Harrison, Garnett - interviewed by Rose Norman
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Transcript
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- | And I need to say to the tape player, | 0:00 |
this is Rose Norman, it's November 16th, 2012 | 0:02 | |
and I'm doing a telephone interview with Garnett Harrison. | 0:05 | |
Who is in Jacksonville, Florida. | 0:10 | |
And she's gonna be talking about her | 0:14 | |
lesbian feminist activism in Mississippi | 0:16 | |
roughly the period from about 1975 to the early 90s. | 0:20 | |
So take it away. | 0:25 | |
- | All right. | 0:27 |
In 1975, | 0:29 | |
I had read about rape in maybe | 0:32 | |
Ladies Home Journal, or some mainstream women's magazine, | 0:37 | |
and really started thinking about the need, you know, | 0:44 | |
for a rape crisis center. | 0:51 | |
And at that time, rape victims | 0:54 | |
were required to take lie detector tests. | 0:58 | |
And so, you know, I was a member of NOW, | 1:01 | |
and we talked about it, | 1:07 | |
and I went ahead and founded | 1:10 | |
the rape crisis center, I got a little VISTA grant | 1:15 | |
and you know, a non-profit status, and | 1:20 | |
got materials from the shifts at the rape crisis centers | 1:29 | |
and started. | 1:35 | |
At this time I was about | 1:37 | |
22 years old. | 1:43 | |
I did that while I was in law school, | 1:47 | |
and at that time I really wasn't, | 1:51 | |
I was not a lesbian. | 1:53 | |
I was actually married. | 1:54 | |
I had a small child, and really | 1:58 | |
I thought I knew a whole lot about | 2:03 | |
incest and child sexual abuse | 2:06 | |
but I really didn't. | 2:09 | |
But I just was upset | 2:13 | |
you know about how women were treated. | 2:17 | |
And really identified with the powerless. | 2:21 | |
So at the law school, | 2:27 | |
I finished law school in 1978 | 2:30 | |
and I started working with legal services | 2:35 | |
and I really found that what I liked the most | 2:42 | |
you know, was family law. | 2:48 | |
I did work in, | 2:51 | |
you know I did work in other areas, | 2:52 | |
I even did some police brutality work | 2:57 | |
but I really liked family law. | 2:59 | |
And I think the reason that I liked family law | 3:04 | |
was that I saw that it really made | 3:08 | |
a real big difference in the lives of | 3:12 | |
women and children. | 3:15 | |
And that women really did not have a voice. | 3:16 | |
And that's what they were looking for. | 3:22 | |
And I did that, and I eventually went | 3:28 | |
into private practice and | 3:30 | |
I quickly started volunteering | 3:34 | |
at a battered women's shelter, | 3:37 | |
and I really enjoyed that work. | 3:41 | |
I represented battered women, | 3:45 | |
they have had a lot of courage. | 3:46 | |
And you know | 3:53 | |
a battered woman, many abusers would say, | 3:55 | |
you're either a whore or a lesbian. | 3:59 | |
And that was it, and | 4:02 | |
so I, I identified with battered women, | 4:06 | |
I enjoyed representing them. | 4:11 | |
They gave me a lot of courage. | 4:15 | |
I quickly learned, | 4:21 | |
at that time throughout the South | 4:22 | |
there was a core of women really working | 4:25 | |
in the battered women's shelter | 4:28 | |
and we knew we had to change the law | 4:29 | |
where battered women could get into court | 4:32 | |
pretty quickly. | 4:35 | |
And so I wrote the Mississippi Protection | 4:36 | |
from Domestic Abuse Act, | 4:40 | |
which allowed women to get into court pretty quickly | 4:42 | |
and also to get them an emergency order. | 4:45 | |
If you could show that their lives were | 4:48 | |
threatened or that they had been beaten up | 4:51 | |
or fear of eminent harm, you could get | 4:53 | |
an emergency order right on the spot. | 4:56 | |
And that was, you know, that was | 5:00 | |
pretty miraculous. | 5:02 | |
And so that law, I wrote it and we lobbied for it | 5:05 | |
and we got it passed. | 5:10 | |
