kelpiewilson

A Stand for a Stand

Here's some more background on the logging protest from 1987 that resulted in a SLAPP suit:

A Stand for a Stand
by Kelpie Wilson
The Progressive
March 1994

One July morning in 1987, I found myself with five new friends at a logging site in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. Valerie Wade, a college student, fifth generation Oregonian, and daughter of a logger, had climbed to the top of a ninety-foot yarder spar pole to hang a banner. Chained to the bottom of the yarder, which drags felled trees up steep slopes to waiting log trucks, were Karen Wood, a Eugene computer scientist; Michele Miller, an elementary school teacher from Chico, California; Kamala Redd, a college student from New York City; James Jackson, a surveyor from Texas, and myself, a new graduate with a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Chico State, about to head off to a career in alternative energy.

What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common

I have this very weird connection with Shelley Shannon, the woman who tried to kill Dr. Tiller back in 1993. Now one of her comrades has succeeded in killing this brave man. Shannon is a member of the American Taliban, aka the Army of God.

Blockading Logging Companies and Abortion Clinics: What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common
by Kelpie Wilson
The Portland Alliance
May 1994

Even though I am a a pro-choice environmentalist, I have a few things in common with Shelley Shannon. She’s the woman accused of shooting abortion doctor George Tiller in Kansas last August. Only a few things—still more that I would expect to share with someone whose values are 180 degrees apart from mine.

Shannon and I are the same age and we have homes about 35 miles apart in southern Oregon We both have brown hair and wear glasses. She has been sued for Operation Rescue protests while I have been sued for an Earth First! protest. The abortion clinic suing Shannon filed an amicus brief on behalf of the logging company suing me because they wanted to apply the precedent set by my case.

My case was decided last summer when the Oregon Supreme Court determined that to allow a logging company to sue me and five others for hanging a banner on their equipment would not violate the First Amendment. Both my lawyer and Shannon’s have argued that allowing punitive damage in cases of civil disobedience would let a jury determine the degree of punishment based on the content of protester’s beliefs—an infringement of First Amendment rights.

Pro-choice IS Pro-life

In Memorium: Dr. George Tiller.

Domestic fundamentalist terrorism has cut down another friend of women, Dr. George Tiller. I can't express the sadness that I feel about this. But I will say this: Dr. Tiller was pro-life. I am pro-life, and I believe that pro-life means being pro-choice, because the purpose of life is not to maximize our numbers but to live in balance and harmony with all the other life forms that support and sustain us.

Life only survives by being part of a community of life forms known collectively as "the environment." For a human embryo, its first environment is its mother. Mother makes up both the environment and the first human relationship for all of us. It is in her role as "environment" that a woman may sometimes have to end the relationship to her embryo or fetus. She may not have the capacity to welcome a child into the world.

This may seem harsh, but this is often Nature's way. Every year, millions of human neonates die from natural causes. Most abortions are natural miscarriages of genetically malformed embryos. Ironically, the abortion services that Dr. Tiller provided were mostly concerned with those rare cases where a malformed embryo has survived past the initial stages of pregnancy, not cases where a woman "chose" to end a pregnancy because she did not want a child. In most cases, Nature would have aborted such a fetus. Dr. Tiller was able to help those women who were subject to the cruel fate of bearing a deformed child. Dr. Tiller's work was less about "choice" as we have come to think of it, than about completing work that Nature had left undone.