact, he was saying that all of America suffers “bloodguilt” for legal abortion because of the failure to punish abortion providers through the legal system.
Whatever one may think regarding the legitimacy of Newman’s complaint about being barred from Australia, he cannot simply pretend that he never wrote words that are very clearly written in his book.