And that was about 1983. | 5:11 | |
And then the next year we had to figure out | 5:17 | |
where we were getting our money for these shelters. | 5:20 | |
And so we came up with the idea that | 5:23 | |
you know when people got their marriage license | 5:30 | |
they could pay a little bit of extra money | 5:32 | |
and we could help fund the battered women's shelters. | 5:35 | |
Well, we got a lot of resistance from that because | 5:39 | |
the proper court in Mississippi, | 5:44 | |
the circuit courts were | 5:48 | |
would hand those marriage licenses out | 5:49 | |
as political gifts. | 5:52 | |
You know, a free marriage license. | 5:54 | |
So we were able to get the bill passed | 5:57 | |
but it was a lot of work. | 5:59 | |
So we funded the domestic violence shelters, | 6:02 | |
then after that | 6:09 | |
or about that same time I had referred | 6:12 | |
a client | 6:16 | |
to an abortion clinic in Pascagoula, Mississippi. | 6:20 | |
To, her daughter had been molested | 6:26 | |
by her husband and | 6:29 | |
the step-father had impregnated | 6:32 | |
you know her daughter, | 6:34 | |
and raped her. | 6:37 | |
And she needed an abortion and | 6:38 | |
she was so traumatized by going to that clinic | 6:41 | |
because there were so many anti-abortionists there. | 6:45 | |
They came back and they said you know, | 6:50 | |
we couldn't go through the procedure | 6:51 | |
she was just too upset, and I was just, | 6:54 | |
I was just furious. | 6:56 | |
And so I said, well I'm gonna go and get an idea | 7:00 | |
of what it is. | 7:01 | |
And so I went, and I was just beside myself. | 7:03 | |
I was so angry and I ended up | 7:07 | |
representing that clinic against | 7:10 | |
the anti-abortionists, and that was really | 7:16 | |
the training ground for Operation Rescue. | 7:20 | |
Beverly McMillan was a Mississippi doctor | 7:26 | |
who had done abortions | 7:29 | |
and then switched sides and joined | 7:31 | |
Operation Rescue, and that's kind of how they learned | 7:34 | |
some of their tactics. | 7:36 | |
And that was a pretty inspirational time. | 7:39 | |
You know I really learned a good bit about | 7:43 | |
social change work. | 7:49 | |
(phone ringing) | 7:50 | |
Oh, I'm gonna have to hold on a minute. | 7:51 | |
Just a second. | 7:54 | |
I ended up representing two clinics, | 7:56 | |
one on the East side of Mississippi, | 7:57 | |
and one on the West side. | 8:02 | |
I represented one in Bay St. Louis, | 8:03 | |
you know as well. | 8:06 | |
And really, what I learned there was | 8:07 | |
how to represent, | 8:10 | |
or what it was like to represent | 8:12 | |
civil disobedient clients, or | 8:15 | |
people that are not quite as popular. | 8:19 | |
And that, that made a lasting | 8:27 | |
impression, you know with me. | 8:31 | |
And I continued to represent | 8:34 | |
people in my family law practice | 8:38 | |
and I was doing quite well. | 8:41 | |
And then, well then in '86, | 8:48 | |
I was actually sued as a lesbian mother. | 8:53 | |
Where my ex-husband sued me or outed me | 9:00 | |
as a lesbian, and that was in 1986. | 9:05 | |
My daughter was 12 | 9:09 | |
and I had to settle that case. | 9:12 | |
I was hoping that I would be able to | 9:16 | |
actually win it. | 9:19 | |
Because she was a straight-A student and | 9:21 | |
but, that was when Bowers versus Hardwick came out | 9:25 | |
in the US Supreme Court, and | 9:30 | |
I knew when that case came out | 9:34 | |
that I was toast. | 9:39 | |
That I had to settle it. | 9:42 | |
I did, and she went to live with her dad. | 9:44 | |
That was in '86. | 9:49 | |
And then in '87 I represented two mothers | 9:51 | |
that both were divorced | 9:58 | |
and in both cases their children disclosed they had been | 10:05 | |
sexually abused by their fathers. | 10:10 | |
And one case was Dorrie Singley | 10:16 | |
and the other case was Karen Newsome. | 10:18 | |
Now what I had learned, | 10:22 | |
