Revolutionary Communist Party leads ‘Abortion Rights Freedom Rides’ to 14 states
The abortion freedom rides are being led by Stop Patriarchy, a front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (RCP). SP's original “Call to Action” gives the RCP's web address as its own and prominently quotes RCP founder and chairman Bob Avakian.
The new “freedom rides,” modeled after the civil rights campaign to register black voters in the segregated South, provide special support to states that have only one abortion facility.
Their banners proclaim, “Abortion Providers are Heroes.” Another said, “A Woman is Not the Life Support System for Her Uterus.”
This weekend, they are protesting in Wichita, Kansas, to back efforts to open a new abortion facility once owned by Dr. George Tiller, whom they call a “heroic abortion provider.”
Troy Newman of Operation Rescue said the group protested outside his offices on Friday. Their beliefs could hardly be further apart.
“Abortion is not tragic, because fetuses are not babies and abortion is not murder,” said leader Sunsara Taylor.
The freedom rides have been hailed by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and formally endorsed by Janeane Garofalo, playwright Eve Ensler, leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and abortionists like Willie Parker, Diane Derzis, and Merle Hoffman.
Taylor, fellow organizer Alex Petersburg, and a tiny core of activists are RCP members.
The RCP is anything but guarded in its belief that the U.S. government must be overthrown by force. At a feminist lecture Taylor led at New York University in 2010, a student asked fellow RCP member Annie Day if the group endorsed warfare and bloodshed. “Revolution is a serious business,” Day replied. “We are not pacifists. So to answer your question, yes.”
“The most mind-blowing part of this whole event was realizing that by 'revolution' they mean that they are willing to kill people,” he wrote.
During the 1992 L.A. riots following the Rodney King verdict, party members spray-painted graffiti in English and Spanish to fan the flames.
Their goal, then-National Spokesman Carl Dix told the L.A. Times, was “rallying people to wage mass militant struggle against the powers today in preparation for doing what's really needed – and that's leading millions of people to rise up in mass armed revolution when the time is right.”
Avakian called the conflagration “the most beautiful, the most heroic, and the most powerful action by masses of people in the U.S. for years and years.”
The party tried to inflame similar tensions after the Trayvon Martin verdict, attending rallies and calling for “revolution” and “struggle in the streets that must not be allowed to die down.”
Founded in 1975, the RCP emerged after a split within the ranks of Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s. It was marked by its devotion to Maoist communism, a cult of personality surrounding Avakian, and a belief in violence.
Avakian praised both Mao and Stalin in his 2005 autobiography. His party supports Peru's narcoterrorist guerrillas, the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso).
That presented no obstacle to their current freedom rides. The group quickly raised $22,261 through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo. They now criss-cross the country, giving award certificates to abortionists and telling post-abortive women“how important and liberating the right to abortion is for all women.”
Their membership's beliefs are even less reported than their deeds.
Although extensively covered in the news by such outlets as NBCNews.com, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, U.S. News and World Report, The Nation magazine, The Daily Beast, Democracy Now!, publicly funded WBAI Pacifica radio, only one mentioned the word “communist.” None specified the RCP's beliefs.
The same has been true of the group's previous media-generating outings.
Last October, it protested the installation of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, chanting, “Away with all gods!”
In January, Stop Patriarchy received extensive mainstream media coverage for its sparsely attended “counterprotest” to the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
At the time, LifeSiteNews.com encountered six SP protesters holding a counter-demonstration at another March for Life prayer vigil outside a D.C.-area Planned Parenthood abortion facility.
In a turnabout from its earlier stance, which denounced gay rights as a sign of capitalist decadence, the RCP now attends “marriage equality” protests, as well. On March 9, the protesters picketed the Mars Hill church's “Biblical marriage” class and denounced its pastor, Mark Driscoll, as a “chauvinistic, patriarchal pig.”
“Mars Hill fuels rape!” they said while holding signs that said, “Stop Forced Motherhood.”
Despite their radicalism, the RCP still draws prominent backers in the feminist movement.
“I am proud of the women and men who will be traveling from both coasts and down the middle of the country in this summer’s Abortion Rights Freedom Ride,” wrote Ensler, whose Vagina Monologues celebrates a lesbian's statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl.
Whether the subject is life and family or racial division, Columbia University Professor Todd Gitlin said the RCP's stunts have an ulterior motive: “It's how they recruit.”
“They present to the world a face that's attractive, and that makes sense in the moment," wrapping their communist ideology in a more attractive message.
Gitlin, a '60s radical himself, noted the Communist tactic of using front groups and popular ruses dated to the party's earliest days in the United States.
Communists referred to liberals who supported such fronts as “useful idiots.”
Source: LifeSite News
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