Sunday, May 17, 2009

May, 2009: Randall Terry

Randall Terry is a piece of work. I really shouldn't be including him in this blog, not because he isn't a "fundamentalist" (he is), but because the man is mentally ill and in serious need of counseling and, perhaps, long convalescence in a home for the handicapped. A short chronology of his miserable life convinces nothing so much but that he is seriously deficient in the ability ot make intelligent choices:

1986: Terry chains himself to a sink at an abortion clinic.
1988: Terry becomes a foster parent to three troubled foster children, aged 3, 8, and 12, adopting them seven years later. Two of the children, daughters, bear children out of wedlock. One converts to Islam.
1990: Terry helps in organizing protests outside a hospital where a patient's feeding tube was removed.
1994: Terry was sued by the National Organization for Women and settles out of court.
1998: Terry runs unsuccessfully for congress in New York as a candidate for the New York State Right to Life Party.
2000: Terry divorces his wife of 19 years and marries another woman.
2003: Terry becomes the spokesman for Terry Schiavo's parents and talks Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) into working the Republican Party into a frenzy of self-righteousness.
2004: Terry's adopted son, Jamiel, writes article for Out Magazine, announcing his homosexuality. Terry promptly disowns his son, claiming that the magazine article was written by someone else, that the boy "prostituted" the Terry family name, and that the youth's sexual orientation was attributable to his biological mother having been a prostitute.
2005: Terry formally converts to Roman Catholicism. He announces a run against Florida Republican state senator James E. King, citing the latter's failure to support efforts to keep Terry Schaivo alive.
2006: Terry loses to King in the Florida primary, King receiving some 66% of the vote.
2009: Terry organizes protest against Notre Dame's conferring of an honorary doctor of laws degree on Barack Obama and is arrested for violating a no-trespass order.

It is said that the central theme of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is that a man, by embracing a truth and making it his own, renders it a falsehood. Such is Randall Terry.