and in both cases they were tried | 10:25 | |
in front of the same judge, | 10:28 | |
a judge whose father was rich in segregation | 10:30 | |
in Mississippi, | 10:35 | |
whose father was involved in the | 10:38 | |
Mack Charles Parker lynching back in 1959, | 10:42 | |
and there was compelling | 10:49 | |
clearly convincing | 10:52 | |
persuasive | 10:54 | |
physical evidence that those children | 10:57 | |
had been abused. | 11:01 | |
And I really believed, you know, | 11:04 | |
that the legal system | 11:07 | |
would protect the children and | 11:10 | |
we lost. | 11:14 | |
And I was completely | 11:15 | |
shocked. | 11:19 | |
And I knew | 11:20 | |
that the only way, | 11:24 | |
yeah, the legal system had failed. | 11:27 | |
And perhaps the only thing | 11:35 | |
that would keep the children safe | 11:37 | |
was a public outcry. | 11:39 | |
I'd certainly learned that, | 11:41 | |
having grown up in Mississippi. | 11:43 | |
I'd certainly, I'd been reading about | 11:46 | |
Civil Rights cases | 11:50 | |
when I had represented | 11:52 | |
the abortion clinic. | 11:54 | |
And the picketing, | 11:56 | |
and you have to have pressure | 11:57 | |
from the outside. | 11:59 | |
And so | 12:01 | |
I made an error. | 12:04 | |
I went from lawyer to community activist | 12:06 | |
and you really can't do that without | 12:10 | |
paying a high price. | 12:13 | |
And I was, you know | 12:16 | |
I can be a very good | 12:19 | |
community activist. | 12:21 | |
You just can't do both at the same time. | 12:22 | |
At least shouldn't in the legal community. | 12:25 | |
And we organized you know, protests | 12:28 | |
and really went public. | 12:31 | |
And I will give you | 12:34 | |
two articles. | 12:39 | |
One is Freedom Fighter by Judith Brown, | 12:40 | |
I'll send that to you. | 12:44 | |
And another one, | 12:46 | |
and that article really describes | 12:47 | |
the community organizing piece. | 12:52 | |
And why I was run out of state. | 12:55 | |
The other article is a more traditional article, | 13:01 | |
it's called Witch Hunting in Hattiesburg. | 13:04 | |
And that's from the American Lawyer Magazine, | 13:12 | |
which is a national publication | 13:14 | |
it was published in 1988. | 13:17 | |
I will send that one to you. | 13:18 | |
And that gives you a factual background | 13:21 | |
of each of those cases. | 13:24 | |
Those cases are different | 13:27 | |
because of the broad base of community support | 13:29 | |
that was there. | 13:34 | |
They're different because the lawyer was targeted. | 13:35 | |
I'm probably, they're different because | 13:39 | |
I was an out lesbian. | 13:42 | |
And I think I'm the only lawyer that's been | 13:48 | |
disbarred in the country, | 13:51 | |
at least at that time, | 13:52 | |
around the issue of child sexual abuse. | 13:54 | |
So, that was in '88. | 14:00 | |
'87 is when the cases were tried and I lost them. | 14:05 | |
Then by '88 I had actually had a warrant for my arrest | 14:08 | |
for civil contempt issued | 14:14 | |
and it was outstanding till about 1990 or '91. | 14:17 | |
And then ultimately | 14:25 | |
in those cases | 14:29 | |
I was ultimately disbarred | 14:32 | |
in Mississippi. | 14:35 | |
And I think the disbarment came through about 1992. | 14:38 | |
So five or six years till disbarment. | 14:43 | |
And by that time, | 14:47 | |
I had long since left Mississippi because of the | 14:51 | |
arrest warrant. | 14:57 | |
And I had my Georgia license actually to practice law | 14:59 | |
before Mississippi. | 15:05 | |
And you know, I went to Vermont for a little while, | 15:07 | |
and I loved Vermont. | 15:11 | |
You know it was the first, | 15:14 | |
you know the one thing the Mississippi cases did for me | 15:16 | |
and it was, well two things. | 15:20 | |
When my ex-husband sued me, as a lesbian mother, | 15:23 | |
and outed me, | 15:27 | |
he gave me a great gift. | 15:29 | |
And that was he forced me, | 15:32 | |
