1996: Operation Rescue Founder: Organization’s Larger Goal to ‘Recapture the Power Bases of America’

Randall Terry, the founder and former leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Save America (formerly named Operation Rescue), says that his vision of the organization’s goals was not merely to stop abortions in America, but to “recapture the power bases of America.” In a video broadcast on PBS, Terry says: “From the beginning when I founded Operation Rescue, the vision was not solely to end child-killing; the vision was to recapture the power bases of America, for child-killing to be the first domino, if you will, to fall in a series of dominoes. My feeling was, and still is, once we mobilize the momentum, the manpower, the money, and all that goes with that to make child-killing illegal, we will have sufficient moral authority and moral force and momentum to get the homosexual movement back in the closet, to get the condom pushers in our schools to be back on the fringes of society where they belong where women are treated with dignity, not as Playboy bunnies, etc., etc. We want to recapture the country, because right now the country’s power bases are in the hands of a very determined, very evil elite who are selling us a bill of goods. They call it good but it truly is evil. They say, ‘Here, it’s sweet,’ but in reality it’s bitter. It’s wormwood and gall.” [The Public Eye, 4/2000 ; Cronin, 2002, pp. 440; Feminist Women's Health Center News, 2010]