Randall Terry, 12 Followers Arrested Outside Pepsi Center

The AP is reporting three incidents Tuesday involving anti-abortion protesters raising cain at the DNC.

The AP is reporting three incidents Tuesday involving anti-abortion
protesters raising cain — one event resulting in arrests outside the
Pepsi Center, a picket of an Emily’s List event and another where
Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies responded to heat-stressed
individuals on a mountain mesa west of Denver after they unfurled a
666-foot banner on the hillside (um, no religious symbolism there).

Notorious Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who split with the
organization and now leads a loose cluster of rabble-rousers, predicted
they would be arrested for staging a planned, but illegal, sit-in
during the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week.

And true to form, Terry and 12 followers were arrested by 50
officers in riot gear outside the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver for
blocking an entrance after being warned three times to disperse. As he
was led away to a paddy wagon, a handcuffed Terry shouted “Don’t vote
for Obama” at DNC delegates and members of the press entering the
convention hall.

California blogger Dave Winer documented the stand-off at Scripting.com.

Last weekend, Terry distributed hundreds of racist fliers
at a DNC media party touting a fictitious “Candidate Smith,” proposing
“real solutions for the ‘Negro problem’” as a shocking metaphor for
Christian voters who support pro-choice but otherwise conservative
political candidates.

The Colorado Independent reported a schism that has developed between Terry and Troy Newman,
the leader of Operation Rescue West, a group that arose from Terry’s
original group and that also engages in inflammatory picketing of
women’s clinics.

Simultaneous to the sit-in, another dozen anti-abortion
demonstrators rallied outside the Sheraton Hotel in Denver, where
Emily’s List was holding an event featuring Sen. Hillary Clinton and
others to back women candidates who support reproductive freedom.

Earlier Tuesday, supporters of American Right to Life Action
unfurled a enormous banner that read “Destroys uNborn Children” —
highlighting the DNC in the phrase — on a nearby hillside that the
group claimed was visible in Denver, 10 miles away.

The banner, made of approximately 2,400 queen-sized bedsheets,
remained on the mesa for three hours until Jefferson County law
enforcement officials ordered its removal. While several members of the
group scrambled back up the hillside to take down the sign, police
tended to others who reportedly suffered heat exhaustion carrying the
2,700-pound banner.

American RTL
was established in Denver in Nov. 2007 to aggressively usurp the
national status of National Right to Life as the primary leader within
the anti-abortion movement.

One of its primary thrusts is to challenge the “wicked courts” and oppose “child-killing regulations” through state-based laws attempting to overturn Roe v Wade, according to its Web site. The group is actively involved in Amendment 48, a proposed constitutional measure on the November ballot in Colorado to proffer due process rights on fertilized human eggs.