you know out of the closet. | 15:35 | |
And I had to deal. | 15:37 | |
And there was a painful period, too. | 15:39 | |
I'm not arguing that, but I'm saying that | 15:43 | |
you know, to come from out of the shadows | 15:47 | |
was, you know, it was a transforming event. | 15:53 | |
And then, when the Mississippi cases hit | 15:58 | |
there was lots of publicity. | 16:05 | |
And they took the lesbian mother pleadings | 16:08 | |
and I was outed in the newspaper. | 16:13 | |
And that was a transforming event. | 16:17 | |
First I was really frightened for my safety. | 16:21 | |
But you know, I've never been | 16:28 | |
back in the closet. | 16:31 | |
And I've been as authentic as I can possibly be. | 16:34 | |
And I think | 16:42 | |
that there's absolutely no doubt | 16:45 | |
that it has added to the richness in my life. | 16:47 | |
If I had not been forced to be so | 16:54 | |
damn authentic, | 16:56 | |
you know, | 17:01 | |
the oppression made me | 17:04 | |
become the survivor, | 17:07 | |
authentic, whatever, | 17:11 | |
you know whatever I needed to be I managed to do it. | 17:14 | |
That is, you know that, | 17:19 | |
I wouldn't be who I was today without that. | 17:23 | |
So I was gonna, you know, | 17:30 | |
I left Mississippi in around '88, | 17:32 | |
I couldn't come back until '91 when the arrest warrant | 17:35 | |
was lifted. | 17:40 | |
I haven't practiced, | 17:41 | |
I have no desire to practice law there. | 17:43 | |
I practiced law intending to do | 17:47 | |
what I've always done, | 17:50 | |
which is family law, | 17:51 | |
in Georgia for the last 20 years. | 17:53 | |
As an out lesbian, so. | 17:56 | |
Whatever else you want to ask. | 18:02 | |
- | Can you talk about Dorrie Singley, | 18:08 |
or do you feel like that's all that needed to be said | 18:10 | |
is in those articles? | 18:14 | |
- | You know, I think that | 18:20 |
I think that child sexual abuse, | 18:28 | |
you might think you know a lot about it | 18:34 | |
but in reality you know very little about it. | 18:35 | |
And it still goes on, | 18:39 | |
but I think that we speak about it | 18:45 | |
more than we used to. | 18:48 | |
But there's enough written. | 18:53 | |
You know, I think you can read the articles. | 18:55 | |
I, every time I ever talk about it, | 18:59 | |
you know, I really have my own take going, | 19:04 | |
I've been sued plenty of times about these articles. | 19:10 | |
And I'm practicing law now, and I'm ready to | 19:12 | |
give you the articles. | 19:16 | |
And if Tim was still alive they'd hate my guts. | 19:21 | |
(laughing) | 19:25 | |
But I'll give you plenty of articles to read about it. | 19:28 | |
- | Okay | 19:34 |
- | I gave you, | 19:35 |
I mean if you want I think that the incest stuff | 19:37 | |
you know you have to, | 19:41 | |
it kind of started with Kiss Daddy Goodnight | 19:43 | |
by Louise Armstrong. | 19:46 | |
That was one of the first books | 19:47 | |
about incest. | 19:49 | |
And so you would start there, | 19:53 | |
and then there are books that have come out | 19:56 | |
and then Louise Armstrong, I think one of her, | 20:00 | |
she's dead now. | 20:03 | |
One of her last books that she published | 20:04 | |
in the early 90s was Rocking the Cradle of | 20:07 | |
Sexual Politics, I think that was the name of it. | 20:10 | |
And I think she gives a whole chapter, | 20:13 | |
you know to Dorrie Singley. | 20:16 | |
I mean Dorrie, | 20:17 | |
she's a very brave young woman, she's 27. | 20:21 | |
Her daughter now, her daughter's about 22, 23. | 20:26 | |
- | Do you know where she is, or what happened to her? | 20:37 |
Chrissy? | 20:42 | |
- | Chrissy ended up, you know how she was given back | 20:43 |
to her father. | 20:48 | |
You know Dorrie died in hiding, | 20:50 | |
trying to protect Chrissy. | 20:53 | |
And ultimately | 20:56 | |
Chrissy was returned to her father. | 21:01 | |
And then there was a civil rights suit filed | 21:04 | |
on behalf of Chrissy in Mississippi | 21:07 | |
and the judge and the District Attorney and | 21:11 | |
just about everybody else in the whole department | 21:15 | |
Everyone was sued | 21:18 | |
and it went up to the Circuit Court of Appeal | 21:20 | |
on two different appeals. | 21:25 | |
And then it was tried | 21:27 | |
in federal district court | 21:28 | |
and it was ultimately lost. | 21:31 | |
But it cost the state of Mississippi | 21:32 | |
millions of dollars in legal fees. | 21:34 | |
So Chrissy now is 22 years old, | 21:38 | |
about that. | 21:41 | |
And you know she's a young adult in Mississippi. | 21:42 | |
I don't know if she knows the history of her mother, | 21:46 | |
but I think that she does. | 21:49 | |
But I don't know how much she knows. | 21:51 | |
I have not communicated with her at all. | 21:53 | |
- | So something I read said she had recanted, | 21:55 |
and the press believed her when she said | 21:59 | |
that he didn't do it. | 22:03 | |
Is that documented in any of this stuff? | 22:06 | |
- | That is, | 22:11 |
now you need to really look. | 22:14 | |
There's an article in the Boston Globe | 22:17 | |
where the reporter questions Chrissy. | 22:20 | |
You need to read that article. | 22:25 | |
- | Okay. | 22:27 |
- | You know, because at the very end of that article, | 22:28 |
Chrissy looks at her father, | 22:34 | |
and said something like, he knows. | 22:39 | |
You know, first if you know something | 22:42 | |
about child sexual abuse, | 22:46 | |
you know that that's one of those stages | 22:49 | |
where they do recant. | 22:51 | |
You know, that's true for child abuse, | 22:54 | |
that's called accommodation, what is it? | 22:56 | |
Child Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, by Roland Summit. | 23:00 | |
Now I didn't get my books out to go all into that-- | 23:04 | |
- | No, no, no. That's all right. | 23:07 |
- | Child Accommodation Syndrome, by Roland Summit, | 23:09 |
who was a psychiatrist that worked | 23:14 | |
with children that had been beaten years ago. | 23:17 | |
And you know sometimes kids do recant. | 23:23 | |
So that's characteristic of a child to recant. | 23:27 | |
You know, you can recant all day long, | 23:30 | |
but if you have a piece of your hymen missing | 23:34 | |
or you have some scarring in the genital area, | 23:36 | |
you know, it doesn't matter whether you recant or not. | 23:40 | |
I mean that's some pretty demonstrative evidence | 23:45 | |
of what's occurred. | 23:48 | |
- | Okay. I don't think we need to retry this thing, | 23:51 |
you know, in our, I don't think we need to go into a lot | 23:55 | |
of the stuff that's already documented elsewhere. | 23:59 | |
I guess the only other question | 24:04 | |
that's tickling me right now is | 24:05 | |
how you came to be so, to be able to do this. | 24:10 | |
This sounds like, I mean I know I can see where you say | 24:16 | |
you were kind of pushed out of the closet | 24:17 | |
when your ex-husband sues, when you get this-- | 24:18 | |
- | When I, first of all I grew up in Mississippi. | 24:23 |
Now, you can't, you know, you must have | 24:28 | |
been able to survive. | 24:34 | |
Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, | 24:39 | |
there were haves and there were have nots. | 24:42 | |
And I also grew up in a time of great change. | 24:46 | |
You know I was | 24:51 | |
I was 10 years old, or nine years old, | 24:55 | |
when I witnessed the Freedom Fighters | 24:58 | |
coming to Mississippi. | 25:01 | |
And you know, Mississippi Delta, Greenwood was | 25:03 | |
the headquarters for SNCC, the Student Non-Violent | 25:07 | |
Coordinating Committee. | 25:10 | |
Which really was the radical element | 25:12 | |
of the Civil Rights Movement. | 25:16 | |
By radical I mean, what Janice Fairchilds would say | 25:18 | |
it goes to the root of the problem | 25:22 | |
So as a child I witnessed, you know, | 25:26 | |
I witnessed demonstrations outside the courthouse | 25:32 | |
just to get to vote. | 25:36 | |
Just to be able to vote. | 25:37 | |
And I watched, | 25:40 | |
I watched the injustices of society. | 25:44 | |
You know I watched how African-American people were treated. | 25:48 | |
I saw how women were treated. | 25:53 | |
And you know, I didn't like it. | 26:00 | |
And I'm sure that that had | 26:06 | |
a profound effect on me. | 26:08 | |
I mean, just being able to see this is a good old boy thing. | 26:11 | |
You know this is a good old boy town. | 26:16 | |
So I think that at a very young age I saw a lot. | 26:21 | |
And I kind of took all of that in | 26:25 | |
and you know, | 26:28 | |
that was one of the reasons I'm sure | 26:31 | |
that I have always | 26:34 | |
aligned myself with the underdog. | 26:36 | |
I don't have any doubt about that. | 26:42 | |
- | Okay. | 26:48 |
Okay, well, | 26:53 | |
I feel like we've got a lot of good material here, | 26:56 | |
and I know I'm gonna think of questions | 27:00 | |
that I forgot to ask. | 27:03 | |
- | You know, there were, | 27:05 |
I was trying to think | 27:09 | |
of some of the lesbians in the South | 27:12 | |
that were really active in the | 27:14 | |
battered women's movement. | 27:16 | |
There was a woman named Dianne Levy | 27:18 | |
in Tennessee | 27:20 | |
and she lived near Cosby, Tennessee. | 27:23 | |
And she actually started a shelter there | 27:30 | |
and there was a grant | 27:33 | |
by Levi Strauss in the mid-80s | 27:38 | |
that really allowed battered women's shelters | 27:41 | |
to organize politically | 27:43 | |
you know, into coalitions, and be able to meet, | 27:46 | |
and talk about what they were doing. | 27:49 | |
And many of those women were lesbians. | 27:52 | |
Many were not, but many were. | 27:56 | |
Now the woman in New Orleans, | 28:01 | |
that started that rape crisis center in New Orleans, | 28:02 | |
was a lesbian. | 28:07 | |
Her name was Donna Meyer. | 28:07 | |
I think Donna's dead now. | 28:10 | |
But she has a good friend | 28:12 | |
named Mary Capps | 28:15 | |
that might be in Mississippi but I don't | 28:17 | |
have her number. | 28:19 | |
But they started the rape crisis center in New Orleans. | 28:21 | |
But there were | 28:27 | |
you know, it makes sense that lesbians | 28:31 | |
have always been there. | 28:33 | |
You know, I mean they've been | 28:35 | |
first and foremost in many ways. | 28:37 | |
When I did the rape crisis center, | 28:43 | |
there was a woman OB-GYN | 28:44 | |
I cannot remember her name right this minute | 28:47 | |
but she was a lesbian. | 28:50 | |
And she was really clear | 28:53 | |
you know about the need for a rape crisis program | 28:56 | |
and was very supportive. | 29:02 | |
So that would be one thing that I would | 29:08 | |
want to say, | 29:13 | |
is there were many women. | 29:14 | |
But we were not, | 29:16 | |
some said they were lesbians. | 29:21 | |
But you know we have all changed | 29:24 | |
in 30 years. | 29:27 | |
Again I guess I call myself a dyke. | 29:29 | |
I guess I call myself a lesbian | 29:35 | |
if I'm really feeling | 29:38 | |
middle-aged. | 29:40 | |
- | Yeah, the young people don't like the word. | 29:42 |
It's annoying. | 29:46 | |
The young dykes. | 29:47 | |
When did you get divorced? | 29:52 | |
- | I divorced | 29:56 |
let me think about it. | 30:00 | |
I divorced about 1979. | 30:04 | |
But I had, you know, we had | 30:13 | |
joint custody. | 30:15 | |
He apologized, years later for the lesbian mother suit. | 30:21 | |
Well I was divorced | 30:37 | |
when I got married | 30:39 | |
to my partner in Toronto. | 30:41 | |
So I've been with my partner for 21 years. | 30:45 | |
Now that was something. | 30:49 | |
The thing about marriage, | 30:53 | |
it oppresses women in many ways. | 30:56 | |
One of the things that changed me was | 30:58 | |
The Future of Marriage by Jessie Bernard. | 31:00 | |
You know when i think about that. | 31:03 | |
And then when marriage was a possibility | 31:07 | |
as a lesbian, | 31:10 | |
I think it happened in California first | 31:13 | |
and it was so exciting. | 31:15 | |
And then I decided I really wanted to get married. | 31:18 | |
Now what is that about? | 31:21 | |
A divorced lawyer that wants to get married. | 31:22 | |
And you know, we did, in Toronto, | 31:24 | |
and it was a liberating experience for me. | 31:30 | |
And I've never regretted it. | 31:36 | |
And I think it's a real necessity. | 31:40 | |
And I think we have to have it. | 31:45 | |
But today, even, in family law cases | 31:52 | |
lesbianism can cost women their children. | 31:58 | |
Can cost fathers their kids. | 32:02 | |
It's still, you know, | 32:05 | |
it's still cutting-edge work. | 32:08 | |
Its just hard, you just have to keep going | 32:11 | |
- | One question I had about, | 32:21 |
when you said it was the training ground | 32:23 | |
for Operation Rescue, was Mississippi | 32:26 | |
the training ground, or Pascagoula, | 32:29 | |
or some particular part of the country? | 32:31 | |
- | No it was Pascagoula's clinic. | 32:33 |
- | Oh, that particular clinic. | 32:37 |
- | Yeah, their clinic. | 32:38 |
But they really, they did funerals for babies out there. | 32:40 | |
They looked at, | 32:46 | |
they would take pictures of people's car tags | 32:48 | |
and then they would go to the tax assessor's office | 32:52 | |
and find out who they were, and call them up | 32:57 | |
and harass them. | 33:01 | |
You know they certainly left dead fish on my car. | 33:05 | |
At my law office they would set up appointments, | 33:14 | |
the phone would be ringing off the hook, | 33:20 | |
they'd make all these appointments, | 33:22 | |
then nobody would show up for appointments. | 33:23 | |
Harassment of the clinic | 33:25 | |
just how they, | 33:28 | |
really they were terrorists. | 33:31 | |
I mean you know, with taking pictures, | 33:33 | |
or trying to take pictures, | 33:37 | |
or writing down people's name tags, | 33:39 | |
I mean car tags. | 33:42 | |
Haranguing them in the parking lot. | 33:44 | |
You know really learning how to approach them, | 33:47 | |
figuring out, you know the coming players | 33:55 | |
and then to realize, you know at some point, | 33:59 | |
the only way they could stop it | 34:02 | |
was to target the doctors. | 34:06 | |
I mean that really was, | 34:08 | |
they finally learned, hey, that's how you do that. | 34:10 | |
And then that clinic doctor in Pascagoula, | 34:15 | |
his name was Wayne Patterson, | 34:18 | |
or George Wayne Patterson. | 34:21 | |
And he was ultimately murdered. | 34:24 | |
He had a clinic in Mobile, that he ran, | 34:26 | |
and he was shot and killed in his car | 34:31 | |
and they said it was a robbery | 34:37 | |
but his wallet and credit cards was in his car, | 34:38 | |
right beside him. | 34:42 | |
It wasn't no robbery. | 34:43 | |
But you know, | 34:46 | |
they got pretty clear | 34:47 | |
of what did and did not work. | 34:50 | |
And how to terrorize people, | 34:54 | |
they got good at that. | 34:56 | |
Now Patterson wasn't killed, | 34:58 | |
I don't know exactly when he was killed. | 35:01 | |
I want to say it was in the late 80s, maybe 1990. | 35:05 | |
But I'm not sure, I mean I would have to go back and look. | 35:11 | |
I just heard that. | 35:15 | |
But I had not kept up with him after the clinic. | 35:19 | |
- | Okay. | 35:25 |
- | Are you there? | 35:26 |
- | I'm there, I'm there, yeah. | |
I'm writing really madly. | 35:28 | |
I think I have enough here that I can type these notes | 35:33 | |
and send them to you, and if you'll send me those articles-- | 35:38 | |
- | I'll send them Monday. | 35:43 |
- | Okay. | 35:45 |
- | We'll scan them and you know, send them to you. | 35:47 |
- | Okay, okay, well, I'm gonna turn off the tape player. | 35:51 |
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